One of the best bonuses of an online environment...
DD regularly exercises maximum snark, and mostly without getting into major trouble for being a wise-acre.
(Which, um... she IS. To be clear.) It's just that in this environment, since such things are (mostly) not 'disruptive' to other students, it's all fine.
Another in the negative column...
my daughter has a VERY unrealistic view of her relative strengths and weaknesses as a student. She doesn't have a range of observations (of other students) from which to draw, and in the absense of such data, she tends to assume that everyone is like her.
They aren't. (Obviously.)
Even other MG kids' parents kind of goggle when she/we get rolling with a few anecdotes about some of her antics with this system...
doing an entire semester's Algebra midterms in a week (with an average of 90%+), learning an entire semester's worth of high school mathematics in just a few days of intense study... polishing off 80 overdue lessons in GT 8th grade over just 3-4 days...
THAT kind of thing shouldn't even be possible if they were really challenging her, n'est pas? But it's also something outside the realm of possibility even for most of the highly capable classmates 2-5 years my DD's senior.
{ETA: I guess this also points up another negative, which is that this is hardly a good system for developing a good-- or even reasonably okay-- work ethic, since it allows for and maybe even encourages such 'red-lining' activities in adrenaline junkies, and frankly it doesn't allow for much else in the way of authentic challenge, which to kids like my DD, is an INVITATION to this sort of thing... }
Anyway. So my daughter really has no idea how unusually academically competent she actually is, because she doesn't experience group learning most of the time. The few times she has, she's tended to write off the others kids' apparent "slowness" as anomolous, because it challenges her self-image/self-perceptions significantly to consider herself THAT unusual.
I found it telling that when she (for the first time) met another PG Connections kiddo like herself last spring (at an Honor Society event), both of those kids were fascinated with one another-- and elated to not be such 'freaks.' The other child is physically very small, but DD is younger, much to both child's delight. (DD because she's finally taller than SOMEONE in her peer group, and the other child because he finally is OLDER than someone in it.)
Last edited by HowlerKarma; 09/25/12 10:42 AM. Reason: to add another realization (in italics above)
