Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Stanford-Binet L-M, and school enrichment question

well, it's a BlackBerry - great for reading, emailing, and web surfing while DS falls asleep... Sort of like a Kindle and an itty-bitty book light wrapped into one. But for some reason, it's hard to go back and read and edit in the quick reply text box.

I do agree that it is interesting. My guess is that many folks find us, think we're nuts, and keep on looking for their just right spot on the Internet. I wish I could know what I would have thought of the talk here when my son was age 4 or 5! No Clue! Also, since this forum is run by the Davidson Program, I would guess that a bunch of us read "Genius Denied" on our way here, as I did, and already agreed with the 'pro-accleration flavor.'

Should you seek out opposing view points? Gosh, I have no idea! I guess I'd go back to Hoagiesgifted, and look from there. I do think it's important not to get carried away by the crowd.

Grins

No one I knew in either pre-k through high school OR college had been skipped to my knowledge. In our neck of the woods, grade-skips were as rare as hen's teeth. In fact, despite an active gifted support/enrichment group that my mom created from scratch--so I knew pretty much every GT kid in our large town/small city!--I was the only person I know of who was even subject accelerated out of the regular classroom. Beyond that, GT kids were handled solely through clustering and differentiation.


FWIW, it seems to me to be shared experience. I have been struck by how "weird" my experience with our DS6's schools seems to be in the "real" world, but how absolutely normal we seem here on this forum.

Of course, we forum-users are a self-selecting group, but I think the people here are accepting enough of differing views and experiences that we're not chasing away people who might have a different perspective. Witness ACS and E&CMom...and even me, really, since I came here quite scared of grade-skipping, though fearing that it was something we might *have* to do, whether I wanted DS6 to do it or not. I still have some concerns about it: sports participation (football) being my main one. But I feel like I've gotten a pretty balanced view of skipping from this forum, and I see it as a more viable option now than I did when I came here.

Here's an alternative: perhaps being able to see the joint experiences of a fairly large group of GT kids, certainly much larger than we'd see in the "wild" of our hometowns, has led us all to similar conclusions, rather than indicating that we all started at the same spot?

Just a thought...

Oh, and go get 'em, Mia!

When checking out our schools gifted program after GS8 was referred and accepted into it, I found links on the schools gifted website that link to Ohio's Department of Education website. ODE seems to take a very pro-acceleration view.
ODE's gifted link

I really love Ohio's legislation, but word I've overheard is that the local districts are still very 'in charge' of what goes on. Still I wish our state, ,or the Nation had something very similar.
Grinity

Yes, the state law in OH and reality often leave much to be desired.

The only mandate is for testing and GT ID...sometime. It's up to the schools how they test, when they test, and who qualifies as GT. No programs are required, no skips, no minimum scores...basically the schools currently just have to test for GTness; they do not have to do a single thing about the results of those tests!

It's supposed to get better. There's some new law coming in, I think. (I learn about it next week at a POGS meeting.) But for now, the ODE can put darn near anything on their website and it has basically no effect on the schools whatsoever.

I hear funding is also an issue, ie they can pass any legislation they want, but if the district doesn't have the cash to support it,,,,,,,,out of luck.

Yup. Unfunded mandates mean zilch, and GT in OH is essentially unfunded.

Back from our meeting (well, yesterday!)

It went quite well; I basically followed the format of the letter when telling her what we wanted. She agreed (obviously) that yes, the MAP is a test of what the child has been taught, not how the child learns, and that the test would only show what B already knows.

I think we'll be able to get him a trial period in the accelerated first-grade math group (which I think he'll probably really like), and I straight out told her we'd like to start the Iowa Acceleration Scale process now. She said start that process. I think she realized that we meant business.

She ended up pulling out the "Well, even if we skip now, there are often issues that show up down the road at adolescence" card -- ie, we shouldn't skip him now because then he'll be younger than his classmates as a teenager. Gasp! You know, I didn't quite realize that? :P I explained nicely that we'd deal with that as it came up.

The fact that her next argument is that the problem will be adolescence means she realizes that he's ready for something else now. She fully agrees that he's way beyond the K curriculum in both math and reading, so that's not the issue anymore, apparently. It's pretty hard to deny that.

She's going to get back to me in the next week or so, and then we'll schedule a meeting for the last week in January (probably, maybe earlier, maybe a bit later) to discuss what will be done. I told her that if he were going to start pullouts, we'd like to get this process going sooner rather than later.

So ... I think I was successful, unless she was just smiling and nodding. Hooray for me! We'll see what happens in the next few weeks. Even if we don't do a skip, I really, really want him in that math pull-out. I think he'd love it.

I know, right, Dottie? That what her comment said to me, too.

The other interesting exchange was about GE (which *you*, Dottie, educated *me* one! How's that for circular?). It went something like this:

Mia: From what we understand, the MAP measures what they've been taught, but doesn't necessarily test how they learn.
Principal: Yes. You had IQ testing done, and that's different. The MAP is an achievement test.

M: Well, actually, we had IQ and achievement testing done. His achievement scores put him in the 99.9th percentile for math. And his grade equivalents show him at the middle of second grade -- so if you gave a child in second grade the same questions he was given, he scored where the average second grader would score.
P: [makes a hemming-hawing sort of face]

M: Am I misunderstanding that? Please correct me if I am! I'd like to know as much as I can.
P: Well, it's more of a projection. We can't know for sure what every second grader is thinking, and this is more of an estimate.

M: Well, certainly ... so it's an estimate that he's thinking at the level of a second grader.
P: [more hemming and hawing faces] Well, it's just an ...

M: Estimate.
P: Well, yes.

WTH? Seriously. I think she's trying to get rid of me and realizing I'm not going to go away.

I hope.