Oh, how your statement of your child being adept at "gaming" the system for the top grades resonates... Ay yi yi.
DD has gone so far as to
calculate what she "needs" to earn on a final exam to keep an A+... and she's DELIGHTED if she can figure out where quiz questions are "pulled" from so that she can take such shortcuts. It's maddening, but I can't blame her. She's just learned that official schooling is more about jumping through hoops than it is about authentically
learning new and exciting things.
My DD isn't particularly 'driven' academically, either. She's GOAL-oriented academically, (she wants straight A+ grades, and she wants to graduate EARLY.... and she wants to graduate first in her high school class) but that isn't the same thing as wanting to do all the daily work to make those things happen.
I definitely wouldn't say that DD11 is a social misfit, either. Anything BUT, in fact.
She is a total social chameleon-- she simply adjusts her reactions, interests, and responses to the environment/expectations, no matter what they are. In other words, she sounds a lot like your child.
Our acceleration of her has a lot more to do with "least-worst" than it might appear there.
There are times when I quite literally have to screech at her to do her work. But the thing is,
that would be true regardless of the level of that work. In fact, pointless/unchallenging tasks seem to
intensify her oppositional tendencies. She's incredibly stubborn.
So without acceleration, we'd have:
- power struggles over getting schoolwork done
- teachers unhappy with (under)performance
- a child who found extremely disruptive means of telling us she's bored... and with her, it's likely that it would involve socializing with classmates to the point of disrupting THEIR learning. (That is really what I meant about the homeschooling activities with chronological peers being a disaster)
WITH acceleration, at least we have eliminated the latter, and added "personal pride in accomplishments" to the Pro column. Even if she were a fifth grader doing fifth grade work, we'd be battling with her to get any of it done in the first place. She's just that kind of kid.
Ergo, acceleration is "least worst."
She
hates the daily grind of it all-- and that would be true no matter what she was doing, assuming that it would involve a daily routine and expectations, and no doubt provide less novelty than she's hoping for.
Cirque de Soleil isn't running a school for gifted children, I mean.
LOL!
So yes, anything she
can weasel out of, she's almost certainly going to give it the old college try, at least occasionally...
particularly writing (her weakest skill set), or anything that looks like "practice" or repetition.
Just because the work is more challenging/appropriate doesn't intensify the, er-- weaseling. (This is a HUGE part of why I say that we can definitely
seem to the uninitiated like complete "tiger" parents; she tends to need a bit of "push" parenting in a general sense.)
The thing is, she gets along just fine with
ANY peer group, so that wasn't much of a consideration. Besides, she has exposure to same-age peers in other venues.
Hopefully something in there is useful as you think about all of this. You aren't alone in wrestling with these choices.
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Perhaps you might take into account how well your child's personality and drive lend themselves to independent study. For mathematics in particular, there are a lot of options for distance learning that a school can implement without necessarily placing a child physically into a situation with classmates 3-7 years older than themselves. The PP is absolutely right about math being unusual in that it can frequently be "decoupled" from the rest of the curricular core that way.
For kids that can do IS, subject acceleration in math isn't that hard to continue in the later grades. Mine isn't one of those, and it sounds as though maybe yours isn't either (socially inclined and not internally motivated/independent).
