Celebrate the Season of Giving: Helping the Gifted Means Giving Opportunities to All

“When do I need use this?”

In my 5+ years as a math tutor, this is the most common question asked. Not about functions of equations or how to find the area of a triangle, but when they are going to be given the opportunity to use the material they are learning.  

In the New York Times editorial “Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up: In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves”, the author states that these opportunities need to be provided to the gifted and how the United States needs to spend more time and energy on our top students.  I do not want to waste too much space discussing the faults in this argument because I believe there is a more important part of the article.  However, I cannot simply ignore the goal of the piece. 

Yes, it is true that the middle and lower performing students have been the focus of recent legislation, there is a reason for this: top performing students don’t need us.  The best way I believe I can support this statement is by looking at the teaching method of cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is the teaching practice where all types of students are placed in the same classroom.  The main purpose of this is to have the higher performing students help the lower performing students learn the material being taught.  The primary issue raised within cooperative learning is whether this method would decrease the performance of “gifted” students.  The answer, found by multiple studies for the past fifty years, is no.  In fact, many of the studies, such as Patrick, Bangel, Jeon, and Townsend or Adams and Rotondi, suggest that cooperative learning increases the performance of these students.  Gifted students are going to benefit if our focus toward middle and lower performing students entails quality teaching methods.

So while, in my opinion, the writer places too much focus on high-performing students, an important underlying point is made: creating opportunities.  Many students in math classes have no idea why they are learning the Pythagorean Theorem, and until we provide them the real-world opportunity, they are not going to care to learn.  We need to make school more relevant to life.  Although, I think standardized testing is a good way to see if students are on track in education, if we want the United States to create a better educated society, we have to make education more relatable to society.

As someone who is unable to state a problem without offering some type of solution, I will provide an option that has already been enacted in many colleges and some high schools: The Capstone Research Project.   For those interested, here is the Virginia framework for math, though entirely less incredible than the potential of this course. One day we will turn “When do I need to use this?” to “What do I need to use to solve this?”

~Rachel Drescher