Thanks as always for the resources!
When it comes to educating my children, my first and foremost concern is preserving their desire to learn. I want them to keep their intrinsic motivation and curiosity. Most other issues, including the actual level of knowledge content they receive, are kind of secondary. Content can always come later. So in that sense, no, I don't necessarily need them to have a challenging curriculum (especially in absence of the human resources to teach that curriculum.) But I do need them to understand that unchallenging curriculum is not an invitation to underperform. I want them to feel responsible for their learning, regardless of curriculum.
Those red flags sound terrible when you put it that way!
But yes, she's basically playing the age card. When presented with a task geared to her age-level or grade-level norm, she displays some perfectionism in that she expects such tasks to come easily. But when presented with a task intended for older children, she doesn't put in commensurate effort, she just coasts because she's still "pretty good for her age," you know? I don't want her to have perfectionist anxiety.
But I do want her to understand that, regardless of whether she's surrounded by age-peers or not, she can and should find a worthwhile challenge.
For example, she was invited to join the fifth grade FLL robotics team this year, and she was a productive contributing member. But if I ask her if she has any interest in working on some programming skills now to build toward the next season, she points out that she already did about as well as the fifth graders at programming skills.
But I probably need to flesh out whether I'm right, that she's worried that fifth grade expectations will be high enough she will need to work toward them -- or whether she's actually looking forward to sixth grade work being a challenge? She might be motivated by letter grades, and I guess I could see her thriving with the pace of ELA and History as my DS has experienced it this year. And maybe she just wants the pressure off of being "the best" at things. Hm.
I'll try to spend some time following links and thinking about where we want to go! Thanks again.
