Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The ultimate brag thread

I posted earlier today on this subject, but deleted thinking I was bragging too much, but then thought again that that is the topic of this thread.

So here it is:

dd 2 3/4 has long established herself as verbally astute. Mommy and daddy are both math folks, but we have neither ever really tried to teach her any math. She did learn to count on her own as a function of learning to talk at a very young age. But today, on a whim I threw an easy subtraction problem at her:

If daddy has 5 gold doubloons and then gives you 3 of them. How many would daddy still have? Instantly she said 2 without a thought. I tried several more addition and subtraction and each time she gave the right answer.

Then to step it up I asked her:
If daddy has 10 and mommy has 4 and each of us give you half of ours, who would have the most. Annoyed sounding she said "Me.", with a sigh as though to say why am I asking these stupid questions.

Later I repeated the exercise for my wife, and dd did answer correctly, but slower and more annoyed and distracted.

I am very proud of her, and do want to encourage her along these lines, but on the flip side she seems to be figuring this stuff out on her own, and I would like to let her keep figuring it out for herself. I feel like I need to sneak math opportunities to her without overtly teaching math. Right now, I feel like I have missed the pink elephant in the room. She has always been into singing, dancing, superheroes, and books. It never really occurred to me to ask her math questions, which is odd as my career is math intensive.

You know, this shouldn't even be in the "brag" thread. You are just talking about your daughter being right where she belongs, doing what she does.

We gave our 11yo boy a Windows 8.1 laptop. He installed Ubuntu Linux on his own with a dual boot and uses Linux mostly. He has taught himself some C, and now he is trying to create his own Linux distribution by compiling everything from scratch. I have explained to him that many man-years have gone into creating polished Linux distributions, but I admire his fearlessness. I amused to be getting questions such as

"Does gcc include a C++ compiler?"
"What is clang?"
"What are binutils?"

If he follows his current plan of majoring in computer science, he will be a well-prepared freshman .

He is teaching his younger siblings how to program in Python.

I came back from an outing tonight to find DH and DS3 adding and subtracting simple pizza fractions with common denominators. DS was grooving to the Tarantella Napoletana all the while and building an elaborate jet out of Duplo while playing the app with DH.

Awesome squishys! DS isn't yet motivated to toilet train. When he is, I hope he does something similar!

DS6 recently won his first chess trophy. Last year he had a difficult first "real" tournament and didn't do as well as expected...a learning experience. This time, he finished very strong and will now "play up" to the next age group.

An odd brag that only parents here could understand...

Our school behavior perfectionist DD9 told her GT math teacher off, balled up her assignment, and shoved it in her desk. I'm supposed to not react like Haymitch did when Katniss shot the arrow at the apple in the roasted pig's mouth, right?

I mean, it's only yesterday that DD politely asked this teacher for harder work, because she's been doing long division... AGAIN... and she's getting frustrated with doing all the same work she did last year, in what's supposed to be a gifted class. So if the teacher isn't going to respond to polite requests, maybe this will get her attention.

Meanwhile, I'm glad they finally got a tiny glimpse of what we have been seeing every time we've had to pull her out and homeschool. We are not those parents like they always figured... she's that kid. Teach her something new, or beware the consequences.

Oh, and that whole ball-up-your-math-and-tell-your-teacher-you-refuse-to-do-it bit? DD ripped it right from my own playbook. I did this in 2nd grade, because being the best-behaved was never a goal for me. DD has heard this story more than once, because one of her favorite chat topics is "Bad Things Dad Did as a Kid."

I am soooo giving DD a thumbs up when she comes home tonight.

I recall grade school math being something like the movie "Ground Hog Day"... And, this year we are going to learn to multiply again, but with two digits. Next year, now let's try three digits.

Well, the version of events I got at home was somewhat different than the version I got from the teacher through the filter of DW, who was feeling overwhelmed during the conversation because the teacher was talking pretty fast. There wasn't a "telling off" so much as an outraged, "Really?", and DD shoved the paper into her backpack to take home and do, so there was no refusal. There was no disciplinary issue, then, but the teacher was so shocked to see DD angry that she was calling to make sure everything was okay at home.

Oh, sure, everything's great at home, the problems are all at school, thanks.

The trigger, according to DD, was a four-question quiz on long division at the beginning of the day's lesson. Score 100%, and she can go do 6th grade work. Otherwise, it's sit through the lesson, and do the homework assignment. DD says all her answers were correct in the form she provided, but two had remainders, and they were marked wrong because she was supposed to extend them out to decimals instead. DD says they'd been doing the remainder for weeks, and there were no instructions on the paper to do anything else.

If all of her claims are true, I'd call that justifiable outrage. Not that she'd lie... I'm sure that the way she described it is how she experienced it. She may have misread the paper, or been distracted during a key instruction, or have had math errors she didn't notice, though. If they were right, but in the wrong format, the teacher could have simply sent DD back to rework the problems into the correct format, rather than just marking them wrong.

DD still got her thumbs-up.