my DD, who will now struggle with task-avoidance and perfectionism her entire life.
Ding ding, task avoidance and perfectionism detected.... Maybe she will work hard at acquiring a growth mindset, and succeed in overcoming her task avoidance and perfectionism...
She's done better there in the past 24 months since we've been truly pushing her to work at it, take risks, and improve her failure tolerance, yes...
BUT.
She was a kid who was
extremely keen on algebra at 6yo, and then the school spent the next THREE YEARS teaching her...
well, fractions, I guess. Because the rest of it? She knew at 6yo when we turned her over to them.
By the time she was nine, she was sloppy in her work habits, and tended to assume that mistakes were an indication that she should give up doing math, and that
learning was painful and best avoided entirely.
Also-- I wouldn't assume that high-level thinking the way some have mentioned it here (rigorous proofs, etc) is even
taught in high school curricula at this point in the US. Seriously-- do NOT make that assumption. Val and I can both attest that whatever higher level understanding our kids have had (up to calculus) has been gleaned via interactions with us, not with the curriculum or their teachers. Sad but true.
Knowing what I know
now, I'd have pressed harder to get her into algebra a LOT sooner-- probably at 7yo-- and searched out the applications-oriented material that she was so clearly keen on, rather than relying upon the school to take care of that stuff. We pulled back later to allow for some math-specific unschooly time, but what she really needed was competent higher level
instruction. University level, not this test-focused baloney in AP coursework now.
