canadianstuck:

liveasloved:

Honestly, there has got to be a way to encourage “gifted” and “advanced” students to learn, explore, and challenge themselves that doesn’t include making education a freaking competition, pitting them against themselves and each other and leaving them with serious mental problems and fear of failure. 

There definitely is a way, because from about grade 5 to grade 12 I was in a gifted program. It was never a competition with other students. What usually happened was instead of getting assigned specific projects (do an essay, make a poster), we would be assigned a project to “explore Edgar Allen Poe” or “represent an organ from the human body” and then get a week or whatever to do it. For the Edgar Allen Poe project, I turned in a painting, someone wrote his eulogy, and someone else turned every story into a haiku. For the organ one, I made a plaster brain, painted to have all the different regions. Someone knit a diagram of a lung. It was never a contest, and everyone always turned in something different, but everyone learned because they got to do it in an interesting way. So yes, there is a way to do it.

So giving students free range to explore a subject within their own means without discouraging their creativity and talents makes students more likely to do well and be less stressed? Who would have thought?