Good luck to you, I hope this placement is as successful as it sounds!...this dilemma sounds extremely familiar
Thanks sunnyday - that makes two of us! My standard for off-the-rack schools is that they need to somewhat work.
In fact I would almost go so far as to say that, if you are "school shopping," that a school that doesn't offer Algebra for eighth graders at all, might not be as good a fit as it seems otherwise?
This is Canada, land of the lowest-common-denominator in math education. Above-grade classwork is generally verboten, sadly, which is why I'm working on such a long lead time. Moreover, provincial math has been de-streamed for 9th grade this year, which is excellent from an access perspective, and perhaps actually supportive of SSA to help outliers.
But yes, in principle - agreed.
And I'll also add the caveat that this level of SSA is still not an opportunity, at least for my children, to learn study skills. My 9th grader (who has since accelerated once more and now in Precalculus) was just lamenting about this recently. He longs to know what it would be like to have to study, LOL.
Gotcha. The EF piece drives an unabashed study skills hothousing program at home for us. If I can occupy DS' brain for 20 mins / day with math and have him progress one year for each the next two years in math in school, this box is checked.
I suspect 20 minutes might be massively overshooting this. But what can I say? I'm an optimist.
I'd advise that prior exposure to AOPS at the Alg or even pre-Alg level, and maybe also having actual live AOPS instructors (instead of a mom who winged it with lesson prep the day before, LOL), would have made it even more successful. Just a thought.
Point well taken!
I have a tendency to meld a hodgepodge of content for DS for math - he needs some basic skills and automaticity, some problem solving, some proofs, and some interdisciplinary application.
Re: lateral stretches - yes! I have my eye on AOPS counting + number theory program this year if DS runs through the existing material faster than I'd expected, as well as a grade 11 physics text.
For competitions + Olympiads - this has been a topic of discussion I've had in the DMs. DS is a slow, deep thinker who isn't overly motivated by the competitive angle of math or traditional outlets for mathy kids, like chess. Combined with his EF deficits, the format of competitions would actually (I suspect) be quite stressful for him. We tend to jump straight to the MOEMS / AMC problems in AOPS, and he can usually solve most of them in a few minutes. But there doesn't seem to be any intrinsic drive to do more of the same. *shrugs*
What I've been doing with him, instead, is watering down some first year uni linear algebra (simple stuff like Euclidean vectors, inverses, determinants, systems of linear equations), stats, introducing some philosophy / logic concepts, with an aim to teaching him some econometrics and decision theory modelling. There's a lot of fun application to be had with those topics.
He seems to like cryptography, so maybe some combinatorics next?
Truthfully, I have no idea where he's going to land career-wise. Instead, I try to feed him fun little problems or concepts from several disciplines, and see how far he can take them logically on his own steam. Then, to the extent I can, I throw the ball further afield and connect the interdisciplinary dots.
The common thread in everything is a hunger to find a generalizable solution and to automate the heck out of his process.
