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ok, i just realized the beg this thread was when he was ds5!!
i'm so excited.
what you describe of your then ds5 is my child rt now except mine has autism. and also your son is much more advanced at age 5 than mine is now...
which is also one reason i have been opposed to supplementing him, because if i do? he's already ahead-- he will really rocket forward. he is like a thirsty sponge. i just really didn't want to be his 'teacher' and again, as i mentioned my focus all these years has been recovery and now finally all social skills.
so i have many pages to read of this thread but again, i'm so thrilled to find it. it is like an answer to my prayers right now. honestly! thank you

Hi! He's pretty smart. Maybe smarter overall than me, though maybe less driven to learn than I was at the same age. Everything's on a continuum.

That was his kindergarten year, and I recall afterschooling him some that year because he learned absolutely nothing at school. I do remember that the school did some reading and other assessments, but that those didn't generate grade equivalents. The WJ-III Ach he did that year yielded some grade equivalencies from mid-2nd (writing) up through 5th, but I don't put much stock in those numbers based on conversations with his tester. (I'm not saying he was higher than that, just that I don't think they were fully accurate, especially since the test wasn't mapped to our state standards. From what I've seen, the math here is a grade or so behind what I'd expect in a higher-performing state.)

That's the problem we've found. I think that the material here is not very challenging at any level, due to a focus on basic proficiency and fact memorization. His acceleration hasn't resulted in providing challenge for him. I don't think the acceleration is necessarily worthless, just that it hasn't borne fruit yet. Our advocacy has finally made the school system notice our son so that they're working on providing real learning opportunities for the first time. And at least he knows we're trying, and he's not as frustrated as he would have been in his originating grade, where he was one of the younger ones to start with.

That's not a bad goal. Eventually I think you may face a choice between keeping him with kids his age 100% of the time, or looking at least into subject pullouts or some other arrangement for things like math. What I've come to realize is that I want my son to be taught, and I won't stop trying to accomplish that until it happens. With math, there's just no way to have him sit in a classroom with kids his age and be taught properly. Sure, he could teach himself from books or a computer, or I could teach him at home, but this isn't the same as what the other children get: a classroom environment with an engaged teacher, with whom he can interact.

He appears to have had no problems. There was one bigger child who physically bullied him a little, but he stuck up for himself.

I have had more of a problem with some of the parents, though most have either not noticed or been very understanding. It's just very hard not to give offense, since everyone wants to see their child as doing well, and even if it's often unspoken I think parents of bright children tend to think of their children as being top performers, due partly to competitiveness but also to hoping for the best opportuntities for their kids.

For example, there's a child in his third grade class this year who is one of the better math students, and was picked for subject acceleration as well-- but just so DS would have a companion going with him to the other class. (I think this is bad from a couple of aspects, personally-- the other child should get what's appropriate for him, whatever that is, not because of someone else's needs; and if he needed a subject pullout they should have been considering this before.)

This boy was invited to DS's summer birthday party, and his mom came along. I gather that she told my wife that her son had suddenly been picked for a math pullout (almost literally unheard of here before we hit the school), and that she was glad that they had finally noticed he was good at math, but that she didn't know why it was only because some other student needed someone to go with him. My wife made some comments that I think didn't go over perfectly well, revealing that DS was that other child in a clumsy way (she is a sweetheart but can get flustered in the moment), but the point that bothered us later was that this mom shouldn't have been told that that was the reason for her son's pullout. Things didn't improve much when the massive "7" Mylar ballon my wife had bought was unveiled to float above the tables.

You're not alone. There are some recent threads here where this topic has come up. I think it's a perfectly valid choice not to accelerate. Though acceleration can work great, no one can tell in advance whether it will work perfectly for a certain child. Some children don't want acceleration even when they're academically frustrated, and in those cases it's certainly a bad option aside from any developmental concerns.

I think, again, that it's also true that inadequate acceleration doesn't fix the academic mismatch it sets out to resolve. In a perfect situation, with a fully invested school and a child who's a great candidate, accelerated to the proper level and taught at something approaching the right pace, though, I do think that the unavoidable downsides of acceleration are just known evils. Having an advanced child means an academic level / age mismatch with normal children; the only real way to avoid tension in one area or the other would be to find other similar children, but that's not an option for us right now.

I wish I could hug you. I think you're in for a set of very tough choices, unfortunately. I think that your # 1 goal has to be to keep your son's love of learning alive, and to do that you have to try to feed the sponge. You can't ration learning for a fast learner; you'll just wind up with someone who has never been challenged and has an inappropriately low idea of his abilities. He'd only be a stunted high achiever, not a normal one, and that would be a tragedy.

In my son's case, I don't regret advocating for accelerated learning opportunities for him. I regret not advocating forcefully enough, and not supplementing enough at home in the meantime.

I'm a bit late here, but I meant to comment on this. I think there are three things that might be in play here:

1) new concepts: good

2) problem solving practice at a lower level, i.e., not introducing new concepts and not using problems that are genuinely hard for him: totally pointless

3) problem solving practice that doesn't introduce or require new concepts, as such (i.e. he isn't going to have to say "what does that word mean" or be unable to make progress because he doesn't know how to do X) but which is hard for him.

(3) doesn't seem to get a look in in what you write, and I hope you/the school aren't conflating it with (2). There are plenty of maths problems whose statements he could understand now but which are unsolved problems, to give an extreme example. Our experience is that although the ideal would be to introduce new concepts by means of hard problems that motivate them, this is really hard pedagogically: it really needs one-to-one support. We've sometimes managed to have both (1) and (3) in school by having parallel strands of work going on, but I think if you have to choose between getting (1) in school and getting (3), (3) is actually far more beneficial. Either can be provided in afterschooling, and if you have time for an hour or more of maths afterschooling every day, it might not matter which it is, but for us, significant amounts of time afterschooling only arise outside the school term. A few weeks spent without learning new maths concepts, but working on hard problems, is fine (you just get a bit of an itch to learn something new, but you're still getting better at maths in the meantime); a few weeks learning new concepts but never needing to turn your brain on when it comes to applying them is much more stultifying, IMO.

Yeah. The danger is that you get new concepts that way, but only ones that are so easy they didn't need any explanation!

Yes, I do think that's a danger. You can end up with weird gaps (although IME weird gaps are easily filled when you do discover them, so it's an oddity more than a real problem, provided systematically introduced new concepts are coming in somewhere). I forget what it was, but there was some problem type DS had met a few times for which there's a standard solution method he didn't know. Being resourceful, he was managing to get the right answers by some kind of trial and error method, and it was quite a while before anyone noticed that he had a gap.

What we currently have, fwiw, is (3), with a good teacher who has time to explain concepts that come up, but without as far as I can see any systematic plan about what concepts to introduce. I'm thinking to have DS work through a couple of ALEKS courses at home during the holidays this year (as he did last year) to make sure he has a tangible forward step in what he knows; acknowledging all the failings of ALEKS they do work quite well in this role, with the non-routine problem solving and the writing out of solutions being handled elsewhere.

The other thing I do, and have had as a habit for a few years now, is to have text files of the detailed syllabuses for things he might be following, if he were following a syllabus (iyswim: for us this means the maths syllabuses for A level and Pre-U, but ymmv). I annotate it by adding notes next to each phrase in the syllabus e.g. [DONE April 2012] or [SHAKY May 2012] or [DONE except needs more practice in...] as I notice that he can/can't do things listed in the syllabus. I find this quite useful as it lets me have an overview of syllabus areas in which he's got most of what would be expected at that stage (bar a few gaps which I might then fill in) or where he's got hardly anything (in which case I might look out for an afterschooling resource in the area), or where he hasn't learned anything new for a while, etc.

colinsmom- what you posted made sense to me.
my ds5.11 (w/ aut) is at begin stage of the current ds7 discussions saga... so i am learning a lot.
it's like a roadmap drawn out for me!
i am bumping my son from kinder up to 1st gr at science magnet where he will be placed in their gifted program to differentiate and cluster him w/ his academic peers/and agewise peers, all in 1st grade.
i am quite excited. this doesn't happen until jan 2013. and only IF he can get in via lottery...
still it is something to try for!
in meantime after reading this whole "saga" i am going to afterschool him with singapore math and begin to push phonics and LA. (they don't teach phonics in school! but that is how my son taught himself to read... beg age 2, and i firmly believe in phonics myself
anyways thanks to everyone on this entire thread for all the insight and knowledge i now feel armed with- armed and ready for battle with the principal, IEP folks- you name it!
happy wedsnesday.

(I'm sorry I didn't reply to this earlier.)

I'm not conflating them. I think there's a ton of value in letting him work on tough problems, and I have at home when we've done math. I'm even somewhat on board with the idea that he can progress in problem solving ability at this stage without a tutor, just by cutting his teeth on problems that he finds hard. I just don't think that it's the whole picture of math development, and I want him to be taught something at school. I don't think that the sorts of math teachers at this school, from what I've seen, are going to increase his ability to think mathematically by coaching him on problems; I'd settle for their not artificially limiting his progress through new concepts in efforts to keep him closer to his current classmates.

I've thought about just doing AoPS and teaching him at home, but that would involve giving up on getting something out of the school day. I agree with you.

Same here.

Good point. I've been keeping him engaged lately more with computer programming while we decide what to do.

I agree totally with you in general. What I've found with the local school system is that some of the school admins and teachers are so anti-acceleration that they will seize upon any seeming gaps at all in an attempt to deny the need for advancement. At the most recent meeting, for example, DS's third grade teacher (who is not supposed to be taching him math) was present, and said that she had decided to give him two "math minute" speed drills on basic addition and subtraction facts, and that while he had gotten 50/50 on the addition, he had only gotten 40/50 correct on subtraction, so would need some practice that she'd be giving him. (Not. And it turned out that he had simply gotten bored or tired and stopped writing, but had perfect accuracy. I told him to refuse all such drills in the future, at least in that classroom. It's disheartening for him to plod through such stuff, especially when he's bored plodding through long division and other sorts of arithmetic practice too, but at least it's not so insultingly below his level of skills development.)

I think what I might do over the holidays, if this isn't resolved by then, is have him finish fifth grade in Singapore Math, then just start on Age of Problem Solving and ask again to send work with him to school. Partial homeschooling might also be in our near future. A lot depends on what happens in the next 1-2 months with our educational consultant. It's just a rough fit even with the school trying to do their best.

I like your method for tracking your son's progress. Thank you for all your insights; as usual they are very valuable to me.

This thread is parallel to my newer mess on the Certainty among educators thread.

My eldest got to the point where he is now primarily through afterschooling with me. His only true math instruction in school was for two years at a wonderful defunct private school.

I've been thinking back to DS12's experiences. He was held back by the schools. He should have finished algebra 2 last year but didn't. He should have started algebra 1 years ago but didn't. Etc. No amount of evidence or parent-teacher conferences was able to change that.

I realize now that my daughter won't get what she needs unless she gets it at home. The vast majority of schools simply can't or won't see past their own preconceptions and we are truly living in a Dark Age of education in this country. I can't fix it (though I can make contributions through grant app. review). So I'm going to do two things:

1. Continue working with DD on the wonderful puzzles in the Beast Academy books (see end of message).

2. Accelerate her into algebra using the Brown textbook. We'll just backfill anything from 5th or 6th grade math that she needs as we go.


Beast Academy: These are new books from AoPS. They're for younger kids. They teach basic ideas like multiplication and division but go into real depth. They only have books for 3rd grade right now, but the problems are a lot of fun. Examples:

• Here is a list of numbers (one list has 16 numbers). Order them so that adjacent numbers add up to perfect squares.
• Write the following number as the sum of four perfect squares....
• Three congruent rectangles are laid out to make a square. Each has a perimeter of . What's the area of the square?

These problems are great. They're fun puzzles and make my DD think. Even DS12 and I enjoy some of them!

(I have no connection to AoPS apart from using their books and the class DS12 has enrolled in).

Val, I just now bought a used copy of that textbook, and am eager to check it out. I fear DS7 is headed in a direction similar to your son's, if we leave things up to the school system.

A minor update:

Despite the agreement that the third and fourth grade teachers would make appointments to meet with our educational consultant to plan and implement, no appointments were made. DS7 took the end-of-fourth math test and scored 100%, but he has not yet been scheduled to take the end-of-fifth math test yet. NECAPs were taken by DS7, but results will apparently not be in until February 2013, and DS7 hasn't been given the fall math MAP test.

I and my wife sent an email asking about the status of the "math menu" (a group of choices for DS to choose whatever learning activity strikes his fancy) and the other outstanding items. We also asked that he be excused from all third-grade math fact drills (granted in an email response afterward), be excused from fourth-grade math homework to free up time for afterschooling instruction (granted), and that he be free to bring work from home to do during math class (not granted, though his teachers did agree that he could bring work to do during bits of math time in his third grade class). I think, regarding the last request, that the teachers are still reluctant to look like they are throwing in the towel. DS is stuck in class twiddling digits while the class learns about multiplication, place value and averages.

We also asked that one menu item be hard-coded to always represent a math lesson next in his curriculum, whatever that turns out to be, but that request was completely ignored. Our math consultant is now of the opinion that afterschooling/partial homeschooling and sending work to school is the best approach, and also doesn't think that the rest of the work in the third grade class is at his proper level either, though she hasn't been allowed to sit in on any classes yet.

For now DS7 is excited about learning algebra from the book Val mentioned, and I also highly recommend it after having had a chance to go through it. Eventually we plan to do Age of Problem Solving, but for now he is loving this book. When he hits a new topic in passing he always has to know more, so we just do an ad-hoc mini-lesson and move on. For instance, early on there was this question:


He found the answer quickly, I suspect by the numbers just popping into his head, and couldn't easily verbalize how he'd done it. That prompted a short first lesson on factoring polynomials, which he loved, even though it doesn't first appear until a bit later in the book.

Thus there've been some improvements, but he continues to have his time pretty much wasted in school. His first "book report" was to read a biography-- cool, right? He chose "Maus", read it twice and loved it. However, the report itself turned out to be to write ten sentences about the biographee on strips of paper, then put the strips inside a coffee can decorated to look like the person. Math class time is wasted until further notice. He advances in reading on his own time as well.

hi val,
would this BEAST ACADEMY be ok for my ds6?
he wants to learn multiplication, and i don't know how to make it "fun"... he's not ready for actual algebra, he's still doing add/subt but knows mult 0,1,2s haha i knw the easiest of all. but he is asking and doing on his own.
or was.. now he has shut down m ostly but i plan to make learning fun again for him and i agree with you re schools-
and sadly it is reflecting on our entire country,
schools have been in dark ages as you say for so long, of course it all catches up with real world.
many of those kids are adults now.
our kids will be soon enough... at least it seems everyone here is really making an effort to help support their kids learning...
there is hope...