tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post7841853592258402479..comments2024-03-09T03:20:20.004-05:00Comments on Tenured Radical: Radical To The University of Connecticut: Cookies, Milk and A Social Worker, PleaseTenured Radicalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05703980598547163290noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-91746483423829568582010-04-25T11:59:58.500-05:002010-04-25T11:59:58.500-05:00Wonderful article, thanks for putting this togethe...Wonderful article, thanks for putting this together! "This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here. Keep it up!"<br /><a href="http://www.dissertationwritinghelp.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">Dissertation Writing</a> | <a href="http://www.dissertationwritinghelp.co.uk/buy-custom-dissertation.html" rel="nofollow">Custom Dissertation</a>Dissertation Writinghttp://www.dissertationwritinghelp.co.uk/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-16270366313358527322008-11-29T00:39:00.000-05:002008-11-29T00:39:00.000-05:00I'll second douglafem's statement above. I am also...I'll second douglafem's statement above. I am also someone who found a new social place at CTY. Having dropped out of 8th grade, with a family that was at odds with the law and sometimes homeless, I tried going to the freshman year of high-school, only to be bored to tears in class, and (literally) spit on between classes. A peer adviser suggested that a new wardrobe would help me fit in. Instead, I decided to enroll full-time at a state university (UC Irvine).<BR/><BR/>I agree completely, TR, that it is a mistake to celebrate such early admissions, but I find your assumption that people have similar life experiences at similar ages to be way off base. I didn't fit in as a 12-year-old college student, but I've been a misfit most of my life. I still don't fit in very well on a faculty, oh so many years later. But I fit in here better than I did in the corporate world, and fit in the college classroom at 12 better than I did the high school.<BR/><BR/>Just as many 18-year-olds are not ready for college, some 12-year-olds are. Doesn't make them better, just makes them different. And it seems a shame, from my experience talking to some of the undergrads at your institution, that someone would be excluded merely on the basis of his age, and the assumptions that go along with it.Alex Halavaishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02939876011057687196noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-3529236383225592372008-11-03T21:21:00.000-05:002008-11-03T21:21:00.000-05:00Wow. I could suggest some ways that Colin's story...Wow. <BR/><BR/>I could suggest some ways that Colin's story is not yours, and vice versa, but I think it's more appropriate to say good luck.<BR/><BR/>best,<BR/><BR/>TRTenured Radicalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05703980598547163290noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-78520981110398968062008-11-03T18:10:00.000-05:002008-11-03T18:10:00.000-05:00Learning is not a contract in which a set of facts...<I>Learning is not a contract in which a set of facts, or critical thinking tools, are simply handed off the the student from the teacher. In the humanities and social sciences, college students bring a life experience to their courses that is expanding, perhaps more rapidly than it ever will. How can you teach Milton's Paradise Lost to someone who has never known or observed the anguish and rage of being cast away from a beloved person or place? How can you teach the history of the domestic Cold War to someone who may or may not actually know what a homosexual really is? How can you convey theories of deviance to someone whose only experience of being in the world is a keen sense of his own uniqueness?</I><BR/><BR/>I understood your concern until I came to the above presumptions.<BR/><BR/>By the age of 12, I had long been identified as gifted, and sponsored by way of corporate scholarships to Johns Hopkins CTY summer programs. <BR/><BR/>I had also survived molestation at the hands of a female family friend five years earlier and was attempting to reconcile that secret with my growing suspicion that I might not only be attracted to boys. In elementary school, girls I thought were my friends used racial epithets to describe me to my face and behind my back. During middle school, I not only took responsibility for my younger brother in the afternoons and cooked while my mother worked, but also visited and provided emotional support to my unemployed father on weekends while he recovered from an injury without health insurance, finished law school, and passed the bar. While I now bring my particularly racegender&class-based life experience to the classroom, I don't know that many of my peers at college are self-aware at all.<BR/><BR/>At CTY, I engaged with equally incredibly gifted and informed peers, most of whom have gone on to assimilate into mainstream college culture and feel that they now fit in with their peers. Not me; I'm still curious to a fault, bored by partying, and disappointed by the bullshit tactics that my fellow English majors use to get by with As. <BR/><BR/>I wish that I had been offered the opportunity to progress at my own pace...and went to early college programs like Simon's Rock or Mary Baldwin. I might not have been patronized by high school teachers who thought that I, as a young woman of color, wasn't "as smart as I thought I was" and instead encouraged me to aim lower than the selective schools to which I ultimately gained admission. I might not be bored or moved to transfer by the rampant anti-intellectualism that somehow pervades my Ivy League campus.<BR/><BR/>I'm hoping grad school will do it for me, but who knows?<BR/><BR/>I apologize for writing my life story into your comment thread, but I do it to show you that you can't assume that you know the level of maturity or of life experience of every gifted child, or that our public (or even magnet/charter/private) school curriculum will serve one well as long as (s)he is with her/his age group. I had lots of friends growing up, and I am lucky to have found a boyfriend at college with whom I am very intellectually compatible, but...after waiting patiently and coming to college with the assumption that I would be returning to my true peers, I was incredibly underwhelmed...and not willing to drink myself silly to find friends among the students here anyway. <BR/><BR/>So much for the system.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-75701150462836450262008-11-03T16:58:00.000-05:002008-11-03T16:58:00.000-05:00I taught elementary school before college and I ag...I taught elementary school before college and I agree-- most college teachers aren't prepared at all to work with children. Heck, most college teachers aren't prepared at all to teach writing for that matter! (The point being-- college teachers really aren't that prepared for teaching-- teaching prep is generally not the point).<BR/><BR/>And a quality prep school would be just as intellectually challenging as a standard public school college first or even second year curriculum, and in many cases moreso, so I think that was good advice if this kids' family could afford private school tuition.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-41396595747465915462008-11-02T16:33:00.000-05:002008-11-02T16:33:00.000-05:00Well everyone:I take all these points and realize ...Well everyone:<BR/><BR/>I take all these points and realize there are a great many people who disagree with me, and there is a great deal going in with early college programs and has been for a while. But it still isn't clear to me why the kid needs to be enrolled full time in college, and what it is we are supposed to admire about this. Call me silly, but there you have it. At what point are people of great intelligence supposed to learn how to be ordinary as well as extraordinary, and how are they supposed to learn it if they spend their childhood with adults?<BR/><BR/>And as for the father's suicide, the article doesn't say he killed himself because of depression. It says he was a genius too and killed himself. Which I think is a dicey thing to put in an article about a boy genius without explaining why it's there. It makes it look -as one reader alluded incisively -- like the kid is on suicide watch. And if he is -- why write about him?<BR/><BR/>In other words, why is this story news, except that UConn and the Mom want publicity and are using the kid to get it?<BR/><BR/>your heartless,<BR/><BR/>TRTenured Radicalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05703980598547163290noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-58875530413379546002008-11-02T12:34:00.000-05:002008-11-02T12:34:00.000-05:00I'm sorry, TR, but any vision of college which ass...I'm sorry, TR, but any vision of college which assumes the liberal arts cocoon is some kind of normal developmental stage is narrow and problematic. <BR/><BR/>I do think you're right about some of the literary and historical deficits which are likely to result from studying this material at the wrong time, but we don't seem to think too much about that with 18-22 year olds who are, often, not all that much more mature and deep on average than teenagers. A really age-appropriate curriculum would require decades....<BR/><BR/>Here's my question: is it really necessary for him to engage in a full undergraduate curriculum if his interests and skills are in science? Yes, the traditional model requires distribution/gen ed courses: why enroll him as a traditional student, though? <BR/><BR/>I've had students somewhat like this. As an historian, I haven't found their comprehension and analysis skills, or writing, significantly different from my other students, and there's strong evidence (Thank you, Sam Wineburg) that more sophisticated historical understandings are possible at much younger ages than we traditionally have taught them. I think we should embrace the opportunity, and make the case that history is one of the best "humanizing" disciplines which also teaches skills that are absolutely necessary in all fields of endeavor, and draw these students to us, rather than rejecting them.Jonathan Dresnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04356112719229675996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-23521334148831825852008-11-02T11:53:00.000-05:002008-11-02T11:53:00.000-05:00Given that most college students (and their parent...Given that most college students (and their parents) are now treating universities like "High School: The Sequel," I am not sure that there is as severe a shift as there once was.<BR/><BR/>I take the other commentators' points about not wanting a student to be stifled in schools that no longer challenge him/her. Certainly I would also agree that most of my mid school years were hell in terms of socialization (and I wasn't no genius). I tend to agree with TR, though, that the distance between age 12 and 16 is quite large. What type of concern or actions are there to ensure that these "early-blooming" students actually do have any type of meaningful social interactions? It seems likely that they are treated like a brain with little interest in their other needs/development.GayProfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11289510184782252498noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-44635708283709970732008-11-02T11:12:00.000-05:002008-11-02T11:12:00.000-05:00I was actually kind of glad to see the stuff in th...I was actually kind of glad to see the stuff in the second-to-last paragraph - depression is a disease, and it should be treated as such. Would it have seemed as awful to say that his dad died of cancer when he was 2? And I also took "I didn't really know him" as just a statement of fact - who remembers anything from when they're 2?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-79532840545210631832008-11-02T10:29:00.000-05:002008-11-02T10:29:00.000-05:00By your arguement Motzart should have been forced ...By your arguement Motzart should have been forced to stick with his xylophone rather than going out and composing at age 3.<BR/>As far as I am concerned, it is completely acceptable to allow a child to go after a skill set when they are intellectually prepared for it. It is not like he is the first person to ever do this and it is common in other cultures. There is really more than one way to skin a cat.<BR/>Besides, most of the college students are not intellectually prepared or even emotionally mature enough to be in college and no one is holding them back until they get their heads out of their bums.Margothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01354931288147701203noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-78446256778557864272008-11-01T23:40:00.000-05:002008-11-01T23:40:00.000-05:00So I agree its weird that he's in the paper. and I...So I agree its weird that he's in the paper. and I did read the article...and then had to go back and reread them to find what you thought was so awful. (I guess suicide isn't stigmatized for me as all that much worse than saying that his dad died of cancer when he was 2). I took his comment as not really wanting to talk about it with a random reporter. It's a shame his mom over-shared. <BR/><BR/><BR/>To some extent I wonder if the mom letting him/pushing him to go to college is a protective mechanism against what happened to his dad. One of the things I got out of going away to school was more of a sense of who I was separate from being the smart one. I was able to be known for other things, because when you are working that far out of your own league you aren't the smart one anymore. You get to separate your personality from your brains. It's healthy. <BR/><BR/>The maturity point is hard to determine from the article. Maybe at 12 he was able to deal. Maybe he deals better in science/language classes than literature classes. I wonder if anyone actually follows these kids beyond anecdotal accounts and tracks progress/benefit. I know my high school/college tracked our success and I still get requests to send updates when the legislature is renewing the funding for the program I was a part of. <BR/><BR/><BR/>P.S. Check out the Duke TIP program - 7th graders in college as a cohort. It works for them... and makes me less skeptical of it working in a more integrated fashion on a campus.hypatiahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12652466638464405055noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-52484642876994124272008-11-01T20:49:00.000-05:002008-11-01T20:49:00.000-05:00TRWhat do you think this boy should be doing for t...TR<BR/>What do you think this boy should be doing for the next 5 years? taking courses at the local CC? Independent study at home?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-31732049470631425372008-11-01T16:55:00.000-05:002008-11-01T16:55:00.000-05:00Dear all,I like having this kind of conversation a...Dear all,<BR/><BR/>I like having this kind of conversation about education, and as you point out, all kids are different.<BR/><BR/>Many of your points are well taken -- including, as I pointed out in my opening paragraphs-- that many schools are dead zones. But those of you who were saved by going to college early (and I believe you were), this young person would properly be in the seventh grade, not a sophomore in high school at all. I have a fifteen year old nephew who I could easily see in college now. But the one who hasn't graduated from middle school, no.<BR/><BR/>And part of what raises red flags for me is, in a way that is admittedly none of my business is, why does Mom want him in the newspaper? And did you actually read the story? The personal information at the end is really kind of awful.<BR/><BR/>TRTenured Radicalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05703980598547163290noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-68811296653213547842008-11-01T16:45:00.000-05:002008-11-01T16:45:00.000-05:00Perhaps you are forgetting (?) how miserable the p...Perhaps you are forgetting (?) how miserable the pre-college "social experience" is for many kids, though I agree a 12-year-old is too young for college. Maybe college-level courses while living at home, though I wouldn't want to teach a child of that age myself. <BR/><BR/>I think your arguments about "how can I teach deviance, etc." apply to college-age kids as well as 12-year-olds! They argue for college at, say, 30 or so :)<BR/>-untenured P.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-3194881228681411622008-11-01T15:20:00.000-05:002008-11-01T15:20:00.000-05:00Ditto what Patti said.... I left home my sophmore ...Ditto what Patti said.... <BR/><BR/>I left home my sophmore year of high school and went to college. I learned about actually studying, got some cockiness knocked out of me, and got a good well rounded education that included some fantastic lit courses. And I knew my own mind enough that when an adminstrator encouraged me to be a doctor (MD) I said no and went on to do something I loved but that was perhaps a bit less prestigious for them. I would likely be a crazier, cockier, more obnoxious person without the experience of my high school. <BR/><BR/>Re: the social experience.... If you are the smartest person in your high school class, high school isn't about the social experience either. (Or rather, not the kind you mean). If you are too smart you don't fit in middle/high school anymore than a 12 year old fits in a freshman dorm. I did maintain social experiences even after I left home by being involved in scouting and church where I mixed more with folks my own age. <BR/><BR/><BR/>To some extent I think you have to trust that the family is making the best choice in context for this child as an individual. And that means weighing the challenges and experiences - social and educational - he is getting to fit him. Yes, it would likely stretch your teaching style to teach to someone coming from a different place, but I don't think either you or he would be incapable of making it a good experience if you were put in that situation.hypatiahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12652466638464405055noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-88801618617107002462008-11-01T12:37:00.000-05:002008-11-01T12:37:00.000-05:00Overall, I definitely agree with you, but I'm not ...Overall, I definitely agree with you, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the social experience argument. Going to Zenith (or my Zenith-rival undergrad) is a social experience, sure. Going to a community college, or going to the local gigamorphic Big 10 school while living at home, is not so much. Attending college in your mid-twenties with three kids at home is likewise not so much about the social experience. I mean, I learned an AWFUL lot from the social experience of attending my SLAC, but I suspect I'd have learned an AWFUL lot about life if I'd gone to work full-time after high school, too. So I don't think that the educational and social experiences have to be linked. <BR/><BR/>(I may have just misread this and you're talking specifically about the places where this kid applied, but I thought I'd throw this out there anyway.)<BR/><BR/>I think the 3rd point is really a subset of the 2nd point, too. College profs may not know how to teach <I>Paradise Lost</I> or the Cold War to 12-year-olds, but I don't know that I think means the 12-year-olds shouldn't learn about them. I mean, students often reread in college the "classics" that they read in high school. You're not going to learn about them the same way, but just because high school freshmen don't have the same life experience as college freshmen, doesn't mean they can't get anything out of learning about such things. I don't think there's a certain age/experience level someone has to meet before education can become more than handing over facts. <BR/><BR/>That said, no, it's probably not fair for students who do have the life experience to have to cope with someone in class who doesn't have that life experience - but the third point seems to imply that learning prior to college *is* a handing off of facts that doesn't require any life experience, which I think is a little unfair.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-42002134500495687912008-11-01T12:21:00.000-05:002008-11-01T12:21:00.000-05:00I have to disagree. I did choose to start college...I have to disagree. I did choose to start college after my sophomore year of high school, and it was the best thing I ever did. High school was a hell-hole for me. I was 14 and getting migraines and ulcers from how much I hated school. By the end of my first quarter in college, no one could tell the difference between me and the 18 year olds in terms of my maturity, my ability to think, etc. They simply assummed that I just looked really, really young. I learned quickly that I had to take responsibility for my words and actions in a way I never had to in high school. <BR/><BR/>I would agree that a 12 year old should still be living at home, and the dorms would be a horrific idea, but college itself can actually help younger students to mature at their own rate, rather than at the far too slow and infantilizing rate perpetuated in many schools. <BR/><BR/>And while Math/Science might get you into college early, you might be surprised at what those 12 year old math-science geniuses are reading under the covers at night. It might not be Lacan, but it really might be Milton and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. From the article, his first college class was a language class, not a math class. He did physics and history his second year. That seems pretty balanced to me.Sapiencehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09259871146375570988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-33767186586914507572008-11-01T11:47:00.000-05:002008-11-01T11:47:00.000-05:00As a person who was offered a chance to start coll...As a person who was offered a chance to start college after her sophomore year of high school, I wholeheartedly agree- and I believe myself to be a much saner person for staying in high school.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-59486553053956587752008-11-01T11:37:00.000-05:002008-11-01T11:37:00.000-05:00The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was be...The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was being in grad school where one of these kid-college students went (we saw him racing around campus in a tiny 3-piece suit and a brief case) and then much much later seeing him on the A&E show Intervention, trying to cope with a gambling addiction severe enough that it cost his parents their house. Sad yet somehow...not entirely surprising.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com