What Dottie said.
My daughter is not
particularly well-served by high school science offerings, and the reasons are well-explained by what Dottie's posts reveals (but doesn't necessarily SAY overtly); that is, the OUTPUT demands are quite taxing (cost), but the level of instruction (benefit) isn't correspondingly high.
For the average high schooler, of course, this is as it should be. For a PG pre-teen, however, it's far from ideal, because it doesn't offer quite the 'benefits' that would make all that work feel worthwhile.
Then again, what's the alternative-- and is it
better?For us personally, the answer was "not much, and no, not really." So here we are. But it means that what DD is really "learning" is executive skills hothousing, courtesy of much teeth gnashing and cajoling on our part as parents (and on her teachers' parts, I might add). She's also very strong in math, so that isn't an additional barrier in any way. Her executive skills are actually pretty good-- for an 11yo. But that means that they are also "pretty bad, but not exceptionally so" for a fourteen year old, which doesn't exactly set her up to be very autonomous in her high school courses.
She earns top marks, for sure-- but it would be much better for her if she had to work harder
at the material itself to earn them. In other words, I don't know that I would expect the difficulty level of the material itself to be all that different from middle school offerings (at least, GOOD middle school offerings). There will be the occasional chapter that is novel, but most is going to feel like review of concepts with a sparse sprinkling of new twists thrown in.
My daughter feels like she's being asked to walk barefoot across the Sahara for the occasional canteen of warm stale water. (Her analogy.) Not to put too fine a point on it or be negative or anything...
Some of this is LOG dependent, and it probably depends on the type of learner your child is. Mine is one of those kids that tends to see big picture stuff the first time through the material, and therefore the 'synthesis' stage of the spiraling pedagogy leaves her yawning and irritable.
I don't know what I'd advise in your situation since so much is variable on a local level and with individual children.
