This weekend provided some new insights into how it's going for DD9.

She had a robotics meet. We spent the whole afternoon there, mingling amongst the teacher, parent advisers, other parents, and the students themselves. We found DD9 to be positively bubbly, and the other kids in good spirits, but the main parent adviser seemed to be rather stressed out.

I asked him if he was getting nervous, and he talked about how the kids were getting tense, but the adults were helping them cope and try to keep it about having fun. I thought that was odd. So I mentioned how my DD was in a great mood, and he responded with, "Well, DD is the youngest by far in the team, but she's hanging in there."

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

No wonder DD feels like she has to prove herself every day. Apparently they've even communicated ageism to the adviser.

For the record, DD did not just "hang in there" during the competition. She was paired with an older teammate for a particular task, and she found him very valuable and good to work with. I'm sure what they did probably came organically through an exchange of ideas. However...

DD wrote the program.

DD designed and built the extension arm.

The partner's sole operational contribution was a rather clever tool to measure and place the robot in the precise starting location.

This particular operation was so consistently successful that, after the first run, when the team saw that they were in trouble, this same parent adviser came up with another way that DD's program could be used to gather them more points.

Now, Parent Adviser's son's program failed on all but one run. Immaturity? No. One kid was found crying his eyes out because another kid had been mean. Immaturity? No. One other kid was still trying to write her program during the meet, and it never got finished in time to test, nevermind run, because she'd missed most of the team meetings. Immaturity? No. Because all three of these kids were among the oldest on the team.

Yet any time my DD does something they don't like... IMMATURITY!

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I rather expect it was the events of the day before that triggered DD to begin expressing a lot of complaints about school yesterday afternoon.

- They're doing a lot of things they did last year.
- Her classmates are not doing their homework, which is often the basis for the next day's lesson. As a result, no lesson.
- One GT teacher is preoccupied with the 6th graders, because they have a number of problem children, and the 5th graders are getting little instruction.
- DD is finished with a whole week's worth of ELA work on Tuesday, and has little to occupy herself with the rest of the week.

DD summarizes with, "They killed my love of learning."

This has raised concerns on our part of whether the class she's in is truly a gifted class, or whether it's full of hothoused high achievers. We did hear Parent Adviser say, "How do these kids have time for all these activities? DS is up doing homework until 8."