Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education NY Times: does lockstep pacing hurt top students?

The new school is probably part of it, as are the reactions of some other kids. The latter thing is probably the hardest on him right now.

I spent my Freshman year as an Econ / Math major, for just that reason.

There are lots of weird restrictions in the scholarship world, and you're no worse off declining a scholarship that restricts you unacceptably than you would be not having applied for the scholarship in the first place. But you have far more options in scholarships if you're applying as a high school senior planning to attend college as a freshman the following fall.

If my kid wanted to take a gap year, I'd recommend she apply, be admitted, and defer, rather than waiting to apply.

I think that in a gap year, you could do some really cool stuff in a country, learn the language and be more appealing to some of the upper end colleges.

Ren

I agree; he's also toying with the idea of staying for two years, doing the national exit exam, and matriculating at a university overseas.

The uproar about "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" was not about classical music, although that's what Amy Chua's book is mostly about.

Some Chinese kids go to Chinese schools on the weekends, which have classes on Chinese language but possibly also on algebra for 6th and 7th graders. When they take algebra in 8th grade, it is material they have seen before, giving them an advantage over less-prepared classmates.

Oh, I have a friend who went to college at 15 and did just fine. Dated lots of girls, joined a fraternity, graduated from college as a teenager, married one of his college sweethearts, and got a PhD from Yale. Seems like he had a double major, too, in two very different subjects. Has been working for several years as a professor at the college he considered his top choice. He went to ours instead because it offered him a better merit scholarship.

Every kid is different, but many gifted kids find that their social lives in college are much better than they were in high school. I say let the kids choose some college campuses to visit and weight their input very heavily, if not let them make their own decisions.

But our alma mater was one where freshmen were much more likely to get in than transfer students. I think the odds were something like 1:2 or 1:3 for freshmen and 1:20 for transfers. I'm not sure I ever heard of anybody getting AP credit there, either, though plenty had done well on the AP exam.

I used to teach in a cram school in Asia. Traditionally, these were a way for teachers to earn more money. The usual schools had classes all day M, Tu, Th, Fr and half days on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were when most students went to lessons at the private cram schools, where they sometimes learned from the same teachers as their regular schools, they were just paying more for it. Some students might have private lessons at the cram schools on other days after school, but those were more expensive.

The reason parents did this was that the exams to get into an academic junior high, high school, or college were very competitive. Everybody knew the rankings of the schools, and your family would not let you attend less than the best school you could get into.

In the old days, exam scores also sorted students into majors. The students with the best scores, got into most highly demanded departments. You might end up in architecture school, for example, because your entrance exam scores were in a certain range, not because you had any aptitude for architecture.

Family expectations do play a big role. In many Asian families, getting good grades and good exam scores are almost the only way to be a good kid. Teenaged girls aren't even given household chores or allowed to get jobs because it would take time away from their studies. Besides, they will learn to do housework the way their mother-in-law wants it done some day.

Every time somebody mentions Amy Chua, I think about how often I skipped her class and the time I went to a party at her house.

She's a pretty nice person.

The only thing that ever irritated me about her was the fact that she was a academic social climber who seemed bent on getting to Yale.

I'm with Beckee on this one. It's a Chinese old-time culture thing.

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Thank you,
Mark