Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Race to Nowhere- any thoughts?

No, but I can cite a news story "Federal Reserve Sends In Largest Earnings on Record for Treasury Securities" http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...est-earnings-record-treasury-securities/ consistent with what I wrote.

Our neighborhood public high school has an option for students to graduate after 11th grade if certain requirements are met. It's worth investigating if one's school district allows this.

Yes, even a long time ago when I was in HS and homeschooling was not so common I was looking at leaving HS early and going straight to college. I didn't find any that I was looking at that required a diploma, but most did require certain prerequisites and, obviously, the appropriate ACT/SAT scores. If I remember correctly, the state university was willing to take me on a probationary status. But it is worth getting an idea of the application/entrance requirements of your local colleges so you aren't surprised down the road.

Yes, I should clarify-- the problem is just how young DD is. (Currently 11 and already at college readiness level in many subject areas, but developmentally... eleven. )

Local CC basically has admission contingent upon: HS diploma, dual enrollment via accredited high school program, or GED-- or upon instructor permission. State rules prohibit anyone younger than 16 from taking GED exam.

In other words, individual instructor whim/permission is what this would leave us with, at the end of the day. Not ideal as an educational plan for the next three years.

The good news is that one can take AP exams as a homeschooler, and there are no age restrictions on those, so she could at least produce AP scores as "proof" of college-level readiness. The bad news is that she'd be doing AP coursework as independent study, which isn't ideal in terms of preparing her well for a variety of teaching styles and increasing her flexibility as a student.

I realize this is a touch off-topic for the thread, and my apologies for that. It's just that this is, ironically, also what is driving US out of mainstream education-- the output expectations in this data-mad microcosm run by education bureaucrats are frankly insane. As I noted elsewhere in the high school courses being dumbed down thread-- washing machines. I don't see any point in running my own kid through the heavy-duty, fast spin cycle just to prove that my cheetah can keep up with the current pack of wolves. If you'll forgive the mixed metaphors, that is.

Anyway. We're crunching the numbers and running cost-benefit analysis on the entire situation.

The cost of materials is a real concern, as is the loss of social interaction via the virtual school intranet. No easy answers, I fear-- at least not in our case.

I still think at least part of the problem is that some students are overloading on AP classes, under the perhaps mistaken notion that a profusion of AP's will impress colleges. The article below suggests this is the case.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020600738.html
Too Many AP Courses? It's Possible, Official Says
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

How many Advanced Placement courses are enough? Here in the Washington area, a hotbed of AP mania, the College Board provided an answer for the first time yesterday: Five is plenty in a high school career. Any more, the official response suggested, might be just showing off.

Trevor Packer, executive director of the AP program, said he had spoken to a number of college officials about how many of the college-level courses were needed to impress admissions officers and prepare for the rigors of higher education. They told him that "three, four or five AP courses are sufficient" in a high school career, he said. Under that scenario, a student could max out with one AP course as a sophomore and two each in junior and senior years. "Beyond that, they are interested in seeing students participate in other activities."

Many college-bound students in recent years have been spurred by parents, counselors, admissions officers and other advisers -- as well as peer pressure and self-motivation -- to pack their transcripts with tough courses. Many believe the more, the better.

Yesterday, Packer addressed AP overload for the first time at the College Board's annual release of its AP Report to the Nation in downtown Washington. The report once again showed Maryland, the District and Virginia among national leaders in participation on the three-hour AP exams. About a third of graduating seniors in each jurisdiction took an AP test last year, higher than the national average of about a quarter.

Although area students who take a dozen or more AP courses or tests might be overdoing it, Packer and College Board President Gaston Caperton said, the national problem is not that high school students take on too much college-level work but that they take on too little.

Two students on an expert panel convened to discuss the AP report acknowledged that they were guilty of exceeding the five-exam mark. Kyle Daniels, a University of Maryland freshman who graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County, said he took at least six AP exams. Celina Guerra, a Harvard University freshman who graduated from Edinburg North High School in south Texas, said she took at least nine. Both said that they took so many they could not recall the exact number.

College Board data showed that only 2.7 percent of AP students took six or more tests in the past three years, as Daniels did. But he said he was glad he did. "College is a competitive place," he said. "Competing in high school is good preparation for college."

College Board officials reported that 2.3 million AP tests were given in 2006 in 37 subjects. Among 2006 high school graduates, about 24 percent took at least one AP exam, up from about 16 percent in 2000. About 15 percent got at least one grade on an AP test high enough for college credit (3 or better on a 5-point scale), up from about 10 percent in 2000.

<rest of article at link>

Sorry if I'm a bit skeptical that a full 25% of high school students are at a readiness level to be taking AP coursework.


At least if AP coursework still means 'college level' material, that is.

I am somewhat pessimistic that 25% of first-year college students are at a readiness level for college coursework. My wife reports that many of her second- and third-year nursing students don't know words like "subsequent" and "analysis", and the first-years are worse. (A big shout-out to Val, with the understanding that I still believe that these same kids could learn tensor calculus if taught correctly earlier in life.)

Well, extend that shout out to me, too.

Yes to not knowing what I considered basic English vocabulary.

Flashback moment: <thinking> Wait... I'm pretty sure that English is not your second language... I'm just trying to decide whether your grasp on it qualifies as a FIRST one...


I once had a college sophomore in a gen ed course indignantly retort (not kidding): "How am I supposed to know whether or not this Anne Frank person is alive or dead??!! Who the **** is ANNE FRANK, anyway??"

Many of the second and third year science majors I taught had no clue what the quadratic formula was, or how to isolate a variable using techniques they should have learned in middle school pre-algebra.

So, yeah, I'm guessing that AP stats wouldn't have gone well.

I wish this was true. I really do. But I don't think it is. I don't think that most people can even learn differential/introductory calculus (and this is okay. People have different talents). I wish they could. But I just don't think so.

Here's why:

Some people will never be able to be starters on the college varsity basketball team. Some people will never run a mile in under four and a half minutes or 100m in under 11 seconds or do a triple axel, no matter how hard they train. Not everyone can make the cut for a pro baseball team (which is why starting salaries are over $300,000 a year). They might not have the right kinds of muscles or the right body shape or enough strength (or all of the above).

Why should cognitive achievement be any different?

I understand the desire to include everyone (or not exclude them because of the circumstances of their births). It feel elitist. But being honest isn't elitist. Doing calculus requires that you know your geometry and algebra (I&II) really well. Plus it requires a lot of reasonably difficult arithmetic and an understanding of functions. You need You need to be able to work with these things without thinking too much so that your mind is able to focus on the bigger picture (the calculus) instead of its component parts (the lower math that you use to make the calculus work).

People who can't retain all of that stuff and keep it running in memory at the same time will have a serious problem with just the computational aspects of calculus (never mind applying concepts to word problems or real-life problems). And that's okay.

The problem, I think, is our society's ruthlessness and its attitude toward academic pursuits (get a degree and you'll earn more money!) rather than on being honest about identifying people's talents and steering them toward them.

(HOLLA! @ HowlerKarma.)

Cognitive ability is different because it's not subject to such hard physical limits, and in addition because, in my opinion, we're not nearly as close to the limits of what people can learn as we are to what people can be trained naturally to do with their bodies. You can't double your height, so a very short person will be at a serious disadvantage for all time in the long jump. But people can greatly increase memory, for instance, through training. I don't think you can draw very many valid parallels between current limitations on intellectual abilities and athletics. Intellect is limited by teaching a lot of the time today; I guess that the closest I can come would be a child denied vitamins growing up, and turning out to have stunted growth. We've figured out nutrition to a greater degree than teaching and learning.

A long time ago, people weren't trained to do much intellectually compared to today; reading and writing was considered a big deal. Learned people of those days would likely have been astounded by the algebra skills of a fairly ordinary high school math student of today. And if you had tried to teach someone ordinary algebra in adulthood, perhaps a person with above-average IQ for that time, but dulled through lack of teaching that would be ordinary today, you would have had a much tougher time, perhaps an impossible one, much the same way a child raised by dogs can't learn much human language in the end.

I don't know what would prevent an ordinary person from learning much more than ordinary people learn today. I see no reason to think we've figured out optimal ways of teaching people. It just seems impossible to me. We all gripe here every day about ways in which schools are failing our kids, but they routinely fail most kids IMHO.