For Bright Students, Challenge Often Absent From High School

For a reasonably intelligent and hard-working student, high school should not be that difficult. Master a few tough classes, slide through the requirements, take a couple of electives, and it’s off to college.

It happens all the time.

And yet Glenn Tesler, who is more than reasonably intelligent and hard-working, has gone through an ordeal in his three years at North Hollywood High. In many ways it has been tougher than he expects college to be.

That’s because Tesler is unusually bright. He is one of about 100 students who graduate each year from the programs for the highly gifted at Walter Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood and Portola Junior High School in Tarzana.

Accelerated Learning

The two schools draw some of the brightest students in Los Angeles and turn them loose in a world of accelerated learning. For three years these students know no limits but their own.

And then they are dropped into high school.

While three junior high schools in the district--Reed, Portola and Eagle Rock--offer programs especially suited to highly advanced students, there are no such programs in public high schools.

By the end of the ninth grade, Tesler had conquered academic fields that other students do not approach until high school.

He had completed every math class and most of the science classes offered in Los Angeles public schools. He had read books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Wuthering Heights” and could calculate the area of a parabola.

For Tesler, there was no logical place to move on to but college. But he didn’t want to go.

Age Difference a Problem

“I talked it over with my parents,” Tesler said. “We decided it wouldn’t be good for me socially. I would be going in there with people who were four or five years older than me.”

Academically, Tesler has found high school disappointing. “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “My classes are sometimes interesting, but they’re not extremely challenging.”

Tesler is not alone. In interviews, more than a dozen Reed and Portola graduates described multiple problems faced by graduates of the gifted-student programs.

Some now attend high schools near their homes. Others transferred to one of the district’s high school magnet programs, such as the humanities sequence at Cleveland or math and science program at Van Nuys.

Or like Tesler, they went on to North Hollywood, which offers some accelerated courses for gifted students because so many Reed students go there. Still, many have encountered classroom boredom for the first time in their lives.

Some split their day between high school and UCLA, where they can find classes that will advance their academic progress. A few have chosen to forfeit their high school diplomas so they can skip classes they consider dull, finding a college that will allow them to enter directly.

But most gifted students say they want a high school diploma even if they don’t need it for their college plans. And so, like other high school students, they take the good classes with the bad, catch a few electives for diversion from the academic grind and try to get the most out of the social offerings.

Some enjoy being a “regular kid” for a change.

“I finally was able to stop riding the bus, and I can get up an hour later now,” said Susan Rudofsky, a Chatsworth resident who car-pooled to Portola during junior high school.

Rudofsky and classmate Yael Feinreich do not regret going to their home school, Chatsworth.

Classes Challenging

“When I came to high school, I was sure there would be a big difference and I would be very bored,” Feinreich said. “When I got here I realized the classes were very challenging. I have less homework now, but I still find it challenging.”

In some way, however, almost all of the Reed and Portola graduates felt let down or impeded by high school. Some found the reading materials inadequate.

While at Reed, they said, they typically read original sources, such as the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine in American history. They studied Latin for 10 weeks during their ancient history classes and examined the pros and cons of the Communist system in ninth-grade world history. They were often disappointed to find themselves reading from a textbook in high school.

“The textbook wasn’t fantastic,” said North Hollywood senior Pam Ling, a Reed graduate. “It kind of gave us a slightly stilted American view. Everything in the textbook would say, ‘All in all, this was the best thing that should have happened.’ ”

Worst Experience

The worst experience for most gifted students was sitting through a semester of health or career guidance, classes required for graduation but quite basic.

“I don’t really know anyone who could be helped by it,” Rudofsky said of her guidance class, “even kids who don’t know where they’re going.”

Several Reed and Portola graduates said they already had health in the seventh grade and were surprised when they were issued the same textbook for the class in high school.

“Questions like ‘What is an orthodontist?’ ” are ridiculous for someone who has had dental braces for three years, said Carrie Swensen, a UCLA freshman who graduated from Reed.

Others got a laugh out of the class. “That’s where you catch up on extra sleep,” Feinreich said.

Correspondence Courses

Some gifted students took these classes by correspondence to avoid the boredom and allow themselves to concentrate on tougher academic subjects.

Routinely, Reed and Portola graduates take as many as possible of the high school advanced-placement classes, academic subjects such as English, biology and history, which are taught at an accelerated pace. The courses prepare students to take tests that, if passed, lead to college-level credits at many schools.

Students who have taken these classes at North Hollywood High, as well as at Chatsworth, University and Palisades high schools, generally found the work challenging and interesting. Some said they were surprised to find themselves getting strong competition from other students who had not been in the gifted-student program.

The most aggressive students, however, soon use up all the advanced-placement classes offered at their schools.

Improvised Study

Sometimes students try to improvise their way out of this problem, with mixed results.

Josh Zucker, a Reed graduate now at Palisades High, found his English class uninteresting except for the outside reading. So he worked out an arrangement with the teacher allowing him to study on his own.

Tesler had completed second-year calculus in junior high, so he found no math class to take by the time he reached North Hollywood.

“In order to graduate from high school you have to take a math class,” he said. So he and his instructor invented an independent-study class. “I found things to work on,” Tesler said. “I did a lot of practicing for math contests.”

He also tried to work with a college-level text. “I didn’t understand everything in the book,” he said. “And I couldn’t find anyone to give me any help.” Eventually he took the class at UCLA.

College Supplement

Most high schools will allow juniors and seniors who prove their academic ability to leave campus part of the day to take classes at UCLA. Many of the gifted students said high school would have been intolerable without the college work.

“Without the UCLA supplement, I wouldn’t find high school very challenging at all,” Ling said.

Ling, like Tesler, leaves the campus every day at lunchtime and goes to UCLA, where she has taken classes in logic, physics, second-year calculus and Chinese.

“One thing I regret was never being able to be on athletic teams” at her high school, Ling said. “Once you go to UCLA you’re not going back to the Valley” at the end of the school day, she said.

Lacking Credits

Taking too many college classes can cause another problem.

Some advanced classes don’t fulfill high school graduation requirements, and if a student takes too many of them, “you don’t get enough credits to graduate,” North Hollywood sophomore Mike Nassir said.

“Some of my friends sort of gave up heart,” he said. “They’re sitting through accounting classes and other classes that aren’t that wonderful. I ask them why. They say because of the credits.”

In the most extreme cases, students find their way out of this dilemma by forfeiting the high school diploma.

Zucker, now a junior at Palisades High, is taking math analysis, psychology and economics at UCLA this year but will not get a high school diploma.

‘Nothing Left’

“They won’t let me graduate because I’m not taking enough classes in high school,” Zucker said. “They have no science classes for me, no math classes. There is no English class I could take. There is nothing left.”

Reluctantly, Zucker has decided to move on to college.

“I’ll be 16 in the fall,” he said. “I still would kind of like to live at home. I might not even have gone to Pali this year, but it’s fun. Being with people my own age is something that is important to me. That is something I’ll be missing.”

That may be the most significant reason many Reed graduates have stuck with high schools they find unsatisfying.

Uncertain About Future

David Maymudes, a junior at University High, could have skipped high school altogether. But he stayed because he’s just not sure of his future.

“It was basically the fact that I didn’t see the advantage of going to college and getting a degree and having to decide what I want to get a degree in,” Maymudes said. “I don’t know what is better about getting a Ph. D. at 21 than at 24 or 28.”

Maymudes, who fills the time by competing in academic contests, placed first overall in the Los Angeles Academic Olympics and was 20th in a national chemistry contest.

He strongly favors a special high school for the gifted and said he would gladly attend one. So would other Reed graduates, such as Zucker and Tesler.

Their viewpoint was not unanimous, however. Some liked high school just the way it is.

Not in a Hurry

Reed graduate Diana Lane, now a freshman at UCLA, chose not to take any college classes ahead of time so she would be more like the other high school students. “There’s a lot of nice people out there I didn’t get to meet simply because we didn’t have the same classes,” she said.

Lane ran on the cross-country and track teams and still managed to keep up her intellectual interests by joining the school’s forensics program, an activity that requires her to follow current events as well as read philosophers such as Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes.

“I’m very glad I did it,” she said.

“I think I’ve had one of the greatest high school experiences of anyone I know,” said another former Reed student, David Freed, a senior at Palisades this year. “It was another experience I’d never had before: being just another kid on the block.”

Freed said also resisted the temptation to take classes at UCLA so he would have time for school activities.

“I would have liked to take a foreign language, such as Russian, but I couldn’t do that and have my madrigals and my speech and drama,” he said. “I did all my extracurriculars and was just ‘High School Joe.’ I look back with a lot of happiness.”