My DD
is, in fact, way ahead of most of her peers across the board-- in any area where she has had
exposure, I mean. We supply her with college level textbooks and she eats them up. Current obsessions include the historical development of psychology and sociology, musical instrument acoustics, neurology, and poetry forms. Oh, and literature, which is sort of a given with her. She has been pretty hungry for deeper learning experiences for 4-6 years now, and we've indulged it via afterschooling-- in areas where she isn't likely to encounter the subject later in a mandatory course somewhere. She is being raised by two experienced college advisors, after all.
She actually UNDERSTANDS the AP Physics B course that she's taking, and completely retains what she learns, which, if you check out the discussions that Val and I have had about that class, is kind of astonishing in
any high school student-- regardless of age. Again, it's because of the limitations of her school environment that we opted to have her take physics but not chemistry (well, and also because quite frankly, we didn't think that the chemistry
teacher was actually qualifed to teach our DD that material-- more on that in a moment), plus we wanted her to have an actual laboratory experience.
She can be highly autodidactic, but it's very spotty and idiosyncratic. Not exactly a good way to establish a foundation for further study.
The professors that DD talked with
did go through the three-or-four year plan with her on paper as to math coursework. They know that she aspires to a grad program-- there was some discussion of doing a 5y M.S. program there.
I understand the cautions being expressed in Bostonian and CFK's posts, but for my own DD, she will tolerate
one run through "learning" calculus, and it had better be a good one, because remediative instruction is something that she tolerates very ill... and that's a gross understatement. She's a mastery learner, and high school is NOT set up for kids like her. High school now is just a continuation of K-8. It's more spiraling, more 'skimming' the surface, and more test-prep. Sad, but true.
She will earn college credit next year for both English Composition and for Intro to Statistics. We've
deliberately NOT had her earn credit via AP examinations because that isn't why she's taking AP courses. She needs NO help graduating from college any earlier. But she definitely needed more challenging material. She will-- probably-- place out of lower-division coursework in many, many areas as a college freshman. We just don't want her to accumulate CREDITS while doing it. It's an asynchrony/maturity issue, and our logic is exactly like 22B's here-- we want to narrow that gap any way we can.
Hiring a tutor is a reasonable idea-- might have DD put out some feelers this summer in her internship and see if she can connect with an math/stats grad student locally who'd be willing. The reason why I'm willing to teach her stats but not precalc/calc is the same one that Colinsmum alluded to-- my background supports stats. I know it inside and out. I know precalc/calc about as well as a good student who has taken the courses and done very well at mastering the material in them. That's not always good enough with DD-- this is the other problem that we (increasingly) had with the math instruction at the high school level-- knowing what's IN the book/course is one thing, but knowing the subject inside and out is actually needed for kids that interact with the subject in ways which are beyond the scope of the class, but evidently necessary for them to scaffold the material.
THIS is why my DD has such trouble being an autodidact for some subjects. She needs the interaction with an actual subject expert that understands far MORE than what is in the book. I can do that with stats, but not with calculus. She has trouble with any teacher who
isn't a subject expert because of the way she learns.
I'm very frustrated by this situation; her school won't actually teach the kids math in a meaningful way, and her dad doesn't have the time/inclination. His background is MORE than up to the task. Mine isn't. But he refuses to sacrifice his free time to do it.
