Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion How asinine is the US educational system?

Agreed-- but I've been working on that for nearly 25 years, and it's still my default to avoid tasks where success isn't certain in my mind. I have learned to enjoy learning, however, as opposed to "knowing."

Anyway. Tangential either way, I suppose.

My personal preference is for collegiate instruction, when moving beyond high school algebra and geometry. I feel that college instruction is better able to accommodate students who are divergent/creative thinkers with respect to material. High school teachers who lack graduate degrees (and, with no small frequency even a regular undergraduate emphasis in the subject) may simply not be ABLE to answer questions which exceed the scope of the curriculum. Now, that isn't to say that adjuncts or teaching assistants always can do so-- but the odds are certainly better, IME. This is still my number one reason for believing wholeheartedly that AP isn't college level.

Back on the topic of "ridiculous rules" we'll just do what we think is educationally best for our kids, and assume (or hope) that common sense will prevail.

Here's a fun yes/no question. Did your child learn to read in Kindergarten?

No - because both already knew how to read (self taught) before they started pre school.

Number 1 yes, learned to read in K

number 2 learned to read before k

No, DS2.5 has already self-taught.

And the analogous yes/no question. Did your child take high school geometry during high school?

DD6 has learned just this year in first grade, but she is grade skipped, so she is bang on target for learning at K age.

Guess I never heard it called high school geometry, but middle kid took geometry in middle school. Always at least a couple dozen who do this in our district. You can only take it in middle school if you are on the highest track or accelerated in math.

Both DSs learned how to read halfway through first grade. Just as I was getting ready to look for LDs, their readings light clicked on, and they were suddenly 3 years ahead.

Geometry, both in high school. In our district, geometry comes after Algebra 2, which DS#2 took at the high school before his 8th grade day began.

I remember doing Euclidian Geometry including theorems and their proofs up to the 4th postulate and the definition, at least, of parallelism at junior school before I was 11 in England back in the early Seventies. It followed right on from Arithmetic and after that we started with basic Algebra (simple linear equations).

I have never understood, given the sheer parsimony of it, why US schools wait so long to cover it.

It was cool and we got to learn to use compasses to draw and explore the properties of circles, chords, sectors, tangents, triangles, create perpendicular lines and bisect lines etc long before we learned how to use a protractor. Maybe people are afraid of injuries and lawsuits now given how discipline in schools has all but disappeared in many schools.