HK, I loved your tips on virtual-school courses. If you have any more experiences to share, especially on improving curriculum, I'd love to hear them. We're in a situation in which some of the Honors courses are quite good out of the starting gate -- someone with time and insight (and a love for the subject matter) designed them, and they're completely different from regular (which I see because my other DC takes some regular, grade-level in some subjects and is accelerated in others). But on occasion we find an Honors course that seems to be what you describe: regular plus more writing and more work. Luckily, the school will enrich/alter curriculum if asked, and they're very open and nice about it. But we have to step forward and ask and it can only help to come in with our own ideas. They have a good population of gifties in a focused program, but they're all different. So I'd love to hear anything that worked for you!
Okay-- but recognize that some of this is idiosyncratic and based on my DD's particular strengths/weaknesses. She has a probable connective tissue issue that prevents fluid/extended writing-- and that is a HUGE impact on the modifications that we tend to seek/employ.
1. MORE reading material-- this is where we do massive extensions even to AP coursework, and very definitely to honors ones. If there are three reading selections to "choose" from, she reads all three and then picks based on which one will be best to write on, if that makes sense.
2. LESS repetition-- and this is sometimes tricksy in math, in particular, because while you want your child to get sufficient practice with new skills, you also want it to be meaningful without being a phoning-it-in exercise, and that can be a fine line. With math, we had her do the "challenge" problems-- and made sure that the course instructors KNEW that we were doing this. That way, yes, they could hypothetically ask to see her notebook at any time (never did, though)-- but they simply couldn't expect that she would have actually completed "pp 102-104; problems 1-156, evens" but something more like "pp 103-104; problems 142-156, evens" which amounts to the same skills covered in the single-step problems at the beginning of the homework set, but also makes them more challenging by embedding those skills in more engaging/applied problems. We also worked on a white-board a lot, because this is easier on my DD's hands.
3. More depth in work-product-- if a "powerpoint" was sufficient, and the rubric indicated points a, b, and c needed to be covered in it, DD would do that of course-- but then she'd also add citations, animations, look through Library of Congress image banks for illustrations, etc. The biggest difference in "assigned" versus "what DD did" was in the level of outside resource material. When most of her classmates were looking at about-dot-com articles, she was searching databases at the university. I have to say, however, that most of the high school teachers seemed woefully unaware that there WAS much of a difference in work produced with differentiated sources. {sigh}
4. Time-limits. Because mostly there WAS no way to mitigate the fact that this was busy-work, not engaging learning opportunity (by and large, I mean)-- our strategy was to compress the amount of time that DD had available to complete the work-- that way she was forced to do "good enough" work and it also kept things at ROUGHLY the expected level/intensity of work output for the teachers in those classes. Research paper? Well, you don't have 100 hours to work on this. You have 25. Go. In 25 hours, a PG student can readily produce what a "bright" one can in 80-100, so this worked out nicely.
5. LOADS of don't-ask-don't-tell went on throughout DD's career with her virtual school. We also utilized the principle that it is often way better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. I'd urge caution with that approach, however-- it might not be the best strategy with MG or HG kids, because virtual schools see a fair number of those students. (It's an enriched environment, certainly, so you might have a population of students in a virtual school which is as much as 10% MG-- and maybe close to 0.5% EG/PG in some states.) Those PG kids are still rare enough that schools will pretty much do as YOU please if you push hard enough-- because (being cynical for a moment) most of these are companies that greatly desire to hold up such kids as their poster children, along the way implying that the school is the "secret sauce" that makes them that way. Not true, of course, but if you're willing to keep your mouth shut, they'll let you do a lot of what you please. Unless "the system" demands something in very specific verbiage, there is usually a way around it.
6. Learn who's who with course providers-- avoid things with no textbook. Trust me on this one. Also avoid teachers that you KNOW are rigid/inflexible, or who dislike too-smart kids. I learned early on that some of the course-writing from "valued curriculum partners"
was pure garbage, and the ONLY way to make those better was a match and gasoline, frankly. KC Distance Learning, Virtual Sage, and the like are
horrible virtual sweatshop contractors who use low-contract bidding with any tech writer who is willing to shoulder the load. The quality of the end product is about what one might expect from a time-crunched tech writer being underpaid significantly and having no subject expertise whatsoever. {sigh} The teachers are make or break with a course like that-- and the problem is that mostly the teachers will treat them with all of the enthusiasm usually reserved for roadkill, too-- leaving students to flounder through it all on their own, more or less (and, as noted-- with little in the way of reasonable resources to assist them-- these courses almost always lack textbook support).
