Sorting

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Before I hit high school, I knew I would be “sorted” by ability (depending on the grades I brought from the previous schools.)

Turned out I was wrong. And right. You see, my brother had been sorted by ability, but by the time I hit high school we were some years post leftist revolution, and past various kinds of socialist/communist/turn a different shade of red governments, so sorting had been banned for school kids.

For those of you scratching your heads… There were no hats involved, and no omniscient entity sorting us into houses. In fact there were no houses. (There were buildings, one of which was an expropriated earl’s palace from the last time Portuguese politics had got exciting. This is why although I wasn’t reared in a stable, I did attend 9th grade in one.) In fact, “high school” is a matter of speech, because this was grades 7 through 11. 12th was literally added in just ahead of my hitting it, and I was in the US for it, anyway. (Yes, people used to graduate from secondary education in 11th grade. It just was a thing.)

But high school (for lack of a better term. The transitional “middle school” was grades 5 and 6.) was completely different than in the US. For one, in the beginning of the year you were sorted into “forms” which were supposed to be 21 people, but were always around 30 t0 38 people. These forms got assigned a classroom, and it was your teachers who came to you. (Because we were experiencing exuberant socialist progress, one year the classroom was in the cafeteria (they were out of FUNCTIONAL classrooms, as there had been some problem. Another year they assigned us an art classroom, and were shocked and surprised that our form wasn’t grateful for the favor. This was after 9th grade, and the form I was in specialized in… languages. We didn’t even have any art classes. But we were lectured after some trouble (no, too long to explain. We’d broken up an attempted strike. That’s all) for not being “grateful” for our special classroom. Socialists give you what you don’t want and are shocked you don’t thank them for it. The classroom in the stable was actually a proper classroom. the stables had been converted. The classroom in the attic… we’ll get there.)

Anyway, because someone wasn’t utterly stupid at some point the system was created of people being sorted into forms by ability. Look, having experienced this from both sides of the teaching desk, a well-sorted class, particularly a class formed of all high-performers is a joy for both students and teachers and the learning really happens at an accelerated pace.

And while I suspect a well sorted class of low-performers isn’t as much fun for the teacher, it probably also results in students learning more, because teachers can/have to slow down and teach at the pace the student will learn.

But it is unequal. It definitely is that. Even in our system, it’s been judged hurty or something and studies have “shown” that integrated classrooms are better for students. Somehow. I’m not sure how, because one of my kids went through elementary with a kid with an IQ of 68 who was ‘normalized’ and integrated in normal classes, and let me tell you, it wasn’t better for anyone. Okay, the kid had his own “aide” who in fact did all the school work for him (I never understood what THAT was supposed to accomplish) but even with a dedicated aid, there were entire days lost to his having a freakout and screaming at the top of his lungs, or the like. His mother finally removed him and put him in a program for kids with extreme disabilities, when he learned skills like, oh, washing his hands, and going to the bathroom by himself which was far more useful to him for his future life, than having someone pretend he could write essays. (She was in fact one of my best friends among the mothers, because it turns out profoundly mentally retarded (look, it was the official classification at the time) and profoundly gifted had the exact same problems and mainstreaming wasn’t helping either of them.)

Anyway, by the time I entered seventh grade we were so advanced in the warmth of collectivism that we couldn’t possibly be sorted into different ability levels, because that was a) hurty b) unequal.

But you see, the teachers were used to sorted forms. So what actually happened was that they didn’t sort us for 7th grade. (Actually they did. Alphabetically. I was in the class were everyone’s initials were A. A. (first and last name.)) Then in eighth grade something mysterious happened. I came in late for the very first class which was my “I get this for free” class, which was Portuguese (“language arts.”) I sat down just as they finished reading a text, and the teacher asked a question. Look, I didn’t even know I was doing this until it failed. Apparently, I was in the habit of waiting just long enough that no one else put their hand up. So, I put my head up after a calculated pause, and put my hand up, and every single hand was up. Turns out what the teachers/administrators had done was sort people by the level displayed in the seventh grade.

Anyway, I have very fond memories of eighth and ninth grade (in tenth I got put in the language form, which was the only one, and therefore not sorted. I don’t have fond memories of tenth or eleventh.)

I’m not going to discuss how effective sorting students is as a rule, or how well students do under one system versus another. Look, I haven’t dug through the studies and the data. And if I did, I probably wouldn’t know any different, since all those studies are corrupt.

What I’m going to say, though, is that my form in 8th grade was composed of the best students in other forms the year before. Almost… universally. Almost but not quite. I don’t know if by some weird error or as a lame attempt to hide that they were sorting, there were two completely normal students in my form in those two years.

It took me years to figure out they were normal too. Because the rest of us were feeding on each other and flying away ahead of expected curriculum. And the two of them… lagged. Often they didn’t seem to know what was going on, and they — on the regular — had no idea what we were talking about. When forced to participate in the class they usually said something that seemed to come from another planet. A really dumb one. And they just in general seemed completely lost.

But they were probably perfectly normal.

Yeah, they failed the college entrance, the only 2 in the form that did, but then that was just normal, since only about 0.5% of people made it in.

Why am I telling you this? Not to say I was a gifted kid. Though you probably know the syndrome. If I was so gifted, why am I not rich and famous? (Well, I never wanted to be famous. I wouldn’t mind the rich, though.) It’s not the most useless thing in the world. It can help in lots of circumstances, it can give you that extra lift over the wall at the last minute. (Of course you come to rely on it, and push things to the last minute.) And there are a million other things that would really help that I don’t have, like an easy manner in company or an ability to concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds, or the ability not to fall down rabbit holes that have nothing to do with what I’m supposed to be researching or doing at the moment (five while writing this post. No, I swear, d*mn it.)

I’m telling you this because now that I’m a grown up I can put myself in the place of those two girls. They might have been good students, part of the group, happy, but they were stuck in a form with misfit geniuses (and we were all misfits to some extent) who read stuff they had no interest in, talked of things they’d never pay any attention to, and in general drove them nuts.

Do I think it blighted their lives? G-d. I hope it didn’t. It would be very difficult for two years to do that, even two very formative years.

But this is why I oppose the whole DEI (DIE DIE DIE) system. It does this to people, over and over again.

Remember that essay by Michelle Obama, the anger, the feeling she didn’t fit in? She attributed it to her race, and I guess it actually did have to do with her race, because she was accepted to Harvard due to her racial status and being “underprivileged” (I’m going to assume since that essay was written at about 9th grade level.) She was resentful and felt like an outsider. It was only attributing it to racism that was wrong, but what else was she supposed to do.

Worse, she was taking the place of someone else, who would have thrived in that environment and those classes, and that too is terrible. As useless as it was, I loved those two years of intellectual challenge. Most of all, I loved knowing I wasn’t abnormal. There were others like me, and the intellectual facility and curiosity came with quirks and challenges… that other people also had. But someone might have missed out on that, because they put those two girls in to muddy the waters. (I should point out they were both girls because we were ALL girls. It was an all girl school.) Doing this on purpose, to people, over their entire lives, not just high school, is evil

It is evil to put people out of their natural element, the area they would naturally sort into by competence or ability (which always has an element of interest, too, because we’re humans) and to stick them where they either can’t perform or are bored out of their gourd because someone decided they need people who tan there, or who don’t tan, or who have vaginas instead of penises or whatever criteria that has absolutely nothing to do with doing the job.

One of my challenges, when it comes to interacting with life, is that I am all about doing the thing. What do I mean about doing the thing? Well, if I’m in a course, I’m there to learn. If I’m in a job, I’m there to do the job, whatever it is.

I have very little understanding of interpersonal power games, and even less interest in them.

In this case, my obsession with doing the thing makes me furious and righteously angry at whoever thought that sorting people out because of truly irrelevant characteristics, and removing them from jobs they could do, from situations in which they could thrive, from the groups they would normally interact with to … make the groups more color balanced? or whatever.

Humans are not objects d’art. They’re complex creatures where interest, intelligence and ability all interact.

For instance my quip of “why aren’t I rich?” — I know precisely why. Because I didn’t stick with a profession that would have made me if not rich extremely well off. Because I want to write stories. And I want to write the stories I need to write. And if those aren’t the stories that sell a million, that’s too bad. That’s the stories I cam here to write.

I suspect most of us are like that — even if most people are saner — and to try to force people into outcomes they’d never reach on their own for what’s ultimately aesthetics and the rats in someone else’s head?

That’s evil. You are blighting someone’s life, perhaps making it impossible for them to ever find the magical spot that Pratchett referred to as being “yourself as hard as you can.”

Human life, and finding your way is hard enough without people messing you about treating you like a collection of marbles and sorting you by characteristics that have nothing to do with the real you.

And sometimes this type of thing ends in death. That’s how badly it can go.

But even when it doesn’t, it still ends in death. How many geniuses would have found themselves in a truly demanding college (back when Ivy League still meant something) and didn’t. And didn’t have the right contacts to make their key invention.

So many things can improve life for everyone. A better motor, a better fertilizer… that never happen, and therefore some lives that might have been saved and improved aren’t.

And how many people who would have been, oh, natural managers or salesmen, or teachers, got pushed into an ivy league education in law or whatever, and just emerged resentful and feeling that everyone is out to get them… And sometimes went on to be president and first lady and blight everyone’s life as a consequence?

It’s time to do away with the whole twisted mess. If you’re going to sort sort by characteristics that have something to do with what you’re trying to achieve. If it’s a classroom, better learning. And if it’s a job, people best able to do it.

And let people find their way and sacrifice to get what they want.

All the rest is evil nonsense and illusions of omnipotence.

You’re not a hat. You don’t get to sort people according to characteristics that have nothing to do with the job. Stop it. Just stop it.

62 thoughts on “Sorting”

  1. Interesting post. Leftist ideology can really screw up an education system. And really mess up the kids they are supposed to be teaching. You cannot get equal outcomes with humans who are unequal by nature but they keep trying and all of us pay the price for the stupid things they do.

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    1. “Leftist ideology can really screw up an education system.”

      What we call an education system -is- a Leftist (or statist, anyway) creation. 1763, Frederick the Great of Prussia mandated regular school attendance for children aged 5 to 13 or 14.

      The stated purpose of this was to provide the nation with skilled, literate labor. Not, I hasten to point out, to enrich the lives of the students or even to improve the lot of the citizenry at large.

      Big Freddy was sick of coming in second behind Britain and France in war, you see. That’s why we have schools now. It was such an effective tool to get everybody marching in step that every Western nation adopted it.

      And what do they teach you when you start school? Line up, shut up, do as you’re told, repeat back your lessons. THEN you learn to read, write, count and etc.

      Normies seem to do okay with it. Odds, not so much.

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      1. These days, the way everyone thinks about it is literally influenced by a manufacturing analogy.

        Ford’s assembly line or production line.

        Tutors-as-servants for rich kids, or one room schools are a more artisanal approach.

        Up to 120 or so instructors for one K-12 student. They are (we were) literally moved like work-pieces from one work station to another.

        A thing that I turn my nose up at, in hindsight, is that Education is a pencil whipped ‘soft sciences’ degree, that the stuff that these people are trained to ‘study’ is one imaginary thing, and that this directly conflicts with the imaginary situation where the information the system moves between workers would equip them for optimal piece work.

        The model the research questions assume is directly in conflict with the complexity and resolution of the model that their research methods could support. The research is thus on the same level as noise, and it is unsurprising that the research indicated methods seem to have gotten significantly worse.

        The place where this is working the best may literally be bachelor’s programs in applied mathematics. I am disenchanted enough that I am not sure that those should exist.

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      2. My great grandmother took literally “we live in the mud” tribals from “Hey, you don’t suck” to literally going to college when that was Finishing School with her own daughters.

        Decades after the “turn off your brain” cut-off.

        Folks are trying to poison thinking.

        Don’t buy in.

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      4. I have heard of complaints that homeschoolers teach their children more quickly than actual school, which is apparently not challenging.

        So at least some people think that sitting in the chair for six hours is an end in itself.

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  2. What an interesting post, especially the volta twist appropriately demonizing DEI. (OK so I just had to use my word of the day there, deal with it) The sorting I experienced by high school was simply being included in a small cohort of fellow intelligent students in independent study classes where we got to hide out in teacher offices or unused classrooms and complete our assignments in ten minutes and screw around the rest of the hour for two to three sessions a day, freeing up classes we would have either slept through or embarrassed teachers with our answers or corrections. Post high school found myself in an accelerated program with less than fifty other “gifted” (no affirmative action in our group) completing 8 years of training in 5. A few of us became rich and famous, but most pursued their careers less ostentatiously, still rising to top professionally in chosen areas. Me, well I had different goals, and stumbled about searching for the right niche but having a lot of fun in the process.

    I have seen DEI in action, but most of the participants, though never acknowledged openly, still performed pretty well for their level of abilities with only a few notable exceptions. I guess I was just lucky.

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    1. In elementary school I would finish my math assignments in ten minutes and then read Hardy Boys books for the rest of the period. One reason my parents eventually sent me to a private school. 😁

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      1. I got expelled from nursery school day one so my parents put me in a private Anglican school kindergarten. Always was youngest in class, and learned Anglican nuns as fast with a ruler as my Catholic friends said their nuns were. Made it back to public school for third grade. No rulers encountered thereafter except in shop class.

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        1. Girls got the ruler on the palm whilst boys got it on the knuckles. Catholic school taught the great lesson that life is not fair.

          They kept the paddle, used only for the most flagrant of offenses, in a 1st grade classroom on the opposite side of the school from the office where the paddling took place. The malefactor had to go and fetch it. One might just as well have shouted “dead man walking”. Because the whole school would go absolutely silent other than the steps of the condemned boy. — it was always a boy — then would follow the principal’s command followed bg by a swish, a thwhack, and a cry. It all ended in the early ‘70’s when I was still in the lower school, but I remember it well.

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          1. I was in K-2 in Sainte Claire Shores, a blue collar* suburb of Detroit in the ’50s. Public school, but rumor had it that the (male) principal had a paddle and wasn’t afraid to use it.

            Still public school grade 3-12. No corporal punishment (female principal in grade 3-6. Ran into her decades later. I was “the whiny fat kid”. Major klutz, and decidedly an Odd. Still never got punished by the Powers. )

            (*) Mostly. Lots of line workers for the auto companies, an IRS agent, and my dad, who was a senior draftsman at a steel company. Not sure if he had anybody reporting to him there. He definitely did when we moved in the 60s, but as a white(ish) collar family, we were in the lower tiers of the new suburb’s demographic strata.

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      2. Starting with third grade, I did the same. Not just math, but every single assignment. Even during the actual lecture demonstration portion. Reading and paying attention to the instruction. It was either that or zone out. Habit did not help initial college years. It took a while to find my feet academically for college. Note taking did not (to this day does not) prevent zoning out.

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      3. In middle school, we had an unreasonable math teacher object to my sister reading novels in class when she was disrupting nothing and getting A’s.

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  3. Another stupid aspect of public education is homework. I refused to do any my last two years in public school. There was some… friction between me and the administrators. I graduated in the bottom third of my class. I only graduated at all because I had straight A tests. They didn’t appreciate it when I pointed out their grading system didn’t comport with reality. I just wouldn’t play the obedience game. I’d already determined I didn’t want to go to college even though I was offered full financial coverage to do so. I’d had enough of politics and being managed. I went into the trades and made more as a mold maker and aerospace machinist than the majority of my college educated classmates. In the machine trades the part you make either works or it doesn’t. It measures to spec or not. There is no subjective evaluation based on how hard you suck up to the boss and have team spirit.

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  4. Years ago, I read a short story by F Paul Wilson. In it, the “experts” had gathered a group of young people and sorted them into educational programs that trained them in the fields that the “experts” believed that the students would be good at.

    The main character helped the students understand that it was OK for them to want to go into fields that they’d enjoy rather than the fields that the “experts” had chosen for them.

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    1. The modern ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery)test, derived from the mass conscription testing model basically from world war eleven, which is itself based on the German and prior Prussian systems – test for the most useful military role that you fit, with absolutely no regard for preference or interest. Thus in WWII men who tested well, i.e. the high-IQ guys, were directed to radar units or cryptography, while low test score guys were directed to the infantry. Naturally they moved the ranges around as needs changed, so at the end of the war they were hijacking guys from what had been higher scoring roles into infantry jobs as replacements due to casualty rates, but the underlying concept carried through to the postwar system, and through to the end of the draft in the ‘70s.

      Nowadays the ASVAB still opens or closes doors, but there’s a lot more choice involved given the need to recruit in an all-volunteer system. The services handle things differently if an individual wants to change jobs after they are in a role, but it’s all still grounded on the ASVAB.

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  5. I like classes sorted by level, even the lower levels, so long as there is no expectation that you will get through the same amount of material. The ability to review, practice basic skills, do more activities based around core skills, etc, is very valuable to those kids. I taught a class similar to this (thankfully third year math, the last required in our high schools) and had numerous kids tell me afterwards that is was the math class they most enjoyed in their whole high school careers.

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  6. “…challenges, when it comes to interacting with life, is that I am all about doing the thing.”

    Oh holy cr@p yes.

    You’re there to do this thing that they hired you to do. Or that you paid to do. And could we get on with the thing please, and never mind all this other cr@p? And since I’m better at the thing than anybody else here, why am I in the boss’s office getting told off for not being a “team player”? What is wrong with you people?

    Because when they tell you it’s about The Thing, that’s a lie. It seems to always be a lie, honestly, even in a production environment where you get paid by piece-work. You’re there for some other reason that I have never managed to identify. I do the thing, hard, and then they fire me. Okay then. Maybe you should have told me what you actually want, morons.

    This is why I am self employed the last 25 years, doing The Thing at my own speed, whatever speed that may be on any given day, when I’m damn good and ready to do it. It’s heavenly. Finally, blessed peace.

    Possibly I might be a trifle salty about it. >:(

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    1. As far as I can tell, for non-Odds the Social Thing is as expected as breathing, they don’t think they have to explain it. They just expect everybody to do it. Until we don’t.

      …Maybe we’re as unsettling as vampires, because we don’t need to do it to do the job!

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      1. Hoo boy do I hear y’all.

        Always, always, always. Fired for being slow, “not being a team player”, and all that rot.

        I may be slow, but it was by-god done RIGHT the first time. Yeah, SumDood works at ninety miles an hour, but have you noticed how often he has to go back and redo? Doing it twice is suboptimal.

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        1. Never fired.

          But the number of times I had to fix what “SumDood” raced through? Or as likely only touched the one section and not all the other sections that also needed changing? Only once was I able to get “SumDood” to stop what they were doing, and follow through as needed. That was only because the problem infected payroll process (infected is 100% accurate given the circumstances). While I could have figured out the problem, eventually, not quick enough to get the client fixed. I was rather persistent.

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          1. Payroll is the tripwire to Getting Noticed By Management. And Noticed By Everybody.

            Which is why, in any organization large enough that it makes sense, I advocate running payroll on Someone Else’s software, hardware, and reputation.

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            1. Not long after I retired the company software was just getting ready to add payroll to the system officially. Including printing checks and the summary detail to pre printed forms.

              Full disclosure, I despise pre printed forms of any type, and loath checks.

              Up until then I think there was one client whose timecard forms for payroll, that had the earnings, benefits, and non-tax deductibles, listed.

              Most payroll information was hours worked, comp hours earned and used.

              Forms may or may not be custom, but they were not printed to pre printed forms.

              Does not mean the requirements were not payroll sensitive. Timesheets still had to be printed, signed, and passed on to the external payroll system in a specific timing. The prior comment regarding payroll was PTO/Sick hours earned based on either time on job, worked, or a combination of the two. (Generally defined as “whose on first” or other confusing no standard criteria).

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      2. I can do the social thing for a short period of time but the sustained effort over a lengthy period of time breaks me. And I am tired of being broken like Humpty Dumpty.

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  7. Weird – I can’t connect to this blog or a couple of others this morning; something to do with the internet generally, or just my fussy new computer – but I do agree to the sorting-by-ability scheme, especially in an academic setting. It was still something done when I was also in high school. The high-achievers and academically-inclined were routed through honors and academically-enriched classes, which was such a relief to me. We had challenging material and the best of the teachers. Now and again I wound up in a regular class, and nearly went out of my mind with boredom and frustration.

    Celia Hayes, Author

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  8. So my experience was US public schools c.1966-1975 (at which point I went to a very odd experimental High School that had its own advantages and oddities). At least in my little town (Pop ~3500 during the year 10K plus during vacation season) K(compulsory in CT),1st and 2nd grades were mixed, with some sorting by neighborhood, as there were 2 K-4 grammar schools. In second grade you took Standardized (IOWA) tests and were split (called tracked) into a high and a low level. Focus on the low level was to drill basics to improve as much as possible their Basic Reading and math Skills. High level went broader with more complicated reading assignments (different reader texts). Standardized tests again mid to late 4th grade. This flowed into one middle school (5-8 grades). Students were tracked into one of 4 levels, High (called 510 and 520 where 5 was the grade), a mid level (530/540) a low level (550/560), and remedial/behavioral issues level (570). This persisted through Middle school. One disadvantage was that numbers were known (I’m in 510!) and although not explicitly stated, the meaning was clear :-) . Transition was possible at year shifts (Up or down) and occasionally mid year, but given it was middle school the transition never went well. I remember one young lady who transitioned up twice from low to mid, and then next year mid to high. She was mocked at both transitions, and her friends from 560 and the low grammar classes abandoned her. It didn’t help that she was experiencing puberty sooner than her peers, who in 7th grade were still girl shaped not curved.

    Modern Pedagogy(Feh Spit!!!) eschews ANY form of tracking. The alleged intent is to let the more capable students provide support/encouragement for the slower students and a chance for all to grow closer together. It does NOT happen. In addition in larger towns/cities, large numbers of ESL (English as a second language) students get mixed in. They are not totally bereft as they need to have minimal capability in English, but that minimal capability may NOT include enough specialized English (Math, Science even parts of History/civics) to get the material. Also included are Lots of folk with IEP for dealing with specialized issues (ADA has been interpreted to require this). All this means that the teacher can NOT focus their lesson on a particular group, and the overall group moves slowly to avoid dropping the IEP/ESL folks (who may have aides). One place where this changes is 8th grade where Algebra I is reserved for the folks that can cope. However Algebra I at 8th grade is being denigrated (first done in San Francisco Unified School district AKA SFUSD) as it is unfair and considered unnecessarily advanced (which is Nonsense if you want to go to college for Science or Engineering, you need that head start to get to Calculus so you don’t see that for the first time freshman year with a billion other tough courses and distractions). In General the SFUSD action has tested out as a failure, although many places (including San Francisco) refuse to acknowledge the data. The parents with money or focus simply go around the system and get Algebra I outside the system.

    Both systems cause issues, the old tracking model took kids at grade 2 and said you’re stuck and made them feel less valued. Later models (early 2000’s) tried to hide the tracking and make it less severe but no one particularly not the students was fooled. I think part of the issue was the good teachers WANTED the good students, its a more pleasant and fulfilling experience to have 20+ happy eager faces than 20+ people with bored dull looks and recalcitrant attitudes. So you got a feedback loop, the faster more attentive kids got the superior teachers and learned faster leaving their age peers in the dust. This was not ALWAYS so my 7/8th grade Math teacher Taught BOTH a 710/810 track AND the remedial track (770/870) and often got folks moving into the central College track in High school instead of the base classes.

    The modern Model fails as it impedes the fast students without much result for even the middling students let alone those with issues. The lack of Disciplinary action also means that sometimes 1-3 students can disrupt a whole class for the year, whereas in the tracking system they would have been relegated to a low/behavioral level and would have been sorted out by the end of grammar school.

    There is an opportunity cost being inflicted on society. By making the exceptional students go slow we are essentially creating Harrison Bergeron with the weights/impediments being the other students. We’re perhaps losing or discouraging folks by teaching the motto “the nail that sticks out will be hammered down”. I think some limited tracking is required, and honestly, ADA needs to be clarified so that not just profoundly disabled IEP students get pulled but that we acknowledge that some disabilities really need a focused separate teaching group and trying to mainline them just impedes the overall system.

    I really hate that I constantly seem to run into things where there is no obvious solution without its own issues. There are trade offs here and my biggest issue is that those making the decisions have a very small view of the picture and their view is biased by a communalist/socialist bent that is anathema to a western style civilization. Their choice favors moderation at the cost of the exceptional.

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    1. I have mentioned this before. Do not get my aunt going on integration and the ADA. You will get the entire history of accommodations and what it was *not intended for. Prime example of how the whole thing was skin suited.

      Her daughter (cousin, 1967 – 1980) was the Arizona test case. Cousin was born with spina bifida. Confined to a wheel chair, needed physical assistance, for bathroom and little bit more. But she was a bright intellectual child. When she started school, the district insisted on placing her in the class where all handicapped, physical, mental, emotional, and ESL, children went. School district was trying to warehouse cousin into classroom structures that either she did not need (behavioral) or could not participate in regardless of how much she was taught (she had no control over anything below her waist).

      Also, how frustrating for same aunt who, after 1980, and older surviving child was in college, went back to get her teaching credentials.

      (*) Any kind of disruptive behavior not related to physical disabilities or medical condition (diabetes) integration was not the intent. This excludes disruptive behavior of the “class clown”, who if there had been segregated classes for the gifted (school years 1961 – 1974) beyond math, would have been in them (did provide entertainment for others who then could keep being ignored). Or how our class valedictorian flunked out of the same college I managed to stick with then later earned multiple PHD’s, mostly in what the army wanted..

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    2. In my area (California, but inland from SF), math is definitely tracked starting in middle school. There’s Math and Accelerated Math, the latter of which will lead you into Math 2 in your frosh year of high school. (They are no longer dividing it into Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, and Calculus. Which means I no longer understand where they are drawing the distinctions in Mathletes.)

      Mind you, my eldest not only blew through those things, he taught himself pre-calculus from a standard textbook in the summer between his frosh and sophomore years so he could pass the challenge test and take AP Calculus his sophomore year. Which he then proceeded to get the highest score on the BC version of the test, so he ended up taking Calculus 3 at the local community college his senior year.

      Anyway. If they had held him back for any stupid reason, we would have sought teaching outside the system. Because anyone who teaches himself from a textbook (just the student version, not a “how to” version) obviously really really wants it.

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  9. Because of various shenanigans, I ended up in a gradde 7-12 school for grades 7 and 8. This was awful for many reasons, but one of them being I was tossed into their Gifted and Talented section and promptly did everything I could to get tossed back out. (And finally succeeded.)

    Thing was, they weren’t doing anything academically challenging, or I might have reacted differently. Instead the administration apparently thought the proper translation of “gifted” was “performing monkey on stage” – they wanted us to play Star Trek characters! – and while the rest of the group was on board with this, the whole idea made me literally ill.

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  10. Yeah, basically my view is that all of these education programs today are managed by bureaucrats (who conform to office politics even if having suspicions), and that the office politics are set by the uninformed and only moderately intelligent.

    Our conception of mainstream education-as-skills-training from pre-K to maybe master’s degrees is influenced by manufacturing analogies.

    Major goals of policy makers include a) detecting racism, sexism, etc. b) fixing cases where racism, sexism, etc. are detected inside an organization c) correcting for other institutions being racist, sexist, etc. by providing more opportunities for such individuals.

    A problem is that 1) the test used is disparate rates 2) the most persuasive explanation for such rates might be instructors, administrators, and parents who beleive that racist organizations exist, or who believe in racist facts and racist conspiracies that are prehistoric and magic.

    This is obviously something I have not vetted properly, but one of the alleged truth sources for the testing below is a relevant interesting claim. City politics by disparate outcomes.

    https://www.justfacts.com/news_artificial_ignorance_political_falsehoods_leading_ais

    The point that stands without that supporting claim holding is that the consensus understanding of these things is not grounded in a deep statistical education. Naively, we might expect these things to be non-ergoditic and have memory. We might expect weird clusters, and correlations that test our intuitions. The tests applied for liability by judges are extremely simple.

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  11. “Socialists give you what you don’t want and are shocked you don’t thank them for it.” I copied this quote, then by the time I read the article I realized that was not the focus of the article, but it is still very relevant. Thanks for the sorting perspective.

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  12. Too smart for the normal people, too dumb for the real geniuses. I get VERY good at whatever I’m doing, but I have the passion of a rock and the drive of a turtle. And I usually deliberately sabotage anything I start becoming passionate about because that has always led me to a single-minded obsession that never ends well. (Think of Space X, only every so often dropping a fully fueled rocket on Gaza or Tehran because they pissed me off.)

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    1. “Too smart for the normal people, too dumb for the real geniuses.“

      –

      Ouch. That hits awfully close to home.

      “becoming passionate about because that has always led me to a single-minded obsession that never ends well.”

      –

      Same. Only not quite that bad. Usually obsession fades away, and I won’t touch whatever ever again. See retired from programming, and have not touched code since. Did the same with crafts, only never had income. Fifty years ago if someone had said I would be a programmer, more than me would have laughed and pointed at them. Forty years ago if anyone had told me I would quit programming cold and never code again, I’d have laughed politely and said “maybe true for you, not me.”

      “Think of Space X, only every so often dropping a fully fueled rocket on Gaza or Tehran because they pissed me off.“

      –

      Um. Dang. Good thing we cannot get in on that specific action.

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  13. When my oldest was in kindergarten, she was in a dual language program. The “report cards” sent out each quarter kept showing her far ahead of the benchmarks kids were “supposed” to be at. In fact, her 3 year old sister had hit or exceeded most of the same benchmarks the 5-6 year olds were graded on. (One benchmark I can remember is count to 20 by the middle of the school year. My 3 year old was outside with me waiting to pick up her sister. She was jumping from square to square counting as she went. She got to 30 before school let out for the day.)

    I asked her teacher about future grade levels and how that would affect my kid.

    In Kindergarten, the teacher would teach both languages and swap between lessons and languages. In the next grades, different teachers taught, one in English, one in the other language. I asked how they did it. Tended to do themes. This month is sports; next month is seasons. I asked if the schedule was the same for the other language, so, you know, you get reinforcement, English sports words, then foreign language sports words. Nope. It could be months before the same theme is taught in the other language.

    I asked about reading support and other areas she did well in. I was frankly told that my child would likely get bored in future grades because so much of the time was spent in supporting slow learners or ESL students in the English classes.

    We chose to homeschool after that.

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  14. OT: Sugar started stumbling, so we took her in to VCA. This morning, they did an echocardiogram and found that she had a mass on or around her heart that had started bleeding. They can’t do much for it, and so we’ll have to let her go.

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      1. Thank you.

        We knew she still had health issues, but we seemed to have them managed. This was just unexpected that it was so fast.

        With this one, any of the proposed treatments for the mass were probably going to kill her in the process, and it was palliative at best.

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  15. Question.

    What not Kindle or Nook Android reading apps do others here use for on device reading, after transferring books to phones from Calibre?

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    2. I use Overdrive on my older book-reading Android phone, and I also have it on a couple of my older Kindles. Originally this app was developed to allow you to download books from your local library. But you can also set it up to access local Epub files downloaded from Calibre for example.

      Like the Kindle app, you can swap between books and not lose your place when you come back to the first one.

      One of my newer Kindles has Moon+ Reader, which my son swears by. It is available in the Play Store and via other routes. I don’t use it much myself so I don’t know all of its strong points or quirks.

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    3. On Overdrive, I’d suggest looking for one that says it is the original app, updated 2024. I don’t know if it has been modified once Libby became the de-facto library interface, but my early interactions with Libby were so aggravating I swore off using it. I download library books via Kindle and just read them on the new Kindle devices.

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  17. My parents sent me to a small private school for high school, after our district went from a grade/junior/high school to a grade/middle/high school system. Into a high school that was the ONLY high school in town (they closed the other one because there were issues with the building and the district figured out it was cheaper to pack the other high school with portables and sell the property for condos) and was already overcrowed then.

    I think it probably saved my life; from the stories I heard of people that had gone there.

    I went from 35+ student classes to 12 at most. I had incentives to finish my assignments (everything done? I could leave and walk to the train station and go home).

    I was odd, weird, and had a place that worked for three years.

    It was astonishing.

    And I still was bullied.

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