My DS11, heading into 6th grade this year, has had a talent and a passion for math since he was 6 or 7. I don't know that he's as much a prodigy as y'all's DYS students, but he's just so darned good at patterns, and logic, and numbers, and spatial thinking. As a math-minded person myself, I've done a lot of looking into and caring about methods of math education, and I've focused on developing his persistence for problem-solving above any kind of computational fluency. This has paid off, and although every year he gets overwhelmingly frustrated at some point about the excruciatingly slow pace of grade-level math, he's otherwise survived just fine without any subject acceleration, as long as we squeeze in room enough to let him do a little bit of exploring and questioning.
But now, middle school. I feel like it's time for him to find a better fit. And for the first time I'm starting to regret our very small school district, because I don't think we're going to find a good fit here no matter what.
These are our options. First, he has tested into accelerated math, which is a prealgebra course for 6th and 7th graders. He'd be placed with a teacher who's fairly hands-on and discussion-oriented. I think she's similar to his fifth grade math teacher, which worked okay for DS. She found it hard to answer his questions, but at least she didn't put him down for asking? The open-endedness could give some wiggle room for us to provide him with separate challenge work. But the sheer amount of wordiness and cut-and-paste projects and other "multi-modal" learning approaches could be torturous for my guy who sees straight to the heart of problems. I'm sure y'all know that pain. But he'd really enjoy being differentiated with only his most math-interested peers; there were some bright kids in his grade but only 1-2 per class and I don't think they worked together much.
Second, he has been offered early entry into middle school Algebra. It's a high school credit course but with math-interested 7th and 8th graders. He will be very reluctant to make such an unusual move. The class is taught by a very traditional teacher, and would put him on the path to get to calculus fairly early in high school -- and these have always been my biggest fears for him. Algorithmic algebra destroyed my math career. I was just so GOOD at following the steps as prescribed, that it cemented in me the idea that being good at math is synonymous with being good at following procedures. Turning in a neat homework page was so SATISFYING. But I crashed and burned in college math and science when being good at regurgitating stopped being the order of the day. Yet...as long as he gets math in school, he'll get that kind of algebra eventually, next year if not this. And that kind of geometry and pre-calc. And then he'll never really know that discrete math and cryptography and such are even out there...unless we make a radical change.
Which brings up...I asked about doing homeschool math and the counselor said that would work fine. I know exactly what I'd teach him (AOPS Intro to Algebra, either home-taught or online). But even if he agreed to do something so different from his peers, he'd be spoiled for school math forever. And since Algebra is a course that's required for high school graduation, I'd have to really bone up on what records to keep.
What would you do?
