In the spring a young Alex's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of alternatives to her current school. Mom needs a brain dump.
She was fine at the end of kindergarten (and I estimated her to be capable of working at about 1.5th grade). She was utterly miserable by the end of first grade (and I estimated her to be capable of working at about 3.5th grade), lobbied for a full skip, and has been hugely successful, both academically and socially, as a 3rd grader. She is pretty unhappy now, at the end of 3rd (and I'd guess her at close to end-of-4th in math, strong 5th / emerging 6th in reading, not particularly ahead in grammar / spelling / language arts terminology).
She's spent the last week and a half writing diatribes about why she should go to a different school, or be homeschooled. At one point, she said she wished there were an IXL site for all subjects, and she would learn all of 4th grade over the summer, and be a 5th grader next year.
Her arguments against staying where she is are:
- She won't be with such annoying people. (She is in full-on anti-boy mode, and wants to go to an all-girls school. There exists no such thing in our state. I have explained that switching schools will not reduce the number of annoying boys she has to deal with. Her fallback solution is homeschooling.)
- She could check books out from the public library, and not be limited by what the school library has. (The dictatorship of Accelerated Reader means she has a fairly limited selection of books she considers "her level." Further discussion reveals the real issue is "we don't have enough library time for me to successfully pick a book I enjoy.")
- She has insufficient friends "on my level." Further discussion reveals that "on my level" means "interested in the same stuff I am and not interested in stuff I dislike;" it's not clear that it means "as smart as I am." (When she started off the year, she was about even with the bright-normal kids in 3rd. Her best friend is gifted-identified, and when they were playing together at our house last, I noticed the friend asking DD what the words DD used meant, and how to spell words for some project they were doing.)
Her last write-up had an entire homeschooling plan worked out, using IXL for math, hands-on science experiments, parent-assigned reading and "harder spelling," with supervision provided by her elderly grandparents. Staying home with her elderly grandparents has historically been a fate on par with death in her eyes (and I don't believe for a second that it would play out that way).
Her schoolwork is pretty unremarkable, and starting to fall off some. (Her last math test had 10 problems. She left the last 2 completely blank, as if they weren't even there. The online gradebook says she got a 70% on a language arts test last Thursday,
but I haven't seen it come home yet, so don't know what the issue is which was apparently a typo for a spelling test she did fine on.) She makes careless errors - subtracting when she should add, or borrowing automatically when it's not needed, for instance. She is slow as molasses, and will sit staring blankly at a problem for a long time, whispering it to herself over and over. When the class does timed math drills, she'll bring home a set of 3 sheets, which they were given 3 10-minute periods to complete. The addition set will have maybe 5-10 problems done. The multiplication set will have more - I've seen as many as 30. The subtraction sheet will be covered in complaints about hating school. I know she knows the material; she can do much harder stuff at home.
We have parental disagreement as to the best solution.
Both of us oppose another full skip, for a variety of reasons, chief among them for me being that she doesn't need acceleration in language arts (other than reading). Both of us oppose private school (homework load would crush her) and homeschooling (both of us need to work, and DD does not learn well from me, although we've been doing better).
I'm in favor of a math acceleration. Math is an easy subject to decelerate (or to pursue further acceleration) in our district; a subject acceleration will expose her to twice as many potential friends simultaneously; reading acceleration wouldn't work as well due to asynchronous development (and wouldn't likely help anyhow - she jumped 4 grade equivalents in 4 months on STAR Reading, and tested at a grade equivalent of 10.2 in December - there's not a class doing age-appropriate work that would challenge her); she's sort of a freakish kid anyhow (she talks like an old-fashioned book), so she may as well be a freakish kid with twice the chance of finding well-matched friends and academic challenge.
Her mama is opposed to any further acceleration at all, in the "just let her be a kid / why push her" school of thought.
Our district makes acceleration easy, but the timeline is really strict - you can't give a grade a try and then test up or drop down, but have to test over the summer and live with whatever decision you made then.
I don't really have any questions - just wanted to get everything out of my brain so I could see it from some distance.
