0 members (),
381
guests, and
30
robots. |
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
S |
M |
T |
W |
T |
F |
S |
|
|
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
29
|
30
|
31
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639
Member
|
OP
Member
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639 |
So we successfully advocated and got the skip into 1st for DS5.5. After all of that, and going through the period of elation we then went through a period of "are we sure we're doing the right thing." It was a fleeting, but concrete moment. And yes, we are convinced this is the right thing. We're still waiting on the BoD meeting (this week) to confirm our entry into 1st, but do not anticipate any issues.
At any rate, DS has been into Biology for the last month or so. Very into Biology to the extent that certain discussions that I anticipated being years away already have occurred (!).
So finally we decided to return to some other subjects like telling time with an analog clock, money, and doing some math. Simple review, really, as school starts in a couple of weeks and these are subjects that might actually come up. Typically DS's memory is photographic... but it was really an interesting day! It was like at first he forgot everything relating to math. A few months ago he could explain to you how multiplication worked, powers, and roots. Not just the simple squares and square roots, but he'd tell you the fourth root of 16 and he'd tell you why. Or that the cube root of -1 is -1 but the square root of -1 is imaginary. But not today.
DW and I looked at each other quite a bit puzzled. But then I got to thinking. He practices reading every day. Every day. He just loves to read. His interest in math was very intense for more than six months but then went into a period of not wanting to do math much if at all. No practice. So it was like that part of his brain just disconnected. The interesting thing was that I spent about 15 minutes with him later in the day where I did a review of things that I know he knew in the beginning of the summer. It appeared that the math part of his brain started to wake up again.
Anyways. It was an interesting how when he's not focused on a given topic it can get pushed into the back of his mind and largely forgotten or at least filed away...
JB
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jul 2008
Posts: 106
Member
|
Member
Joined: Jul 2008
Posts: 106 |
Sounds like a phenomenal mind, JB. Hope you can keep up!
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145
Member
|
Member
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145 |
Use it or lose, it huh?
Kriston
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639
Member
|
OP
Member
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639 |
Yeah.
I think our biggest challenges will come when he has to learn about the things that he's not interested in. If it's something he wants to learn about: no problem. He'll master the subject quickly. But if he becomes disinterested--like he has been lately with math--forgetaboutit.
I guess in a lot of ways that doesn't have much to do with being GT but with normal growth and development... just that our children amplify these effects.
JB
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 902
Member
|
Member
Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 902 |
I think it's not so unusual to forget the things you haven't used too much or for long time. The good news is that getting the info back usually takes much less time and effort than the when everything was completely new concept.
Let's face I don't really remember the highest level of math I got to, but I am sure I could learn it again pretty fast. I believe that's true for lots of people and lots of other subjects.
LMom
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 797
Member
|
Member
Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 797 |
Yeah, my Spanish isn't half bad, but right after back from Japan and someone spoke to me in Spanish, I'd open my mouth and out would pop Japanese! I hadn't forgotten the Spanish, it had just gone into storage.
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145
Member
|
Member
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145 |
I'll bet you got some weird looks, acs! LOL! As for this: I think our biggest challenges will come when he has to learn about the things that he's not interested in. If it's something he wants to learn about: no problem. He'll master the subject quickly. But if he becomes disinterested--like he has been lately with math--forgetaboutit. I'm someone who has always cycled through obsessions, just as my son does--something I hadn't really been aware of until DH and I were discussing DS's obsessions and DH pointed out that I do it, too. What I've realized as I've thought about it lately is that for those of us who have serial obsessions, the more we learn, the more interested in things that *aren't* our obsessions we become. Here's my analogy: the things you already know form "pegs" in your brain. From these pegs you hang new knowledge like strings. At first, you only have enough pegs for your obsession because the pegs are pushed tightly together all in one spot in your brain. There's no place for anything else to fit. But as you rotate through obsessions and pick up other bits and pieces of learning along the way, more pegs develop in other places in your brain. And pretty soon there are lots of pegs in clumps all over, so you can start weaving all the knowledge you gather into a much more complex way than you otherwise might have because you have more pegs in a more solid pattern. You can see the big picture in a way that you couldn't have if you hadn't focused so narrowly at first. I think as a result of this, a serial obsessive can suddenly switch over and become a generalist, suddenly interested in everything. It happened to me sometime in college. I went from being very focused on my obsession and nothing else to being fascinated by everything. Choosing classes was nigh unto impossible because all of a sudden I wanted to take everything! I still have my obsessions, though I rotate through them much less frequently than my son does. But I'm not the "novels only, please" person that I used to be. One of the reasons I didn't write my dissertation was because I couldn't persuade my committee to let me write about everything from 18th C. American lit to 19th C. British lit for boys, to contemporary South African lit by a Nobel Prize winner! They wanted me to pick a period and stay there, but I saw all these connections that I wanted to explore. I don't know if I'm making sense. I guess what I'm saying is that it will probably be a slog for a while to get your DS to learn stuff he doesn't care about, JBD, but I'd bet he'll get over it. There's too much cool stuff in the world to learn about, and I suspect he'll figure that out pretty quickly.
Kriston
|
|
|
|
Joined: May 2006
Posts: 865
Member
|
Member
Joined: May 2006
Posts: 865 |
Hi JBDad,
Do you think there's an age component too? For instance, a lot of stuff DS6 (almost 7 now) did previously (ages 4 & 5) math topics, books, poems, tales, etc. peaked his interest then & we discussed them and he loved it. Switch to age 6 and he has almost no memory of much of it. He picks it up quickly once it's re-introduced. Guess we all are a bit that way, but usually my lapses are things I learned 30 yrs ago rather than just 2 yrs ago.
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 1,134
Member
|
Member
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 1,134 |
Both of my kids are just like that! They get very obsessed with something for a while and you'd think they could write a dissertation on it. A few months later they've filed it in the back of their brain and moved on to something else. And I do agree - it's developmentally appropriate to be that way.
I hope your son loves first grade!
|
|
|
|
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 982
Member
|
Member
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 982 |
My son, who has always loved science and history and whose favorite book at age 5 was a science encyclopedia, had one major math learning spurt at about 4 1/2. It only lasted about six months but this is where my son and I started having problems with math. He didn't just ask me how to do things and then do it my way. He looked for other ways of solving the problem. It started with subtraction when he asked why he had to borrow from the 10's column like I showed him in a problem like 24-6. He wanted to know why he couldn't just do it like 4-6 is negative 2, 20 and a negative 2 makes 18. He could get the same answer. We told the Kindergarten teacher about the way he was doing math when he started school and we got the feeling that the teachers thought this was something that we needed to try to discourage because he needed to do things the right way, just like coloring in the lines which he wouldn't do.
When teachers and the principal told us we needed to homeschool, I homeschooled knowing in the back of my mind that I had to make him do things the school way at least part of the time because this is how he would have to do it if something happened to us and he had to go back to school. So we fought about math. Math time was unpleasant for us. We sometimes put it off weeks because everything else was so much more fun to learn and he did have to review when we took long breaks from math but it always came back quickly.
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 1,815
Member
|
Member
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 1,815 |
OH I love using negative numbers. I just have him work a few problems so that I know he knows the standard algorithm, and them let him use his method assuming it's sound and will always give the correct answer.
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639
Member
|
OP
Member
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639 |
Spent all of today (until now) unplugged which is very unusual for me. But nice. Just catching up on this thread... and a lot of good points!
Interestingly, DS today, unprompted says "Dad, remember when we didn't do math for a long, long time? Well, Biology came into my brain, and Math went away. But now, Math is coming home."
That didn't stop some 30-off minutes of "Biology" questions later in the day, but he is showing interest in math again.
JB
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639
Member
|
OP
Member
Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 639 |
Hi JBDad,
Do you think there's an age component too? For instance, a lot of stuff DS6 (almost 7 now) did previously (ages 4 & 5) math topics, books, poems, tales, etc. peaked his interest then & we discussed them and he loved it. Switch to age 6 and he has almost no memory of much of it. He picks it up quickly once it's re-introduced. Guess we all are a bit that way, but usually my lapses are things I learned 30 yrs ago rather than just 2 yrs ago. Interesting that you had a similar experience. We're still trying to figure out our little guy. When we first started to notice that he might be gifted, he seemed to learn things at an unbelievable rate (age 4 3/4 to 5 1/4). He'd go really deep on a given subject... what appeared to be very "vertical" interests. He still does that to a degree but now we do notice that he goes a lot more broad on his interests. More "horizontal" learning if you will. It's interesting to think that this might be age related. He's got the mechanics of reading and math down, but there is so much more to learn about life sciences, geography, or history that he's been digging into those topics lately. Didn't think about that. JB
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 485
Member
|
Member
Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 485 |
My DS5 is currently on a self announced brain vacation this summer. He has done minimal reading and no formal math. On our drive home this morning from camping he asked me to explain what a sales/food tax was and how to calculate the sales/food tax on various amounts of money...this was something we had discussed last winter in great depth--at his request. Although he told me that he couldn't remember how to do it, it actually took much less time and explanation for him to exclaim, "Oh, I get it now".
I am not worried that anything he learned and forgot from this past year will not be quickly relearned when his interest peaks again.
Crisc
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145
Member
|
Member
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145 |
BTW, I have always had this weird tendency to recognize the flags of various nations, and I had wondered why. It's not a perfect skill, but I get more right than I should given that I had no memory of ever studying flags. Why would I, right? One day, when I was an adult with kids of my own, I ID'd some random flag on TV when I was with my mom and I said something like, "It's so weird. Why do I know that?" She replied, "Probably because when you were a young child--4? 5? 6?--you memorized all the flags of the world for fun. You were obsessed with it for a while there." Aha! Until she told me that, I had no conscious memory of the flag obsession. Once she told me, I could vaguely remember the plastic placemat I had that had all the flags on it. Oh yeah... The moral of the story: those odd obsessions do stick with you in some form or another, even into adulthood!
Kriston
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 830
Member
|
Member
Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 830 |
Long term/short term memory is a fascinating subject to study, imo. ...more later, I've got to get back to work.
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2007
Posts: 2,231
Member
|
Member
Joined: Oct 2007
Posts: 2,231 |
Hey Kriston, I have this weird and totally useless ability to listen to someone talking and determine what state/country they are from. Usually down to the state/province/region. Some people are "accentless" like news reporters, but I can do this quite often. Who knows what I was doing at 4/5...
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145
Member
|
Member
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 6,145 |
Love that! I had great fun trying to ID the accents when I lived in England for a semester. At first my British friends all sounded alike, but by the time I left, I knew the difference between a Manchester accent and a Birmingham one, and so on, even when they'd been "poshed up" for Oxbridge consumption. It was pretty cool. But--use it or lose it!--it's gone now. Are you a very aural person, 'Neato? I'm wondering about your skill and how it connects to the rest of you. It's a very interesting talent to have!
Kriston
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2007
Posts: 2,231
Member
|
Member
Joined: Oct 2007
Posts: 2,231 |
I don't know, based on my school history it's hard to believe I am!
|
|
|
|
|