Thank you to both of you for your ideas. I appreciate your suggestions and sharing your experiences. I will see about summer programs, that might be doable for us, but I believe he has to be 12 before he can go to the residential ones. As for CTY my child has had a standardized test and my understanding is that because of that I cannot self nominate. Part of my quandary with testing is that he learns algebra 1 almost without trying but tends to score low on standardized tests. I know that can be an indication of 2e, but I think in this case it is test bias. I have never tried to teach all of the things the public schools do, and probably never will. I know that will put him at a disadvantage on the tests designed around their curriculum. I have seen things like my son missing the question on what plants need to grow because he knows they don't need sunlight since we had a small hydroponic garden in our basement. In our home it was that plants needed a particular spectrum of light either provided by the sun or by a special artificial light. He told me later he just randomly chose something because all of the answers were wrong. Can I still nominate him? Or is there someone else that will look at his demonstrable capabilities instead of tests? Or is an IQ test our only recourse?
I have looked at Art of Problem solving and if math was his passion I would probably try to swing it. They have some great stuff. But my son is a computer science kid, he does math because he knows he is expected to. He neither likes it nor dislikes it since we arranged for him to be in the right level. (He hated arithmetic and timed basic facts tests with a passion.) But when he has free time he spends it learning scratch and watching The Great Courses course on cybersecurity. The last time he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up he told them "computer programmer." Last week if I wanted him to do something all I had to do was tie it somehow to nanotechnology and he was all in. Hence my thinking he will be interested in one of the Institutes of Technology when it is time. One of my quandaries is when is it time? I know MIT will take students as young as 15, but I see pros and cons to that. In our current plan my son will earn his AA around 15, give or take a year. So this is also something I have been trying to understand and perspectives would be welcome.
I haven't spent much time at Edx but I know that Coursera has a cybersecurity cert they offer for a reasonable price. I think my son might be interested in that when he has completed the prereqs. They had a couple of other certs I think he might be interested in in the future as well. I will also check out what Edx has to offer.
Thank you to both of you.
