Platypus101, thank you for the Is it a Cheetah? article and link! It is an excellent analogy to our situation and really made me put my son’s situation in perspective. Clearly reducing the level of courses would be a disaster and most of the benefit of the private school I referred to comes from the fact that grades are artifically inflated there to assure college admissions success. He won’t learn more there. In fact he might even learn less and resent the loss of friends. Most of the kids who go there leave our public school because they can’t handle the honors classes and the non-honors ones are too easy. I myself went to a university that had no core curriculum (it is well known for that flexibility and a place my son would absolutely thrive). If I knew he was guaranteed acceptance there, I’d let him do his own thing in high school. The problem is that my old university only accepts about one in twenty students these days. Most of those accepted (with the exception of jocks and hooked students) have thrived in the zoos that they came from and a large cohort probably aren’t even all that notable, they are just there to meet “PC” institutional priorities. My son needs to someday go to a college where he can be with other exceptional classmates, but I fear that (using the zoo analogy), he’ll just end up a a smaller zoo. I still don’t see a clear path forward but the Cheetah article gave me an excellent lens to look through when evaluating alternative paths. Thank you again for that!
