I can relate to this so much! My DS10 struggled with this when he was in public school. The solution for him was to accelerate aggressively in subjects he has the motivation to stick to it.

I think she's too young and too stuck to advocate for herself. She doesn't know what the solutions are, and what could she do? You already said there's no gifted program, negligible differentiation, and you're not interested in acceleration.

Children do the best that they can. Trust her. It's not entitlement. It's desperation.

For a comparison, my son's FSIQ is 132, so within this forum he's on the low end. He is 10, 4th grade by age. Continuous progress acceleration starting in 2nd grade has him in Algebra 2 now.

If you imagine your daughter equally as capable as my son of understanding higher maths, now look at her plight in 4th grade math again. 4th grade is possibly the worst year for Common Core math because it's the 4th YEAR of memorizing math facts and learning increasingly longer calculations. There has been negligible new material presented for years. The trajectory from here is next year they learn fractions, 6th grade they learn proportion and ratio, then 7th and 8th are prealgebra and pregeometry. When you have a child who learns on the first repetition, this slow pace is painful. Like if you were strapped into a chair and forced to watch Barney all day, every day. You would lose your mind.

Academic match is the single most important factor for determining adult outcomes and mental health outcomes for intelligent children. I did not have academic match, in fact, my parents put me in a school that actively crushed me telling me that I couldn't be myself because "it would make the other kids feel bad." About 4th grade I still wanted to learn and as desperate for more. My teachers wrote it as "superiority" as a problem behavior on my report card. By 5th grade I was depressed and remained suicidal from then through high school graduation. It's a miracle I survived my education.

Your daughter's social integration may also contribute to her problems with perfectionism. She has been labeled as "smart". And what does "smart" mean? It means getting the right answers. Getting wrong answers triggers panic of losing her identity and social standing. My son went through this severely in 1st grade. It took time out of public school before he could begin to see himself as something other than "smart", which is to say "gets the answers right." Without this in place, he was emotionally unable to handle acceleration. If he's getting all the answers right, it's too easy. But he couldn't handle that emotional and identity risk while he was engrained in public school.

Fight for your daughter. Before it's too late! Many (((hugs))) to you.

Last edited by sanne; 04/10/17 09:28 AM.