Have you read his English essays? If he has been doing literary analysis since 4th grade, I think you need to figure out why he's struggling so much. At our school, kids from both the regular and gifted programs go into honors Eng in HS and the HS honors class definitely starts out providing step-by-step instruction (usually boring to the kids who were in the gifted class). That's a really important skill, and with such a gap between the honors and regular classes at your school, you want to make sure he's not going to to go to regular and just coast along and not learn anything. Which would bring me back to - is it lack of ability or lack of effort on his part? Could he just be feeling overwhelmed and want to retreat back to regular classes because he knows it will be easy? I don't think kids need to be in all honors, but you want him working at a level that is interesting and challenging to him.
Thanks.. At our school you can drop levels for the first month or so of the semester and then again at semester break. No I haven't seen the essays. Essays are written IN CLASS, until senior year. (Yet another anti-cheating issue.) He himself tells me that he is confused at what the teacher is looking for. Honestly this doesn't surprise me, it's the math that has been frustrated. I am not sure I ever really "got" literary analysis either. It's not that he is that bad at writing, just can't figure out what needs to be said about the books.
He wants to be in the honors classes. He was in a gifted pullout program in 4-6th grade, that almost brainwashed the kids that this is what they were expected to do in H.S. I will talk with him today about going to see his math teacher tomorrow. I guess one of the reasons I wanted him to wait, is I didn't want the teacher to push for him to drop to "regular" until we had seen what he was capable on the final.
