Thanks for the long post! You used the phrase "step function" so you're probably a bit mathy yourself! A year of algebra in 2 weeks is something I'd love to hear about. To keep you from retyping this, maybe you can link me to a thread in which you've posted this?
Is your DD15 completely independent in college right now? Or do you shuttle her each day?
You're welcome.
Yeah-- I suppose that we chalked a lot up to "enriched home environment" for a long time, too. DD started her life the child of two STEM professors, so-- yeah. Like the measured current in potential-stepped chronoamperometry, is how I think of it, actually... that's DD's "engagement/demonstration" level with new stuff.
I don't usually share my kind of geeky/quirky thought process about this kind of thing. But this is the one place where at least a few other people inevitably know precisely what I mean with my peculiar analogies.
We eventually realized that most of our friends' kids
weren't like
this. Not even close to being like DD. It wasn't us, in other words-- it really was her being
what she is. Because those other kids (some of them certainly moderately gifted) were being raised in highly enriched homes, too. DD was different.
Algebra in two weeks. Well. I've never actually told that story before, I don't think. It went like this-- DD was cyberschooled, and this was back in the day when assessment hard-copies were MAILED out to teachers-- and when there was only a sort of hard deadline at the very very end of the semester or school year. That's the background information.
So DD had more or less been blowing things off all term in the fall-- and the school kind of didn't press since they knew that this was in part due to the death in hospice of a family member, that we'd spent almost 6 weeks out of state, etc. etc.
So January rolls around, and I eventually get rather grumpy over the fact that she hasn't turned anything in since before October-- and sternly inform her that the deadline for all of that work is less than a week away. She cried, threw a major fit, screamed "I cannnnnnnnnn't!!!!" a few times, and then realized that I wasn't budging after I calmly told her that if that was so, then she was going to be failing the course-- her choice whether to do it with some degree of grace and a reasonable effort to stave off that outcome, or to just go splat.
Well, she worked about 40 hours during that week, and
aced the semester. This feat frankly
astonished my spouse and I. She was placed in the HONORS algebra I course intended for high school freshmen, and she was a nine year old 7th grader.
She kind of pulled the same stunt the NEXT semester, though-- but with a new twist. She basically blew off the material to such a degree that I knew that her exams weren't very good, but whatever-- I had a stack of them, and turned them in diligently to the main office (in person, even-- we were there for some kind of media thing that featured DD their pet Wunderkind), but then they
never arrived in her teacher's mail-- really, really. He looked for them for three solid weeks-- they never showed up, and as far as I know, never have to this day.
She
had thought that she was done-done-done with that class long about March, having just blown through all of the assessments (as noted, with lackluster work ethic, to put it euphemistically)-- until she found out that she needed to repeat ALL of those exams. All 8 of them, over the course of the 16 weeks. Oh,
and complete a final exam that covered the entire year.
She had even less time that term-- only five days. We did concede that she might need an extension on that one, so she had an extra week available.
She aced that, too, but my goodness she was a touch resentful. Being nine (or was she ten? Nine, I think), she really didn't have a good sense that it was actually lucky for her that those exams went missing, given what I knew about their relative quality... after all, this was going onto a high school transcript.
Bear in mind that with a cyberschool, the "course" that students take covers the entire textbook, and isn't "adjustable" the way that B&M classes tend to run, too.
The following year, when she was taking all GT/Honors courses as a 10yo 8th grader, she did nothing from January through mid-March. Then polished off
87 lessons (that is, each "lesson" there is either one or two days' worth of instruction/work in a particular class, generally estimated to take students about 1-3 hours)-- in just four days. With straight A's; she was really doing the reading and the work, too-- I know. THAT is what "putting the accelerator to the floor" looks like, and it's why I say that PG kids do things that other kids simply
cannot do.
As a junior (13yo), she took 3 AP classes and the rest honors, volunteered 6 hours a week as a math tutor, and spent three weeks in Europe, then missed 2 weeks due to illness-- again, with stellar grades and without even breaking a sweat. One of those classes was AP Physics.
Then as a senior, (also taking several AP classes and some dual enrollment college courses) she opted to jump into APUSH in March for the second semester-- nearly four weeks late. She made up the difference in a few days, and was privately sad that it hadn't been any more challenging than that to catch up-- she'd been hopeful that she'd have to work harder than that.
So.
To say that even with a 3y acceleration, even with GT placement, school was "insufficiently challenging" is something of an understatement.
The lesson to be learned, though, came THIS year-- when she tried the same stunt with Integral Calculus, which was an unmitigated
disaster, to put it kindly. Well. She would still have
passed the course, I think-- but it would not have been a grade she'd like on her transcripts. Still, it was rather impressive that she could cram 4-6 weeks' worth of a second quarter of calculus at the honors collegiate level into her brain at a mastery level in about 86 hours flat.
She has almost no real study skills-- she hasn't needed them.
She has no real work ethic-- again, it's never really been necessary.
Yes, she lives at home, but that is partly because she has a life-threatening medical condition which is very difficult to manage on a college campus, too, and-- well, I honestly cannot recommend
any parent consider a regular dorm setting for a child under 17 years of age. Truly.
But she has friends, she is pretty happy, and she is able to "pass" as far older than 15. She is also struggling intensely with exam anxiety and not having the executive function that she needs in this setting-- never having needed it previously, see.
The lesson to be learned as a parent, though, is that somewhere along the way, DD figured out that, like a sideshow freak, or a circus animal, simply learning and being engaged isn't enough-- she's expected to Perform Extraordinary Feats! She internalized that formal school is about
demonstrating what you know-- it's not about learning anything. It's about KNOWING. She struggles with socially prescribed perfectionism, which we believe wholeheartedly to have been caused by an inappropriate school setting and our failure to be able to provide one that was actually appropriate. It was as though the entire world was conspiring against our efforts to establish a healthy sense of self in our child-- by praising her for being "perfect" or "exceptional" they ignored the fact that someday, she was going to need to know how to struggle and wrestle knowledge to the ground.
Waiting to learn those skills until college is, um--
not recommended, generally speaking.
