Word: davidson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...acuity--is accepted there without the encumbrances of politics. The school is a rejection of the thoroughly American notion that if most just try hard enough, we could all be talented. Many school administrators oppose ability grouping on the theory that it can perpetuate social inequalities, but at the Davidson Academy, even the 45 élite students are grouped by ability into easier and harder English, math and science classes. The school poses blunt questions about American education: Has the drive to ensure equity over excellence gone too far? If so, is the answer to segregate the brightest kids...
...misapprehension that genius simply emerges unbidden is related to our mixed feelings about intelligence: we know Alex Rodriguez had to practice to become a great baseball player, and we don't think of special schools for gymnasts or tennis prodigies as élitist--a charge already leveled against the Davidson Academy. But giftedness on the playing field and giftedness in, say, a lab aren't so different. As Columbia education professor Abraham Tannenbaum has written, "Giftedness requires social context that enables it." Like a muscle, raw intelligence can't build if it's not exercised...
People often wonder how to tell if their child is gifted. Truly gifted kids are almost always autodidacts. Take Max Oswald-Selis. He moved to Reno from Sydney with his mother Gael Oswald so that he could attend Davidson. Max is 12. The first time I saw him at the academy, he was reading an article about the Supreme Court. He likes to fence. He loves Latin because "it's a very regimented language ... There's probably at least 28 different endings for any given verb, because there's first-, second- and third-person singular and plural for each tense...
...Davidson Academy, all the kids are skipping ahead quickly--in some cases they completed more than two years of material last year. There's no sixth grade or ninth grade or any grade at the academy, just three tracks ("core," "college prep" and "college prep with research"). The curriculums are individualized and fluid--some students take college-prep English but core-level math. I sat in on the Algebra II class one day, but it wasn't so much a traditional class as a study session guided by the teacher, Darren Ripley. Kids worked from different parts of the textbook...
ULTIMATELY THE ACADEMY'S MOST important gift to its students is social, not academic. One of the main reasons Jan and Bob Davidson founded the school was to provide a nurturing social setting for the highly gifted. Through another project of theirs, the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, each year the Davidsons assist 1,200 highly gifted students around the U.S. who need help persuading their schools to let them skip a grade or who want to meet other kids like them. Often the kids are wasting away in average classes, something that drives Bob Davidson crazy: "I mean, that...