Okay, upon further reflection, I'm going to concede one point.
I think it's possible that kids around the middle of the ability spectrum--say, within one or one and a half standard deviations of the mean--could be productively educated in the same classroom if the type of educational disservice we're discussing did not occur. I'm willing to accept that kids who aren't at the extreme ends of the ability spectrum may be able to handle fairly similar work if they are all given adequate support.
However, I'm still adamant that kids who are highly gifted or seriously intellectually delayed are not ideally served by placement in a regular class, with the possible exception of intellectually delayed kids who have an EA to teach them a totally different curriculum. Even if the regular curriculum was adjusted to meet your needs, you still didn't get the opportunity to interact with peers at your intellectual level at school, and the cross-pollination of ideas and mutual intellectual stimulation that happen when intellectually gifted people interact with each other (like here!) are, IMO, incredibly valuable. It's also much easier to adjust reading materials for a different difficulty level than to adjust other curricula--just give the kid different books. Would you not have benefitted from being taught how to write academic essays about books at an earlier than normal age, or from discussing the material you were reading with other kids of similar ability?
I actually had problems even in gifted classes with material being too easy, sometimes because the teacher or school was reluctant to teach above grade level (this was most common in math), and sometimes because there were a wide range of achievement levels even within gifted classes and the teachers didn't know how to do differentiated instruction. If I had been in regular classes, the problems would have been exponentially worse--I would have had no peers who were anywhere near me in achievement level, and none of the curricula would have been relevant to me. Honestly, I think if it hadn't been for gifted classes, there would have been no point in sending me to school until at least middle school and maybe even high school, because I wouldn't have learned anything much.
Maybe the Peel school board in the '90s was exceptionally bad at differentiated instruction, but I'm not yet familiar with any evidence suggesting that differentiated instruction can address the huge ability gaps that happen when you put highly gifted or seriously intellectually delayed students in a regular classroom. I think it is probably really valuable for addressing the differences among kids who are not too far from average ability levels, and for addressing the differences among gifted or delayed kids, but I'm really not convinced that you can ever profitably put kids like me and kids like Teri in the same classroom.
no subject
I think it's possible that kids around the middle of the ability spectrum--say, within one or one and a half standard deviations of the mean--could be productively educated in the same classroom if the type of educational disservice we're discussing did not occur. I'm willing to accept that kids who aren't at the extreme ends of the ability spectrum may be able to handle fairly similar work if they are all given adequate support.
However, I'm still adamant that kids who are highly gifted or seriously intellectually delayed are not ideally served by placement in a regular class, with the possible exception of intellectually delayed kids who have an EA to teach them a totally different curriculum. Even if the regular curriculum was adjusted to meet your needs, you still didn't get the opportunity to interact with peers at your intellectual level at school, and the cross-pollination of ideas and mutual intellectual stimulation that happen when intellectually gifted people interact with each other (like here!) are, IMO, incredibly valuable. It's also much easier to adjust reading materials for a different difficulty level than to adjust other curricula--just give the kid different books. Would you not have benefitted from being taught how to write academic essays about books at an earlier than normal age, or from discussing the material you were reading with other kids of similar ability?
I actually had problems even in gifted classes with material being too easy, sometimes because the teacher or school was reluctant to teach above grade level (this was most common in math), and sometimes because there were a wide range of achievement levels even within gifted classes and the teachers didn't know how to do differentiated instruction. If I had been in regular classes, the problems would have been exponentially worse--I would have had no peers who were anywhere near me in achievement level, and none of the curricula would have been relevant to me. Honestly, I think if it hadn't been for gifted classes, there would have been no point in sending me to school until at least middle school and maybe even high school, because I wouldn't have learned anything much.
Maybe the Peel school board in the '90s was exceptionally bad at differentiated instruction, but I'm not yet familiar with any evidence suggesting that differentiated instruction can address the huge ability gaps that happen when you put highly gifted or seriously intellectually delayed students in a regular classroom. I think it is probably really valuable for addressing the differences among kids who are not too far from average ability levels, and for addressing the differences among gifted or delayed kids, but I'm really not convinced that you can ever profitably put kids like me and kids like Teri in the same classroom.