Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Proud or a big sigh?

Well, I’m sorry but this story is very familiar. The promise that things would get more challenging every year, and every year being disappointed. DD actually came home crying one year after the first day of math- she was surrounded by the same kids ‘who don’t get it’ and whom she spent the previous year helping every day in class...

I wish I could be more positive, but no, I suspect at least in APs that your kid will not have to study. My DS’s online gradebook experience is eerily similar, as is his response (though as a junior this year, he is no longer surprised by the 102s). The workload experience we have has been different than what you describe, but it rarely involves what you describe as brainwork, with the major exception of writing assignments, Our English classes and parts of history (essays and research paper assignments) did require brainpower, at least to get a high grade (or so my kids believed).

The main times my kids really exerted themselves intellectually were for their extracurriculars. I have mentioned my distaste for the competitiveness of science olympiad, but it did make my kids want to work hard, whether for the pressure of not letting their teammates and partners down, or because the competition was fierce and these other kids were formidable peers, or because the challenge of learning such in-depth material was pretty exciting. My kids both also exerted themselves, to different degrees, in music, though that’s somewhat different.

(Class projects, open-ended presentations and long-term papers are also exceptions, where there is room for a kid to show their true colors. My DD was basically a teacher-pleaser if she respected the teacher, and she could work her tail off for these kind of assignments- and it showed. DS, however, could rarely bring himself to engage even on these things, and therefore often settled for an A, doing the minimum he needed to get by).

At times I guess we felt proud (or more like you, happy that one thing in their lives is easy) but never of the basic classwork stuff- mainly because our kids were not proud in the least- they knew they did ‘nothing’ to earn the high grades or the subsequent awards, etc, so they actually felt some embarrassment, and in my DS’s case, shame. He particularly struggled with watching how hard his classmates worked, for lesser outcomes, and he still has a lot of difficulty handling that. In the end, our kids grew to be solidly cynical about their high school experience, and mistrusting of authority.