The air conditioner droned in a windowless room at Chapel Hill Middle School, where a girl sat alone and bored in the back corner while a boy and girl near her gabbed about their families.
Among the students actually engaged in the discussion about geography and climate, was a girl who wanted to know what “tropical” meant.
Hot and humid, the teacher told her, quickly adding that humid meant “sticky.”
This was a seventh grade science class in DeKalb County — a class for general education level students.
Across the hall on that spring day, kids the same age and grade were using the same textbook, but learning on an entirely different level. They were on the gifted track, studying intertidal zones.
Ravonda Hardy, their teacher, dropped a question that might confound many adults.
“What is abiotic,” she asked.
A chorus of voices: “Non-living.”
One girl raised her hand: “Ms. Hardy,” she began, “what’s the difference between phytoplankton and regular plankton?”
The gap between general education and gifted education is not always so wide, but these two scenes illustrate one difference between the two. Gifted students are taught the same general curriculum, but they move at a faster pace and can absorb more depth and breadth.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of gifted programs found that white students in Georgia are roughly three times more likely than black students to be enrolled in gifted classes, which are seen as a gateway to a more rigorous education and better opportunities after high school.
Some gifted programs let children pursue their own interests, too, an approach that fosters creativity and critical thinking, said gifted scholar Joseph Renzulli.
Some schools segregate gifted children, as in the science class at Chapel Hill Middle. Others, typically in the younger grades, blend the classrooms and pull out the gifted kids for special enrichment sessions. That’s how it works at High Point Elementary School in Fulton County.
When Rebecca Leffler’s daughter was studying geography in home room with the general education students, the girl’s pull-out class expanded on the topic by planning imaginary trips. The children were given a budget to visit sites like Yosemite or Yellow Stone. They broke into groups, pricing airline tickets and hotel rooms.
Leffler’s daughter plotted an expensive itinerary and ran out of money. So she decided to sleep at camp sites.
“It’s a great program,” Leffler said. “She has more enthusiasm when she comes home.”
At Evansdale Elementary in DeKalb, the trailer used for a gifted pull-out session was abuzz with the babel of young voices one afternoon this spring. The students were sitting back-to-back, playing with Legos. It looked like chaos until the teacher explained their mission: one child built something and had to explain to a teammate how to replicate the random arrangement of shapes and colors. It was a deceptively challenging lesson in communication.
Back in their regular class, the general education students who’d been left behind were quietly working alone on their writing assignments.
One morning at another DeKalb school, Chapel Hill Elementary, gifted students in a pull-out class were discussing their imaginary stock market portfolio.
They were competing with other schools to amass the greatest fortune.
Khemet Warren, 10, was briefing the class: General Mills was up but Six Flags was down, he told them.
“Some of us wanted to get rid of it six months ago,” he reminded them.
Chapel Hill is a high poverty school. The principal once asked all the kids at an assembly to raise their hands if they’d been to the zoo. Only a quarter of the hands went up. Many households lack computers, but the gifted classroom has one with an Internet connection. Khemet could often be found there soon after the 7:05 a.m. arrival of his school bus, said his teacher Rudolph Liggins.
“A lot of the teachers in the general education class, they don’t have time to do this,” Liggins said of the game-like activities he dreams up for them. “When you’re teaching general ed, you have to stick with the basics.”
The market report over, Liggins announced the next topic: catapults. After a brief history lesson about medieval warfare and flaming missiles, he broke the kids into two teams and gave each group a plastic baggie containing rubber bands, a wooden block, a plastic spoon and Popsicle sticks.
Build catapults, he told them.
About the Author
