alt Hacker NewsI didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
And yeah even e.g. 28-22-18-16-16 would be better. I'm not claiming I'm special; I'm taking at face value what they told me that my kid is bottom of the pack of the smart kids (I'm actually skeptical of that claim, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to my point). You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? Like, if we take at face value that there's an entire classroom worth of kids who are multiple years ahead of curriculum, why aren't we teaching them at their level? Even if my kid isn't in that classroom. The school is well aware that they have multimodal distribution in ability, so why aren't they designing the class composition around that? They know the statistics better than I do, so I'm sure that they could fit it much better than these numbers I'm throwing out, but even the numbers I'm saying would be a dramatic improvement, and again, I'm asking for fewer resources allocated to my child and more for the lower performing children.
You've done a fantastic job illustrating the type of person who thinks this is an unfair proposal (poor baseball field box analogy and all), and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom 10th percentile pace, which is what the current system actually does.
> I didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
This is not at all obvious from your explanation. But also, between you and them, if I had to bet, I would say that they are way better positioned to know about resources that you do. They are the ones providing the resources, they are the ones doing the "accounting", they see, with their own eyes, what needs resource or not. Did you even consider that maybe they are right on this point?
> You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? ... why aren't we teaching them at their level?
Did you do some research on this subject? Apparently, there is a lot of academic research there, and the conclusion is that grouping by levels is not as beneficial or as an obvious good idea as it seems.
Especially in young children, skills can vary very quickly and "smartness" is not one dimensional. Apparently the best recommendation is to have mixed class but with the teacher aware of the level of each kids. Which can perfectly be exactly what your school is doing: in which case, they are doing the best for your kid and you are pushing them to adopt something that is worse.
On top of that, you said that they say HP requires more resource. If it is the case, it means that having them all in one classroom may be impossible to manage. So, it would _hurt_ the HP classroom and be dragging everyone to the bottom.
> and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom
I don't understand why you are saying this. Nothing in my argument have been about "moving to the bottom for the sake of some minority".
In my first message, I have done some math showing that, in the context where HP require more resource, it looks to me that YOUR proposal is moving everyone to the bottom.
In my second message, I argue that your proposal is based on what will be best for your child, and that another parent will ask for something different. No "moving to the bottom" there either.
What is happening is that you don't know much about the subject, but you have _decided_ that splitting classroom is "obviously" the best way to go, you've _decided_ that you better how resources are divided than people whose job is literally to provide the resource.
YOU are the one who come with a simplistic "good idea" that people have tested in past, studied, and concluded that it brings everyone to the bottom.