I wonder about this question quite often and I wish I knew a definitive answer. While everything Grinity said is true -- there are more and different opportunities for learning later in middle and high school -- there is still the problem of rate and even depth. I've read several debates among various posters on this in the last two years and it's one of my major issues with whole grade acceleration. It seems that we reserve whole grade acceleration for kids who are at high LOG -- most people have to fight for them and convince a district that the skip is *really* needed. But it's precisely those PG or PG-like kids for whom one or two skips is pretty small potatoes. If a kid is 6 years advanced in a subject, how does one or two skips help? But the kid still faces all the social consequences of skipping, which can be positive but can also be negative depending on the kid and the situation.
These questions are the ones keeping me up late at night trying to figure out what to do with my kids . . . . I think it's quite hard.
J
This is one reason why we work hard to challenge our kids at home. I was just going over Math Kangaroo problems with my eldest and his initial reaction to one of them was "I don't know! It's too hard!" A couple minutes later, the light went on and he got the answer. This was my cue to tell him about how important it is to learn how to solve a problem that looks hard at first, and then to remind him about how good he feels when he does something he thought he couldn't. When this type of experience happens enough time, a person stops being intimidated by a difficult problem and instead remembers all those other ones that were so hard at first, but were doable in the end. Of course, this lesson carries over into life....
Val
