I quite disagree, I go to public school and their gifted program is incredible.
Oh, man, you are incredibly lucky. You have no idea just how lucky you are. My school's gifted program (at least at Jr. School) pretty much existed because of me and my parents literally having to complain and bother them to implement one. I am assuming that the Middle School (the middle, jr, and senior (highschool) schools are all the same school, even though the Jr. School has it's own (smaller) campus.) had some form of gifted program before, however I'm sure it wasn't as good as it is now, and believe me, it's stuffty now. We get our normal gifted thingy twice in a ten day cycle, and once it's two periods out of 8 and the other time it's 1 period out of 8. I'm basing this off of last year so there may be some change. There's also a Math Enrichment program which is a little more often, however it's stuff because all we do is miscellaneous "Hey, look at this cool fact" things, instead of what I want to do, which is: "Hey, Nathan, here's the grade 8/9 program, and here's a pack of worksheets for you, feel free to come to me if you have any trouble with it." We've already pushed them really hard so I don't really want my parents to ask for more but if the school year starts and we're doing unrelated crap every two weeks I'm getting a complaint. Also, our gifted class is hardly for gifted students anymore, it's gotten large enough to contain anyone who can complete their work at a slightly faster than average speed. As a genius level gifted child
this is not bragging, it's fact, it annoys me that some dude who I wouldn't even consider smart is now joining our gifted group to further hinder any advanced education I may get a chance to recieve. It started out as me, then it was three students. I consider this reasonable as both were people I considered extremely intelligent. Then it grew to four, this was still reasonable. At the time of middle school we were at nine. Sorry, you're not smart, how the hell did you get in here? We also have an astrophysics group. It's always lead by someone who's maybe 20 at most, or at least comes across like it. This teenager commands no respect and isn't even a teacher, it's like one of you trying to teach a group of 12 year olds a reasonably advanced concept. You would fail. Nobody really pays attention during these groups, it's like a tradition and should the pay they're getting go down a smidgen I guarantee it would stop. I should also say that I go to a fairly small private school. In conclusion, I can make the assumption based on my experiences and the experiences of others that gifted education in general sucks ass.
Wow, that turned out to be longer than I expected. :/
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