Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Need honesty...EXPLORE scores, how far to advance?

interesting Bostonian!

What Dottie said.

My daughter is not particularly well-served by high school science offerings, and the reasons are well-explained by what Dottie's posts reveals (but doesn't necessarily SAY overtly); that is, the OUTPUT demands are quite taxing (cost), but the level of instruction (benefit) isn't correspondingly high.

For the average high schooler, of course, this is as it should be. For a PG pre-teen, however, it's far from ideal, because it doesn't offer quite the 'benefits' that would make all that work feel worthwhile.

Then again, what's the alternative-- and is it better?

For us personally, the answer was "not much, and no, not really." So here we are. But it means that what DD is really "learning" is executive skills hothousing, courtesy of much teeth gnashing and cajoling on our part as parents (and on her teachers' parts, I might add). She's also very strong in math, so that isn't an additional barrier in any way. Her executive skills are actually pretty good-- for an 11yo. But that means that they are also "pretty bad, but not exceptionally so" for a fourteen year old, which doesn't exactly set her up to be very autonomous in her high school courses.

She earns top marks, for sure-- but it would be much better for her if she had to work harder at the material itself to earn them. In other words, I don't know that I would expect the difficulty level of the material itself to be all that different from middle school offerings (at least, GOOD middle school offerings). There will be the occasional chapter that is novel, but most is going to feel like review of concepts with a sparse sprinkling of new twists thrown in.

My daughter feels like she's being asked to walk barefoot across the Sahara for the occasional canteen of warm stale water. (Her analogy.) Not to put too fine a point on it or be negative or anything... Some of this is LOG dependent, and it probably depends on the type of learner your child is. Mine is one of those kids that tends to see big picture stuff the first time through the material, and therefore the 'synthesis' stage of the spiraling pedagogy leaves her yawning and irritable.

I don't know what I'd advise in your situation since so much is variable on a local level and with individual children.

In our experience you need higher math to adequately complete challenging high school science. We adapted my DD's formal science goals for this year and next while she is focusing on math so she can move into more challenging Biology and Chemistry the following year. If the math isn't there and the executive function skills are poor I'm not sure a high school science class will help his love of science. He may do better homeschooling that subject and following his interests until his other skills are there, and by then he'll probably have most of what a class would contain down anyway. It's a really difficult balance.

(My DD likes the Magna books too.)

One great equalized for my son was his Typing skills. If you DS11 hasn't become a proficient typist already, you may want to hothouse that a bit.

For the Math, I would ask that he be given 'end of year tests' for 6th and 7th grade math - ideally with someone looking over his shoulder to see how he does it and what kinds of mistakes he makes.

If he's allowed to 'audit' the high school science courses, then I'd be a lot less worried about the organizational skills. It would be ideal if he had an opportunity to sit down with the teacher once every two weeks to 'adjust' the output expectations. You might want to start with a science that has fewer labs, since who wants to be a lab partner with someone who is only auditing?

It might be that your son's assignments could be framed to be more along the lines of 'create a power point to introduce 6th graders to this week's subject.'

To me the ideal thing is that he get the interest level of high school science without the expectations to 'earn the grade' that are appropriate for high school aged kids but not for 11 year olds who aren't very synchronous in their giftedness. If the principle is game - why not give it a whirl?

Love and more Love,
Grinity

I'd start my own thread but I wanted to quote this and just quickly hijack. Sorry!

Dd10 has both in 4th and 5th grade fallen into the "C" range on that chart. While I've always thought that math is an area where I see some ability in her, I've never thought she needs as much acceleration as that chart would indicate. She just passed the district tests for subject acceleration in math in 6th grade, but barely. She was right at the # needed on the MAPS and just slightly higher than the requisite # on the 7th grade math pre-test (they needed to get a 70% or higher on that and she was a few percents higher but not like 90%). Would you really accelerate more than one grade in math for a kid like that? I'm not even positive if her middle school is going to put her into the accelerated 7th grade math given that she just made it. She could wind up in non-accelerated 7th grade math which I am likely fine with.

Yes again to Dottie's post; some of the very courses that my daughter has begged to take have turned out to be the slowest and most obviously 'remedial' or 'fluff' courses. We've since learned to be wary of those.

Part of our problem is that the classess that my daughter is in are "honors" courses, certainly-- but the definition and practical application of that term varies significantly by location and administration. In this particular instance, what that means is that she (and the other 6-10 brightest of the 100+ students in each 'section') are the "honors" registrants.

She is generally, like Dottie's DS, in the top tier of THEM...

but the problem is that it's a mixed-ability class. DD is problematic here because she really does NOT tolerate repetition with any kind of grace at all. It's that mixture which is bad news. It might not be if she were more internally driven the way some kids are-- but she's not. She does what's required of her unless someone lights her fire; and most of the high school courses she's had, the teacher is (rightly) a lot more focused on the 80% of the class that doesn't get it so well, and less on 'engaging' my daughter, who is tuning out because it all feels plodding and uninteresting.

The way that "honors" works around here is that it isn't a different class-- it's the SAME class, but with extra work piled onto the regular workload. Jump all of the standard hoops and THEN we'll get to the stuff you're here for. In other words, yet again, increased output expectations.

We, too, have always maintained that if DD is to be accelerated like this, she simply has to be "any other student" from the teacher's perspective. She doesn't get special accommodations due to her age or asynchrony-- except in a few instances where, physically, something is simply impossible (some laboratory set-up or design procedures are physically impossible because of her size, coordination, or strength, for example). We make sure that if her physical limitations impact how much SHE is able to do independently, that she makes it up cerebrally instead; by extending conclusions into a thought experiment, evaluating basic statistics, etc.

It can be an uncomfortable balance sometimes, because she isn't actually a fourteen or fifteen year old the way her academic peers are. I've at times wondered if her graceless, obvious disdain for material she already knows isn't a maturity issue at its heart. She can come across (to teachers and classmates) as insufferably arrogant at times, I know, because she is often fairly outspoken about her complaints.

I recently purchased DMT and have been wondering about this. The authors give a LOT of weight to those talent search test results. If my fifth grader scored very well on the Explore 8th grade test, then she has managed to learn at least 8 years of math in 5 years. So she should be able to maintain that accelerated pace for the next 6 years? I don't know. It seems like a big jump from speeding through elementary school concepts to being able to speed through trigonometry. Does anyone have a long view on being able to maintain the acceleration through high school, or not? Is it dependent on LOG?

You're welcome. You may be interested in a new program by one of the authors of the "Developing Math Talent" book, Susan Assouline, called IDEAL Solutions:

http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2011/february/022111math_online_resources.html

Two new online resources recently developed by University of Iowa experts will help educators and parents know if students are on track to develop their full math potential.

One resource, the Inventory for Decisions about Educational Acceleration and Learning (IDEAL) Solutions for Math Acceleration, is a Web-based system that provides student-centered feedback to inform decisions about academic acceleration in math for elementary and middle school students.
Co-developers Susan Assouline and Nick Colangelo from the UI College of Education Belin-Blank Center for Talented and Gifted Development led a team in developing the Web-based system. Both educators and parents can use the program at http://www.idealsolutionsmath.com/ to assess whether students are in a math program that is best matched to their potential.

Many middle school students do not understand some basic math concepts , such as what the equal sign means http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2011/05/equation.html and cannot solve the equation

4+3+2 = x+2

for x http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122200.htm . A child who understands such concepts may be better prepared for algebra than most middle school students.

I agree.