Hi all,
Apparently I joined a long time ago, but I had forgotten and had to find my user info again. I say that by way of introduction because I am very new here. I am hoping I have chosen the correct chat room(?) for this topic, if not I apologize. My son is 10yo. He is working his way through Dolciani's Algebra Book 1 mostly by reading the explanation and doing the problems. We are here if he gets stuck but we usually only have to help with a problem or two here and there. We live in the educational backwater of America, a small town with schools that are happy to rate 2 stars on anyone's rating system, and usually only rate 1 because there is no 0. My son lasted in the public school system until Feb in K then was in a private school until the beginning of third grade. That was when I discovered the child had figured out how to manipulate the system so that he would have all free time and never have to progress in the private school program. It really is a good private school, but when they told me my son was not gifted I knew it wasn't going to work for him. At the end of second grade he had asked to work from the red book (his current math book). I asked him some abstraction questions to get a feel for what he could understand and discovered to my amazement that he was ready. He completed arithmetic in 5 months, I then insisted he do Thinkwell's prealgebra to make sure we hadn't missed anything. He passed without trouble and started Book 1. We aren't as strong in English as we are in math and so he has less support in Language Arts (LA). However he has made some wonderful strides this year in a middle school essay course offered at our local homeschool resource. Unfortunately they do not have another course that would fit him as well. We have settled on returning to MCT LA, which we really enjoyed but I found hard to administer. My husband will act as teacher this time.
That is the background and the point we are at. I have several questions. At 10 my son is at the tail end of the testing period for gifted kids. We would have to go to another city to get him tested and we don't really need the information. The only reason I can think of to do so is to gain access to the online portion of CTY. We wouldn't be able to afford any of the classes, but there is a forum there my son might like. On the other hand he is enjoying the scratch forum he is on right now, so there may be no need. I can estimate his IQ as being somewhere in the 140's, and that makes sense since mine was tested in the 130's so somewhere around there would be likely. What opinions are out there on our situation and having him tested?
We are also trying to understand our options. There is a junior college here in town with some very basic courses. Our current plan is to have him finish the Dolciani series and MCT, along with some science and social studies online, and then have him start at the junior college here in town. We understand that if he receives his AA while we are here our state laws grant him a highschool diploma. So it was our thought to use that. I am thinking eventually he will want to go to CalTech or a similar institute of technology. I am hoping he will consider a PhD someday also, since I think he would really love that level of work. What thoughts do all of you have? Pros and cons? Other things we ought to consider? Things that are out there that we might not know about?
Thanks to all of you,
(I am going to let the system sign this. I have no idea what it will do so it will be a surprise to all of us. But since it comes up checked I figure I probably ought to know what it does.)
