ParentingBanter.com - View Single Post - cover article in Time magazine on gifted education

**Rosalie B.** · September 9th 07, 01:13 AM posted to misc.kids,misc.education

(Herman Rubin) wrote:

In article ,
Ericka Kammerer wrote:
Chookie wrote:
In article ,
(Herman Rubin) wrote:

Abstract ideas are NOT merely abstractions of more concrete
ones, but exist by themselves. Done that way, children
can understand them.
Only if they are developmentally ready. Claiming
that they exist independently does not suddenly make them
less abstract and more accessible.
It makes them MORE abstract, and hence more accessible.
The abstract idea, when understood, is simpler than
what it is an abstraction of, if presented that way.

I thought I'd mentioned this earlier, but apparently it is a distinctive of
gifted people that they work more easily from the abstract to the concrete,
from theory to practice. Average learners go the opposite way.

But even gifted kids have to scale the developmental
curve, and will not be ready for higher level abstractions
until they're ready for it. That might be a bit sooner than
for others, but it's not instantaneous.
Also, there's a difference between abstract concepts
and general/theory vs. specific/practice.

What is a "higher level abstraction"? Generally, the
more abstract, the easier, IF one does not make a big
issue about what it means.

I'm not sure what it means to not make a big issue about what it
means.

However .. I had a boyfriend in hs who skipped his senior year in hs
and went directly to Johns Hopkins as a math major. Subsequently by
the time I graduated from college (5 years later), he had his PhD in
math. In his first year he was taking English Comp (required),
French, Physics (which he insisted was just applied math) and four
math courses (two kinds of calculus, some advanced algebra and a name
like Rieman Spaces).

Now I'm absolutely not oriented to higher math at all, but I do
consider that I am somewhat gifted. This boyfriend would come over to
my house to study. I basically had to hand-hold him through English
(type and rewrite his papers), and listen while he complained about
French and Physics, but I had no expectation that I would be able to
help at all with the math. This proved not to be true. He have
something he didn't understand and would try to explain the problem to
me, and I would ask a question (without understanding ANYTHING that he
was talking about), and my question would almost instantly give him
the answer to his problem.

Even a weak learner can go from theory to practice. If
one understands something, and I do not mean knows the
words or even knows how to prove the theorems, it is
easy to apply. It may still be difficult to compute;
good mathematical computation is NOT taught.