That's great! Keep us posted on how it works out. A skip can seem like a very weird idea the first time it pops up. When our eldest was offered his first skip, it certainly did to us.
Yes -- he was perfectly happy just tra-la-la-ing his way through school, but had we not intervened, nobody would know how capable he truly was. Most importantly HE wouldn't have known either. But he'd sure figure out something was up when/if he got to college and slammed head-first into the ol' brick wall of reality.
Yes, exactly. Has anyone else here noticed that their kids sometimes do
better when given a greater challenge? Especially if it's a much greater challenge?
DD9 won her school spelling bee in mid-January. She prepared by learning 450 words, including 100 hard words at the 8th and 9th grade level (
bourgeois,
accoutrement,
velociraptor). Today we went over them again in preparation for the regional bee next week. We'd been working on the longer list of regional words, and this was the first time in over a month she'd gone over the 8th/9th grade words. She got 94/100 correct. It took about ten minutes to get through the whole list. ETA: Well, maybe 20. But she was firing them right out.
Meanwhile, back at school, her 5th grade spelling lists lately have featured words like
again,
reindeer, and
raisin. She does well enough in spelling at school (low As?), yet would probably do just as well if they advanced her to the 8th grade class.
I think this characteristic of very intelligent people (not just kids) is missed in our schools and in society in general. Schools look at grades:
you're not getting A+++++s with garlands, which shows that you haven't mastered this stuff and you're certainly not ready to skip ahead. I suspect this conclusion seems obvious to people who don't grok giftedness (and especially the highly-or-more gifted).
I've seen this in the workplace, too. Admittedly, it's more complex in a job, but still, there's a problem with over-emphasis on credentials in many hiring situations.
