Sophomore year of high school, in a Computer Programming course with a math teacher, a set curriculum, and specific grading rubrics mandating building to a specific set of guidelines, we built at best ANSI-blocked windows with titles to prompt the user for their name and maybe a dice roll.
Junior year in an independent study, with access to teachers but without worry for grades or blueprints, I built a robotic plotter/scanner with a PHP-based interface down to a C++ serial library from somewhere in the Linux kernel code.
I didn't get that much smarter in a year. The difference there was between a typical US public school and a progressive (albeit still public) free-thinking magnet school.
It's felt like the presumption was always that you could give the smart kids more freedom and they'd find more ways to grow. But this article has me thinking that's backwards: better to give everyone* that freedom and let them all grow.
*special education and dealing with particular learning disabilities being separate and not dealt with in this wholly unqualified opinion.
Junior year in an independent study, with access to teachers but without worry for grades or blueprints, I built a robotic plotter/scanner with a PHP-based interface down to a C++ serial library from somewhere in the Linux kernel code.
I didn't get that much smarter in a year. The difference there was between a typical US public school and a progressive (albeit still public) free-thinking magnet school.
It's felt like the presumption was always that you could give the smart kids more freedom and they'd find more ways to grow. But this article has me thinking that's backwards: better to give everyone* that freedom and let them all grow.
*special education and dealing with particular learning disabilities being separate and not dealt with in this wholly unqualified opinion.