Hothouse Kids: How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood by Quart Alissa

Author:Quart, Alissa [Quart, Alissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2007-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

After hearing so much about gifted brains and high achievement test scores in the hotel ballrooms of the World Gifted Conference, I found myself wondering less about the terrifyingly gifted and more about those kids who had no gurus, who had never even heard of the L-M, but who had buried promise. Who uncovered and developed their potential if they were overlooked?

I was interested in initiatives around North America attempting to improve the chances of those kids who weren’t making their way to gifted and talented classes. I spoke to the man behind JUMP, or Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies—a Canadian numeracy program founded in 1998. In JUMP’s eight years of existence, John Mighton has sought to demonstrate that even children failing at math or labeled as slow learners can go on to learn calculus. He started the program in his apartment, and now thousands of Canadian students are enrolled in JUMP classes, while others are using JUMP workbooks for teachers and parents—16,000 copies of their workbooks were sold in 2005.

The program was inspired by Mighton’s own lackluster experience with mathematics as a child and adolescent, and by his own thwarted relationship to giftedness. Now forty-eight-years old, Mighton had read about gifted kids when he was young. “I thought you had to be born with a certain set of qualities to be gifted,” says Mighton. “I internalized that. I decided there was a threshold of what I could do.”

With JUMP, he took students who couldn’t count by twos even though they were twelve, including students at a juvenile detention center, and patiently deployed his method of learning math in small steps—raising the bar incrementally, problem by problem. He was astonished at first when three years later, these remedial students were performing at grade level and even skipping a year in math.

“I am convinced math is the easiest subject and that problems learning it are mostly behavioral and have to do with confidence,” says Mighton, who is also the author of a book on the subject, The Myth of Ability. “They want to show off to a caring adult and to exercise their minds. I’ve seen that myself—I’ve had classes with high-end students and low-end students, and within two weeks couldn’t tell who was going to finish the worksheets first.”

Part of the success of Mighton’s method, he thinks, is due to the fact that he doesn’t think math learning should always go from the concrete to the abstract, because some children think abstractly before they think concretely. He also thinks if children are verbally intelligent, using language helps them organize information far better than memorizing numbers.

JUMP is only one of many programs of its kind that have shown remarkable results with children conventionally written off as underachievers. There’s the Washington State organization One World Now, which teaches Mandarin and Arabic to underprivileged kids. There are programs that help match talented poor and minority kids with private and preparatory schools, like Prep-for-Prep and the Oliver Program. In 2004, I made several visits to

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