Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments From your experience, how difficult are Tip/CTY?

DD is kind of worried that if she takes a science course on something she doesn't know much about (Genetics, Engineering, etc), she will fall behind.
So from your experience, how friendly are these courses to students who don't have much prior knowledge of the topic? Or, on the other hand, are the courses too easy if someone already knows a lot (she is also considering Abnormal Psychology of Neuroscience, which she reads about all the time)?

Also, for anyone who's experienced both, would you recommend either CTY against TIP or vice versa based on the overall experience? DH favors TIP, DD favors CTY, but only by a bit, and wants to think about it a bit longer.

By the way DD got a 1920 in 7th grade, qualifying for both humanities and math/science.

For all we know, she will end up with a humanities as her top choice, and we won't even have to worry about difficulty :P

I don't think this really captures the spirit of these classes.

The only course my son, who had a 31 ACT reading score (7th grade), has taken through the TIP program so far was an e-studies course in the "humanities" section - Crime and Justice in America. According to the instructor's syllabus, it covered material at the level of a first-year law school course, and that seemed to be accurate. Because it was a summer course, they covered a semester's worth of material in 8 weeks. There was plenty of challenge - one of their assignments was to research and write an appellate brief - and there was a lot of technical information to learn, too. It just wasn't math-intensive. It did require extensive reading and quite a bit of high-level writing that involved the application of the course material to real-world scenarios. That said, the pre-existing knowledge base in the class varied a great deal, and from what I saw of the materials and the chats, the teacher did a great job of providing resources for students who had no previous exposure while not slowing the class down for those who already had some background.

I wouldn't assume that writing, literature, or social science courses aren't going to have large amounts of material to learn or that they will be easy just because they aren't STEM courses.

That not withstanding, your child should not go into *any* of these courses with trepidation. The purpose of taking them is not to make an "A", it is to learn, and to make connections with other gifted kids. Some of the students my son "met" online are now Facebook friends and e-mail correspondents. As much as he learned, and as much as he liked the challenge, the relationships he formed may have been the best part of participating.

The scoring rubric for the class is not going to be based solely or primarily on number of correct answers on tests. My son's instructor gave timely, thoughtful, and targeted feedback on every single assignment, and was more than happy to answer extensive, detailed and sometimes obscure questions through e-mail and the regularly-scheduled on-line chat sessions.

I can't speak to how TIP compares with CTY, but I can tell you that my son highly recommends TIP to anyone who qualifies for it.

My D has taken the Modern Medicine course at Duke TIP -Davidson. The curriculum was extremely unique. This was not material that is covered in biology classes, and is most similar to first-year medical school curriculum. It was very challenging, but manageable. There was a large amount of "homework" outside of the class, which was unlike the other classes taught there from what I understand. None of the kids had been exposed to more than a fraction of the material before.

The director of summer studies programs at TIP says that they try to create classes that are not standard fare - not the usual biology, chemistry, history, etc - but classes that draw on different disciplines and put together in unusual ways. In looking at TIP vs CTY, that seems to be a slight difference in philosophy. CTY offers a lot of accelerated science classes (fast-paced biology, chemistry, etc) that TIP does not offer.

The reason my D loves TIP (and is planning to do it again this year) is that the class is so different from anything she is exposed to at school. The value of these programs, in my opinion, is not to provide acceleration per se, but to get the kids interested in something outside the usual curriculum, at a pace and intensity that is more appropriate for their abilites and with similarly-talented peers.

I'm not familiar with the genetics class, but since it is restricted to rising 10th and 11th grades, I would think that anyone with reasonable biology background would do fine.

Just wanted to add- D's TIP teacher highly recommended the Genetics class - supposedly intense and progresses rapidly. I think there may be some variation in the classes in terms of intensity, but the idea is to learn, not to worry about grades as aculady mentioned.

We have no experience with their classes and I hope you don't mind my asking a quick question. Are you all talking about CTY summer classes or online classes or something else? Dd12 was kind of disappointed with both of her summer class experiences (one through CITY before they broke off to become CBK and another STEM program through a local middle school). She did those when she was 9 and 11.

We're trying to figure something else out for her for this summer that isn't too simple.

Hi Cricket2,
Curious - When you say your DD was dissapointed, are you referring to summer courses for CITY/CBK in Denver or Johns Hopkins CTY?

I was curious since I was possibly going to consider CITY/CBK program for my younger DD this summer (the 1 week program) just because she cannot not get away for 3 weeks in July.

My older DD did the JHU CTY at Stanford last year and loved the Science and Engineering course...(she is a sciency kid)

CITY/CBK. Granted this was two and a half summers ago and I have no idea what their stuff is like now... I think that the major issue for her was that the course she took was in her major area of passion, she was in the program for 4th-6th graders and she was coming out of 4th, and the instructor didn't have a college degree and wasn't working on one. I suspect that the courses that were run by current uni students who were majoring in the subject of the course or by people who had degrees in the subject area might have been more in depth.

She's extremely knowledgable about this specific area (I've learned a lot from being around her!), so she wants more than the typical fare for bright kids of her age who might not have studied the topic as much.

She really liked the instructor, but just didn't feel like she learned a lot that she didn't already know.

Oops, I think you were clear that you were referring to CITY/CBK - I just read too fast.

I would be interested in hearing you opinion though about CITY/CBK. I was indeed considered about the "engagement level", and we would have to fly her out, so the program would have to be great.

I think this year, we will just stay in town and try on-line courses through JHU CTY instead (writing courses). Both DDs have done the Literature classes through online CTY the past summers and really enjoyed those.

Maybe we will consider TIP/CTY the following summer. My DD really "grew" while she was away, I think it is a great experience for the kids. However, both DDs are serious year-around swimmers, so it's hard for them to get away for so long in the middle of the summer season.

Thanks for the feedback, Cricket2! We were writing simultaneously...

Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that non-STEM courses are easy, because they do both take significant amounts of work, but I still personally believe that half the battle with STEM courses is understanding the topics, while in Humanities, learning the material might be kind of difficult, but it is the reading and writing and applying this that is the real challenge- but reading and writing are never impossible. In STEM, sometimes material just "doesn't make sense". I'm not saying this will happen to DD, but she naturally feels less apprehensive going into a Humanities course, knowing that she may get some hard assignments, but that with hard work, she can be very successful, instead of the apprehension of "what if I don't understand something and can't ever get caught up?" that may precede a science or math course.

Thanks for the review of the program, though! We are probably signing up in the next days, as applications are supposed to go up tomorrow.

Also, does anyone know about the Duke TiP Institutes? They look really cool, but they certainly don't have the 700 facebook fan groups that you can find for the Summer Studies programs, in fact, I've not found one review of them.