Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy I'm making myself crazy!

I think we get an automatic meeting once the testing is done, regardless of the outcome.


Yes, exactly! Looking at the standards, even-grade skips seem to make more sense than odd-grade skips.

Alexsmom,

Sent you a PM. It's the flashing envelope at the top.

As a side note on your side note, PG means a lot of different things to different people. On a modern IQ test such as the WISCIV or SB-5 3SD out means an IQ of 145, and that is exactly the cut-off that the Davidson Institute, with which this forum is associated, uses to define PG (the population they aim to serve). Some people use a higher cut-off, but given how unreliable the tests are at and above this kind of level, theirs makes some kind of sense. Lots more about this at Hoagies. But in that sense the "PG" label might well fit your DD. (Sorry ;-)

LOL! To rephrase, I'd call her "about as smart as I am, likely not frighteningly more so, and certainly not significantly less so" and I don't consider *myself* PG. It's been 20 years since I had an IQ test (no clue which one), and I think the scoring at the high ends is different now than it used to be.

So much of the crazy-making of this is wrapped up in my own atrocious subject acceleration experience in math, where the teacher whose class I was accelerated out of resented the acceleration and publicly mocked any errors I made, and the teacher whose class I was accelerated into said "Well, if you're that smart, you can do the the class work and homework for the 3 weeks of material we've already covered, on top of the work we're just starting."

There used to be ratio IQs, i.e. something that really pretended to be telling you that a 10yo with an IQ of 125 had a mental age of 12.5; the effect of this was to make scores over 200 not unheard of. I don't know when the switch over happened, but I think that's the big difference. FWIW I've never had a "real" IQ test, but I remember being told things like that my school only took people with IQs over 130, whereas it certainly was nothing like as selective as that would suggest now, so I guess that was old-style.
Gah. Yes, we all carry our baggage. Mine is about my lack of any kind of acceleration, and being pressurised into neurotic perfectionism instead of being exposed to things I might fail at. Hang around here and you'll meet lots of people working to overcome lots of different personal baggage; I find the variety of it very helpful.

Yes, exactly! I think it's really important for DS to be exposed to challenging problems and have the experience of tackling things he can't quite do, but the line between failing to give him that and putting him off by pushing him to do things he's not ready for is tricky to walk. I tell myself that the one thing I can promise is really to take the issue seriously and do my best.

Ouch! FWIW, my dd11 was subject accelerated in 3rd grade with a much, much better experience than that. She changed schools in 4th and just went to the TAG class for reading only (that was all they offered) that year which wasn't nearly as good of a fit although we loved the teacher. She then wound up skipping 5th.

You just need to move to Colorado b/c I need more people like you and your kiddo to get my very secular homeschool cooperative for gifted kids off the ground -- lol!

It does sound likely that your dd stands a good chance of doing well on the testing, but I really hate such high stakes testing. It causes a lot of unneccesary anxiety. You are wise to try to have a back up plan in place in case they don't approve the skip, but the private school commute doesn't sound like a viable option. I'm not coming up with any better options than those you've already listed. You might want to consider staying with 2nd with a good teacher who is willing to make accommodations for her in the classroom and then trying again for the skip the next year if it doesn't work out this year.

My own experience was to constantly be labeled a "bad" kid, because I didn't do my homework. And that was the rationale used to keep me out of programs that might have benefited me. In my case I think my parents were more to blame than the school - why weren't they supervising a 3rd grader's homework?! That experience and this board have made me determined not to let my sons' relatively poor writing skills hold them back from other educational opportunities.

These experiences are WHY we know what's best for our kids. I'm not stressing over making a bad choice for my kids, cause I've been there, done some of it. Most of their teachers haven't. I recently attended an open house for a public school gifted program. An administrator/former teacher rambled on about how wonderful the teachers are (and several times she referenced how wonderful she was) because they are certified in gifted education. Then she talked about her daughter's college career for a while (this is an elementary school), and then she bragged vaguely about herself for a while longer. All without saying ANYTHING of substance. Literally, no concrete information was provided. Evenutally one of the other teachers was allowed to give a helpful example of classroom work (which required a parent interupting the blowhard and specifically asking for it). I felt like House listening to his dumbest patient ever. It was agony waiting for it to be over. I was literally twitching. And I walked out of there thinking "I will go on food stamps to homeschool before I will let my children be imprisoned with an idiot like this woman for six hours a day." I suppose all other things being equal, a teacher certified in gifted education is better than one who is not, but I would prefer that my kids just have a smart teacher who understands how their minds work. Like me. But that is so hit or miss!

The "trauma" (that's a joke, sort of) of that experience has worn off and I've accepted that we may have less than ideal placement for next year. But it 's a long process and I plan to keep working on it.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet (and a fairly consistent state-wide policy), I've determined that required proficiency for kids leaving 2nd is 60%. Which is *whoa* lower than I'd have guessed.

Either the kid who sits through an entire year of school and still only gets 60% of the material is being ill-served by promotion, or a kid who knows 90% of the material without sitting through any of it is *still* going to be bored in the next year up. Or both - I remember my high school principal explaining to me that public schools are meant to serve the kids in the middle, and if you don't fall in the middle, you shouldn't expect to be well served.

Thanks to all the people mentioning HSing, I realized there's an alternative I hadn't considered. I need childcare Jan-April, and can't HS those months - but the public school has to take her back at any point if I re-enroll her, and can't keep me from dis-enrolling her later. (We've got strong state-level HS protections.) Now, there are many downsides to that sort of scheme, and it's not ideal - but if none of my other choices are ideal, there's no reason to rule out a possible option just because it's bizarre.

I don't suppose the web (or the school on carefully casual enquiry) will tell you anything about the distribution of *actual* proficiency scores of kids going up? I don't think you should put too much weight on the minimum, at least not unless you know that there are regularly lots of children who only just make it (which might show up, for example, as significant numbers every year not making it, assuming some kind of continuity). The median could be very much higher.