Ariadne Conill 🐰
IQ and other psychometric assessments are not actually backed by hard science but vibes
so when someone brags about having a "genius level IQ", just write them off as a narcissist
sincerely, your local psychologist turned software engineer
humans and other animals are complex systems, while there are diagnostic tests which measure a degree of performance in specific skill areas, you can't really boil someone's intelligence down to a single number: the person who sucks at math might be a great strategist, for example
incidentally: psychometric evaluation is heavily biased toward performance in math and other hard logic categories in general, so-called IQ tests especially.
also while I am dropping truth bombs: Mensa has problematic connections with the eugenics movement
if it were up to me, primary education would be focused on fostering curiosity and empathy rather than psychometric scores
because those are truly the critical life skills
and indeed in countries where they have gone in that direction, it turns out happiness is higher and productivity is higher
teaching children to recognize patterns and systems is far more useful than math drills and "showing your work"
similarly, teaching children to explore and express their feelings through media is more useful than most of what is taught in school
and don't get me started on common core, I once had a tutoring gig for a while and helping with common core math homework literally made me want to uninstall
MsMerope@ariadne
I wish more people understood this.
One of the reasons I left teaching the littles was an implementation of "cook book" curricula that required us to teach them about snow in September (in a region that doesn't even see snow in December)
I wish more people understood this.
One of the reasons I left teaching the littles was an implementation of "cook book" curricula that required us to teach them about snow in September (in a region that doesn't even see snow in December)
@MsMerope I feel like common core was explicitly designed to make comparative psychologists like myself angery
@ariadne we had a superintendent who proclaimed that he wanted to walk down a wing of 2nd grade classrooms and as he left one room and entered the next the teacher would be picking up the end of the sentence that the teacher in the room he just left had started.
Though maybe the final straw was somebody walking up to a 4 year old on a tricycle and asking them what "performance standard" they were meeting when riding a tricycle....🤦
@MsMerope I mean the smartassed answer to that question is "phys ed" obviously
JulianCalaby@ariadne Best math teacher I ever had gave us a blank sheet of paper and asked us to divide 1 by every number between 1 and 50, then when we were done, showed us all the patterns we could see in all the decimals we got.
Bruce Simpson, Ph.D.@ariadne we are about to lose 1000 years of pedagogy...
✧✦Catherine✦✧@ariadne wait, people use psychometric scores in primary education? that's... wild
@whitequark yes that is the backbone of american primary schooling. it is called common core. they teach to pass the tests.
@ariadne that's horrible
artemist@whitequark @ariadne i went to special "magnet schools" for "smart children" from age 9, the entry tests seemed very much what i expect iq tests to be (lots of matching patterns, reading comprehension, and weird math problems)
@whitequark @ariadne yeah, i took those tests because there were other interesting people i could meet that way, but i never got a number back and i actively avoided anything that referred to iq, since i rightly believed it to be an absurd metric designed to accentuate racism.
@whitequark @artemist racism and eugenics, yes
John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺For a brief period while I was in primary school (perhaps before common core curriculum) our teachers recommended a few of us to take IQ tests (each two rounds of one-on-ones with psychologists). Not all of our parents shared our scores with us, but we all knew the minimum score that got us into the gifted program.
As an adult, I realized that I could probably get admitted to Mensa, but its narcissism turned me off.