Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy new school year

Wishing everyone good luck at the start of the new school year - if you are starting a new one now. I am alternately excited and totally overwhelmed at the looks of this school year. I have DS8 partial homeschooling again and DD4 will be starting preschool. I can totally expect wacky experiences from DS's school, even though he won't be there much (but it will make him happy and meet some needs, so we will deal with it). I can totally expect a completely wonderful experience for DD because DS was there a few years ago and it was a beautiful thing. (DD's preschool director emailed a few days ago letting us know how excited they are to have her there and that they are all ready to go to accommodate her.)

I am completely overwhelmed at the thought of educating DS in math and science. He is finishing up prealgebra and chomping at the bit to move ahead. DH is taking over more math instruction (thank goodness). It's not that I can't do it - I just can't answer those questions that DS asks that end up with an answer that is totally beyond my AP calculus class experience, a million years ago. Science we got covered online. Everything else I can handle.

My boys are starting week three of the school year.

Ds9 has pretty much finished all pretesting except for star reading and math (the AR progress monitoring tests) and has started in on daily routines. I think he will have a fairly good year.

Ds14 sounds like he is doing great to me based on his monosyllable grunts.

What are you using?

DS15 starts school tomorrow (Tue 9/2) at 7 am. He is dreading it, and has been quite unhappy with the idea of going back to school. We will have to see how his classes turn out, his counselor hand choose most of his teachers but according to her she didn't have much choice for a few of them. My son heard the Chemistry teacher is bad, that she is disorganized and loses assignments.

SIGH.. in a huge high school you can't win for all the classes. Particularly as his class schedule is a bit unusual. He has been back in marching band for two weeks, and this week if the first football game. He had been enjoying band camp, despite marching in the 90 degrees heat several days this week. He just finished his online drivers-ed, that he promise to finish before school starts.

Crossing my fingers that this is a better year than his last. I hope his math teacher turns out to be good, I don't know anything about her. I will be looking at possible private schools for next year in case it doesn't work out. The tough part is he really LIKE marching band, and robotics club and he needs the social skills he gets out of that as much as the academics so I hate to tear him away.

I will pm you now.

Good luck to everyone and thanks for starting the thread, somewhereonearth! DS10 starts his seventh year of school tomorrow. Not expecting any big changes. Don't know for sure yet who his form teacher will be, but his maths teacher reckons it's likely to be him, which would be fine. Doesn't matter all that hugely as all subjects taught by specialists anyway. He gets to go away for a camping weekend, with white-water rafting etc., next weekend, so that's the big local nervousness; so much not DS's scene, but he doesn't want to be left out of the experience. The big global nervousness is that he'll do the main entrance procedure for senior school late this term ("pre-assessment", but the assessment is a formality in practice for a bright child; they decide on the basis of a "reasoning test" - "not an IQ test", "you can't prepare for it", "verbal, non-verbal and numerical reasoning" - interview and school report, to which 10/11yos to offer places, conditional on sufficiently high performance in exams taken at 13). They don't take all or only the highest performers on the reasoning test; and in any case, turns out DS's performance on NVR tests is not that stunning - like me, he is highly accurate, but slow because he insists on understanding (and verbalising!) every aspect of the reasoning, not using instinct at all. *&(*^$ mathematicians. He should take the ceiling off the verbal and numerical parts, though.

DS15 started last week, and right off the bat he had either a problem or a blessing. A scheduling snafu had him making some choices, and he is out of his AP history course. This is probably ok, because he doesn't like studying history at all, and it's a really tough course and teacher, and I hear the test is one of the tougher ones. He'd been up till 3am the night before the first day of school finishing the summer prep work...so I can only imagine what the rest of the year would be like. Instead, he's in a contemporary issues social studies, where he will learn the importance of history in understanding contemporary issues. It's only a semester.

Another impact of the snafu is that he moved out of the "ideal" pre-calc/calc with all his buds into another section, same teacher, but mostly upperclassmen. He's bummed about that.

He has three classes where, in different contexts or languages, he had to present an "all about me", which is excruciating for him. Not a good start,he's worried he'll have to do that kind of thing a lot in two of the classes, just because of their "themes".

He's so different from me: I asked if it's a challenge to have his two hardest classes at the end of the day. "Mom, AP chem and pre-calc/calc are the EASY ones, French and English are hard!"

Everything else is fine, although it will be a busy year. Thanks to this board for suggestions earlier this summer for SOAR, scaffolding, and reading the teacher. We've used those tips to prepare for the school year. As you can see from his 3am catch up, I can build the scaffold but he has to climb onto it, but now that the year is under way he is appreciating SOAR, and with daily checks he may keep clean with turning in homework.

Your son's mileage may vary, but my personal journey of how I learned to stop worrying and love history began at APUSH. It was the first course in history that I encountered that actually taught it the way it was meant to be taught: stories, with details, that actually connect to each other, characters with human qualities rather than ridiculous archetypes, etc. Before that class, I hated history. Now, I'm a STEM employee with a half-finished hardback of The History of Western Philosophy by my right elbow, and The Story of My Life by Helen Keller opened in an adjacent browser tab.

This sounds like out boys are very much alike. My son it was decided last year that he was NOT taking AP US History so he didn't have to do any summer homework. Honestly, I am happy about that I didn't want him to take this particular AP and it is so time consuming. And he didn't quite make the cutoff for H. Pre-Calc, so he isn't in honors math for the first time in YEARS. It's one of the reasons DS is very bummed and upset he is worried that non of his "friends" will be in his classes. Crossing my fingers it goes well today.

Well, this was a bit stressful for me due to the transition to middle school for both DS and DD. It is more than an hour earlier and about twenty miles further away. Interestingly, they were both pretty cool about it beforehand and so far (fingers and toes crossed) things have gone fairly smoothly. I am particularly grateful when DD comes home with stories about some students being placed in the wrong classes and the inertia in changing their schedules. These were not restricted to not getting the classes that you want but actually being placed inappropriately in the wrong grade such as the 8th grader who got placed in 6th grade health or a magnet student not assigned to a magnet class.

I am also really glad that I did not grade accelerate DS when it was on the table a few years back. I just can't see him managing middle school last year at age 10 without undue stress. Not counting the cafeteria, he has to navigate himself to 7 different locations in a somewhat confusing complex with just 3 minutes between classes. He has to manage two combination lockers and a ridiculous 3 inch binder with multiple sections and subsections. I am frankly a bit impressed with the level of executive functioning skills expected from all 11-year-olds.

Keeping my fingers and toes crossed that all will proceed smoothly.