Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion I need to stop borrowing trouble but I can't seem

Unfortunately, the middle school for which DS is zoned is awful. I would not send him there for anything if I can possibly come up with an alternative (magnet school, private school, selling the house & moving). I am familiar with the high school, which is close by and not so bad.

You are right about the private school. I just met another mom recently whose son goes to one of the most expensive private schools in our metro area and that school absolutely does not differentiate math in middle school.

That's awful for your DD to have something good taken away from her like that for a year. I do think that the Pre-Algebra program overall is a good place to be - it's easy and low-stress without being years beneath his ability level. The teacher recently volunteered the comment that he believes DS would be able to complete Algebra I just fine if he were to do it this year but that there may be an advantage to doing it next year because DS may be able to internalized more of the abstract concepts as a foundation for higher math. It appears that he will likely add some other stuff to the curriculum.

We are also in a very large district but not quite as large as yours. I do believe that if you went to high school 20-30 years ago, you would not have seen as many radically accelerated students.

LOL at your yardstick comment. If I had responded a couple of weeks ago, I would probably have said that I am likely a little off but I don't think I am that far off. After a recent discussion with DS' math teacher, however, I am not so sure. According to him, DS is far above the 5th graders who are in the Pre-Algebra program. In fact, he made the analogy that DS is as far above the 5th graders in the Pre-Algebra progam as those 5th graders are above the "regular" GT 5th graders who are working on 6th grade math. AS DS is only 9 and the other kids are 10 and 11, the difference is actually more profound. I am stil trying to get my mind around his comments because I had not shared any of DS' test scores and completely did not expect his opinion. I guess I am still somewhat stuck on the DS is actually a verbal kid rather than a mathy kid loop.

FTR, I may have been unclear--my district serves an area whose population is about 150K. It does not serve 150K students. (I don't know how many it serves.) I'd consider it medium-sized, I guess?

I think we have a small group of kids here who are working "above" the GT standard (which is one year ahead as you describe), but I have never heard of a kid going beyond that.

Mmm, I saw you say somewhere that he wasn't visual/spatial in the way you think of mathy kids being. IME, professional mathematicians vary wildly, and interestingly, in their fundamental ways of thinking. Many of them, actually, think in what you might call a fundamentally verbal, audio-sequential, way. There is more than one way to be good at maths.

That sounds like a scary piece of feedback from your DS's teacher especially if you weren't really thinking of him that way. It would be interesting to know whether the teacher can articulate more about what s/he meant, and whether s/he thinks your DS needs more/different or is well served in this class.

When I want reassurance that there are kids more extreme in maths than my DS, I go and reread some of the stuff about the early life of Terry Tao. I recommend this strategy to you if you feel you need it ;-)

I'm curious why you say your ds is a verbal kid and not a "mathy" kid? What makes a verbal vs mathy kid with respect to what you see and know about your ds? Does he have areas in school that he is really passionate about? He's clearly *able* to succeed easily in math... but otoh, if he's really not all that interested in it, have you thought about not worrying about whether or not he's able to accelerate past the kids who he could track into an accelerated middle school program with?

I am a proponent of radical acceleration when the child is pushing for it and craves it, but when it's something that creates a logistical issue where you have issues with providing rides to school or a child is going to be in a school for one class only without peers or friends or it's a school that you have other concerns about (safety or whatever)... I think it's also ok to look at the whole situation and think about whether or not your child is really gaining something important from the acceleration or if it's just acceleration because he's able.

polarbear

Could you get a full grade skip? That would help as he could move with the 5th grade cohort.

My son is 10 and in a similar situation. He is 5th grade age and in 6th grade at a small private school that contains grades 6-12. He is further accelerated in math two years, meaning that he is taking Algebra I. One of the reasons we went with this school is that it has a high school. I'm not sure what we're going to do about his math on the other end, but we should have a 4-5 year run in the meantime.

I have no idea what the population in our district totals, but there are over 100K students in the system and that is considered very large.

The crazy thing is that while I did encounter red tape, I didn't really encounter any resistance so just assumed there must be other kids in a similar situation.

Thank you, ColinsMum! You hit it on the nail. While I was glad to hear that DS was doing well, "scary" was the predominant feeling.

LOL about Terry Tao. I am somewhat familiar with his story and DS is definitely no Terry Tao.

You are probably right about the variation in the way that professional mathematician think. I am somwhat bias because I am visual-spatial but DS is not although I think that he has improved over time.

The relatively weak visual-spatial skills made me doubt DS' math abilities even though he assimilated arithmetic skills early on with sporadic question/answer interactions rather than active teaching of math curriculum. His verbal ability, on the other hand, was undeniable. For example, he has always been articulate and able to read high-level text and explain complex concepts in a succinct and clear way,

These are good points, Polarbear. It's not acceleration just because he is able. Learning only a couple of new things all year last year was painful for him. The fact that he brought up the issue voluntarily out of the blue over the summmer(after a few similar comments during the year) led me to believe that he wanted me to fix it. DS is happier in his current situation even with some of the inevitable attendant difficulties. His "passion" for math is hard to gauge. Out of the blue, he may come up with some interesting patterns inherent in squares or he'll start exploring Fibonacci nubmers but he is really interested in lots of science and history stuff and just trivia in general.