As a young adult, I paid to sign up for an adult course called "Advanced Bridge." After playing "at bridge" for some years, this class sounded intriguing.

After the first 15 minutes of the class, as the instructor was answering several questions that clearly belonged in a Beginning Bridge class, I excused myself and went home. No one stopped me because as an adult, this was my prerogative.

Gifted students who are trapped in some classes where the content is clearly below their own challenge level sometimes amuse themselves by making snide comments or showing themselves as the "class clown." Discussed here are other options that should be available to them.

Can you visualize a bell curve that illustrates the achievement of students at at a particular grade level? The curve shows average students represented in the middle, struggling students to the left, and gifted or advanced learners to the right.

Please make a guess about which group of students is most likely to make the least forward academic progress in any given school year. Does the knowledge that the correct answer is "students in the top 15-plus percent" seem shocking to you? How is that possible? It is because education treats the words "teach" and "learn" as synonyms — which they are clearly not.

Administrators expect teachers to "teach" all the grade-level content. Yet high-stakes assessments only measure what students have learned. If advanced learners can score well on those tests without being required to do all the grade-level work, they should have consistent options to demonstrate that reality.

Educators and parents have traditionally believed that high grades prove learning has occurred. More accurately, learning should be defined as the amount of forward progress made by students during any school year.

The paradox is that when gifted/advanced students are already scoring very high when the school year begins, there is little room for any actual growth in their achievement levels. Yet, educators rely on these students' high scores, which they — and some parents — believe indicate that learning has taken place.

This belief is a fallacy since teachers and students are only assessed on what students demonstrate they know at testing time. My unscientific definition of gifted is any student who can learn designated content at a level designed for students two-three years older than they. These students need certain considerations to make sure their learning time is not being wasted doing work related to concepts they have already mastered.

Standards assigned to a certain grade level will almost certainly not challenge advanced learners. Therefore, teachers must include more rigorous learning experiences as they plan any unit of work for their class. If there are no such alternatives ready at instruction time, some students may engage in rather unpleasant behaviors including complaining that they already know the content or behaving like the class clown.

Voluntary assessments must be available to any student who wants to try at the beginning of each unit to demonstrate previous mastery. There should be no "review" before the pretest because that would help kids with strong short-term memories get a higher pretest score, but then not be able to match it during the end-of-unit assessments.

When content is new or unfamiliar, pretesting would only encourage "cramming." Other methods must be used that allow advanced students to move more quickly through that content and spend the time thus created working on an independent study related to extending the depth and complexity of target standards.

These activities should be labeled "extension options" over "enrichment" since all students should consistently be experiencing enriched learning conditions. Work on these extensions is counted as a replacement for the grade-level activities from which advanced learners should be excused in favor of independent study.

The caveat here is that these students must take all unit assessments at the same time as their classmates and get scores of B or higher to continue their independent study. Study guides that describe all the required content help advanced students prepare independently for those assessments even as they continue work on their independent studies.

Students who experience independent work should be encouraged to work in pairs or small groups to experience social interactions with their "learning peer" as they learn more rigorous content together.

Providing these conditions can go a long way toward increasing the school-time satisfaction for gifted/advanced learners and their parents. It becomes obvious to all concerned that these students are not having to battle the frustration and anguish that comes with realizing one's learning time in school is being wasted.