We went to our school's open house for our local gifted program, which starts in fourth grade. I had heard that it acclerates the whole class ahead by a year for math, which is great for us since my son is pretty "math-y."
She said that they are talking about next year just starting right off the bat for fourth grade with our district's 5th grade curriculum! That is something, at least.
Last week, the third graders, for 30 minutes or so, cut out two shapes, colored them, and taped them together. That was it! So everyone could "get comfortable" with shapes.
I was like, really?? I told my son, this is why the USA ranks almost last among industrialized countries in math!

yes, it is why, you are right!

...my 3rd grader's homework today was to color in 1/2 of a bunch of shapes on one side of a worksheet and on the other side to fill in...either 1/2, 1/4 1/3 whatever it asked

I swear she's been doing this for a few years now. No wonder she rolled around on the rug making pained noises...LOL

They did 2 weeks, count 'em, 2 weeks of multiplication a couple of weeks ago. What did your son say when you told him about the ranking, does he understand?

He does understand. I've shown him on You Tube how rigid and rigorous many other countries are for grade school. Actually, I don't think that is the way to go but he did get the idea.
Last week for homework my son had to "name polygons." They connected the dots and drew rays. He named his first polygon after himself and the second one after his friend.
I thought he was goofing off but that actually was the homework! It was so they feel "good" about shapes and geometry.
so..... It's great that my child is being prepared for the global economy!
Supposedly if your child is good at math and takes the honors math all the way through, they will take Geometry in 8th grade, Algebra II in 9th grade, ?Pre-calc in 10th grade, AP AB calculus in 11th grade, and AP BC calculus in 12th grade. So that is really very good. Maybe it just starts really slow or something.

I think it is the philosophy of this curriculum where they go very, very slowly to build the foundation, that's what the district tells the parents who question it anyway. The don't do accelerated work in the enrichment pull-out (my DD's not it in but I know alot about it) and the school has a policy of keeping all the kids on the same page with math within the classroom.

Many parents have been and gone before me with this issue, with more degrees and better advocacy skills than me, who are pretty enraged that their 5th graders are still counting on their fingers...and they've had a really hard time with the district, so I don't even go there...

Right now I'm trying to focus on why DD has only gained two grade levels in reading in 4 years and has such low rapid naming scores (16th percentile) and low math fluency on her university study test (they don't interpret, and the school kicked back the data and won't respond to it). They're setting up to NOT be cooperative, I can just tell.

Meanwhile, I do know that she really loves big, huge interesting math concepts, we just have to get through these elementary years! It's cool that your DS understood the concept of the math rankings.

It sounds like all the teachers understand is how to connect dots. IMHO math is like this because the teachers are like this.


IMHO if kids can do that program, then most could do Calc in the 10th grade which means Algebra in the 6th. We have been doing Calc in the 12th grade for 50 years now. Based on the Flynn Effect alone, today's kids should be doing Calc in the 10th.

The problem is that curriculum must be designed to do this. Which means that the kids must master everything by the 4th which they knew by the seventh. We need a complete revamp of curriculum.

One suggestion to make- find out what is tested on the university study test and work with her at home on it. It could be it is a dumb test, so who cares if her scores are not what you hope. Or it could be that your child missed some concept (or the teacher didn't teach it properly), so you can fix that for her.
My son is hearing impaired and he misses things in class due to that. I use those standardized tests to see if there are things he is missing that he should know.

Our school offers - 2nd grade math for 2nd graders. Period. NO GT program, no acceleration. My son brings home math fact practice quizzes... with addition. The kid can add fractions and understands basic probability. If I could homeschool him, I have no doubt he'd be up to complex multiplication & division. The bar is set too low.

I did Geometry/Algebra2 together as a freshman, then precalc, then Calc AB as a junior (first ever in my school). Had to take calc 2 at a local university my senior year. But when I got to my Ivy League school, I was so far below where I thought I was, I couldn't keep up in Linear Algebra & Vector Calc. I had to realize that I was just not smart enough although I was the best in my class in HS.

Thanks jack'smom

The university study that is bugging me is the CTOPP and with all my googling on it, the low rapid naming is a bit troublesome. I gave the data to the school but the kicked it back, saying they 'couldn't use it or shed any light on it" because they didn't administer the test.

She hasn't been tested since early 2009 so we're going to do it again but we'll have to wait. I get alot of books at the library and BN to work with her to make sure she doesn't miss any content but I think we want to rule out processing things etc. Thanks again!

My understanding also of the WJ-III math fluency is that it tests speed of calculations, not necessarily knowledge...so I don't know if that's from lack of a disciplined math curriculum at school or something in the brain.

All the more reason to check it out.

Anyway it's very interesting reading about the school math experiences of other kids this age, as in what they're learning and whether or not they're being challenged...and it's not very encouraging unfortunately.

I teach 2nd grade in a general education room. I try to provide acceleration for kids that have high ability because we have no g/t program. I try and move them at a faster pace, but it is difficult.

In my room I have five students testing in the 90% percentile for math. I also have five students in the bottom 10% percentile for math, and then 20 kids falling at different levels in the middle. Out of the 30 kids, two speak no English.

The higher students need my time as much as the lower students. However, these days most of my time is spent doing assessments. I'm also putting out fires with parents who could care less. The parents on this board are actually involved with their children, so it's hard to explain how the other side of the coin behaves.

I just want to say please don't blame the teacher for all the woes of our country's STEM areas. Teachers work in a fixed system that is ruled and governed by people who have no education experience.

At our school, the teacher gives the homework worksheet per the schedule of the curriculum, which is selected by the district.

I have teachers in my family and I try very hard to see things from their perspective. All over the countries, some teachers are super, some are terrible some in between, most are doing their best given their many restrictions.

That being said, I think a parent of a 3rd grader should be able to expect that their child has moved past using colored pencils or crayons to color in shapes to show fractions if they've been doing the same thing for the third year in a row, continuously showing 100% proficiency. It's intellectually demoralizing.

I don't blame any individual teacher, it's "the system" that myself and so many other parents are disappointed in.

We love my son's third grade teacher. She is very kind and patient and an excellent teacher. At the start of the year, I asked her if he could do additional, more complex math sheets or math homework. (Apparently the parents of the 4 Asian kids in the class asked the same thing). She said she would try but nothing happened all year. She did give us the CTY application, which we did and our son qualified for but there is nothing to do in the classroom.
We are in a holding pattern until next year when the G/T program starts.

My DD is in second grade. An accelerated gifted program is available, but does not start until third grade.

In the meantime, she is clustered with other gifted kids in her regular second grade classroom and goes to an enrichment class one day a week. Her teacher has attempted to challenge the gifted kids with somewhat harder and more challenging applications of the second-grade math. She also gets challenging math puzzles in her enrichment class.

This is suitable for DD for now, but not enough to satisfy her very "mathy" gifted classmate. So in January the teacher started sending him to a third grade classroom for math time. This week, she started sending him to a FOURTH grade classroom for math time. (Guess he mastered third grade math in two months.)

It seems to me that math-time only acceleration might be a workable solution in lots of cases where there is not a desire to accelerate a student across the board, for whatever reason.

The main idea I get from these threads is that there is definitely a huge range of experiences for all kids (gifted, 2E, average and special needs...) depending upon many factors...the state they live in, whether they are in public or private school, the individual districts, principals and teachers, what type of support they get or don't get at home. It's a total hodge-podge!! So we all do what we can with what we've got. If it doesn't work to the child's advantage, it's nobody's fault individually, but it's the kids and the quality of our future workforce that suffers in the long run.

I had my education in 3rd world country in Asia. I did not remember all (so long ago). With my DDs in 3rd and 5th grade, I have renewed interest. When I visited back in October, I found that their curriculum is almost the same level as in Singapore Math which means we are behind 1 grade level (in Math). Their High school graduate at 10th grade and the students who graduated there did not have problem entering US colleges. (although those are selected few who excel academically).

I volunteered in elementary school and I know that some kids can't even do their grade level of current curriculum. Many schools do not have enough gifted kids to implement gifted program and some nuthead administration wouldn't recognize GT programs.

But the truth is that extra program cost more money (staffing, etc..) and many districts can't afford it especially in nowadays. After relentless advocation, our elementary school started Khan's academy for Mathy kids (who score 2 grades above level on SMI testing). It does not cost anything to the school and the kids go to the library and do Khan academy online when their class is doing Math.

The other solution should be each ISD create a school for gifted kids because there's no enough kids in each school zone.

Several years ago, I actually heard a presentation by the district math department espousing that students should NOT be accelerated more than one year. I seem to remember the justification being that the accelerated students didn't develop true "number sense" and tended to have math fall apart in college. He also said that they ran out of courses to take in high school. (?!)

At the same time, the district adopted the Investigations curriculum. The gt classes were allowed to accelerate the kids one full year. The district did not want any deviations from the curriculum so they could determine the effectiveness of the program. It was torture. Even with one year of acceleration, Investigations was/is painfully slow and repetitive, especially at the lower grades.

Mercifully, we've seen some movement away from the straight Investigations in the gt classes since last year. Teachers are allowed to pre-test at the beginning of the unit. If a student demonstrates mastery, then the teacher offers non-Investigations extensions on the same topic. Still, it varies somewhat from teacher to teacher. Overall, we've seen a significant improvement in pacing and content between DD12 and DD9's tenure.

DD started the GT pullout program for math and language arts in 1st grade. We were told it would be a one-year subject acceleration in there. In math, they started her right off by calculating change from monetary transactions, then moving to multiplication and division. And DW and I were angry, because that's not a one-year acceleration, that's two. DD was right at the point where she was doing multi-columned, multi-rowed addition and subtraction (though still on her fingers), which is what I recall doing in 2nd grade.

Every kid in GT was doing the same work, despite the fact that she was the only 1st grader in the room, and almost all the rest were 3rd graders. So while everyone else is working at grade level in an alleged GT class, the teacher was voicing concerns that DD seemed to be a bit more needy about getting help from the teacher. This left DD convinced she was too stupid for GT, but too smart for 1st, and generally lost and unhappy.

Happily, she's got a new GT teacher now, who is showing interest in identifying DD's level and differentiating.

Yes our district uses Investigations also, and they are very strict with it in part because they are also watching the effectiveness very closely. Hence the control with which homeworksheets go home and the pace, etc.

There was previously alot of noise from parents and the district had a couple of public sessions where they brought someone in from Investigations but it came off more like a strong sales pitch. Those that really had issues with it left...it's been very quiet this year.

I've tried to work with DD at home when she wants to move on, and have gotten grief from the school for doing this. I've asked DD to "shhh" about it and that has helped but it does make her feel like there is conflict between us and the school. And there is nothing big and bad going on this year and her teacher is a peach, but if a child wants to learn is it appropriate to withhold?

Because she loves the big concepts so much we've landed on talking about that, having some cool brainy sessions and talk about the math that is everywhere. Right now she's into geometry and the mathematical concepts of how buildings and bridges are designed and constructed.

We'll start doing alot of math in the summer to at least try and keep up with her peers elsewhere that are receiving a more appropriate education. The kids from families we know in the district who've gotten into the gifted math at higher levels all have parents working with them diligently at home.

It's only carving out a better future for a very specific bunch of kids though and it's too bad.

This subject is making me have existential depression ! lol... sort of

Our school is too small to have a dedicated gifted program, my daughter started seeing an enrichment teacher for reading in K, with a couple of kids joining in as the year progressed. There were more kids in the group in 1st, and now in 2nd she's in a math enrichment group too, along with some other 2nd graders. They're doing fractions in the regular classroom right now, and the enrichment group is doing more complicated fraction work.