Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy For BTDT: Anyone decide not to accelerate?

We got a blue shirt effect just by not accelerating, even though our child was in a regular public school. Our dc got a bronze medal from NUMATS for his Explore score in 4th grade, competing against other 4th graders. The kid was a learning machine - the school curriculum was kind of irrelevant.

Yep - this sounds like our DD11. Stuck with all these tall 13 year olds in 7th grade. Never mind that girls and boys are starting to "like" each other (as it's called here). Very confusing to DD. As stated elsewhere she creates graphs of all the romantic relationships as she tries to figure out how love works. Luckily the math program in DD's middle school goes up to geometry so the kids don't get shipped off to another school.




I don't think I fully appreciated this information before the grade skip. But, would it make me want to roll back the skip? She was really really unhappy back then vs. just unhappy now with bits of happiness sprinkled in (band and art).

Well said!
Research supports this:
1 - http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....icle_about_poor_school_f.html#Post229604,
2 - http://www.casenex.com/casenet/pages/virtualLibrary/gridlock/groupmyths.html,
3 - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.540.8046&rep=rep1&type=pdf
(or do a web search on Gentry Total School Cluster Grouping TSCG),
4 - http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0034654316675417.

We aren't too tigerish here so we wouldn't change anything either. Just sharing here for full disclosure.

Of course, one may tack on additional study hours after school - after hours have already been needlessly burned learning nothing during the school day - but homeschooling is a much more efficient means of achieving the same end.

MVM, reflecting on one of your original questions regarding the educational cultural bias toward chronological age-uniformity: for some educators, I think it is closely associated with a value for equity, which they confound with equality. It may also be a reaction, especially in early childhood educators, to the pressure to raise test scores, which they perceive (with some accuracy) as distorting the value of whole-child development. Grade skipping represents something dangerous to many conventional educators, which provokes an emotional response incompatible with the more nuanced discussion in which we are currently engaged.

Actually, we did not actively afterschool, just fed his bliss by providing library books, conversation and activities aligned to his interests. Our kids always loved the schoolness of school as well, which worked well for us because dh and I both work during the school day.

@amylou,

Not arguing with you :-)

merely sharing our (when you've one gifted kid you've seen one gifted kid), thoughts and experiences with the OP.

I am sure that if you have a kid who is placed well below his actual functioning grade he will 'blue shirt'.

It gets more difficult to do after MS because the busywork stuff begins to kick in - in our experience, at least. And busywork take more time out of each evening itself.

I just want to add that the pressure to grade skip is most intense during elementary and progressively alleviates during middle and high school. Keep in mind that the elementary curriculum is too easy for a large portion of the population and that the span from the average to the top five percent widens over the years. At the same time, increasingly achievement, independence, creativity and passion overshadow cognitive potential as the relevant measure. There are certainly aspects of middle school that can be limiting for any student with high cognitive potential but there are numerous opportunities, particularly in language arts, history and foreign languages, for students to work "to their potential" if they so choose. That was seldom the case in elementary school except perhaps sometimes for writing in language arts. For my 8th graders, the sky is the limit and there is nothing stopping them from producing high school worthy essays, research papers, websites and documentaries throughout the school year in many of their classes. The biggest problem remains math although science can be lacking lab-wise. DD is in Geometry (standard GT) and DS in Pre-calculus (two years accelerated) but the slow pacing and lack of depth remain problematic; however, online resources and competition math opportunities help.

What she ^^^^ said.