Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional How to Advocate for Faster Paced Math Curriculum?

Hello. This is my first real post. I have really benefited from reading old threads. But I'm feeling alone and frustrated right now. So I wanted to ask for encouragement and advice.

My core question, is how to advocate for a faster paced math curriculum for my child instead of him plodding along with the other kids in his class? He is 3rd grade, age 8.

I get mixed responses from different public school personnel. I am located in a small town of a rural area in southern Virginia. The mandate for gifted education exists but with the caveat "according to each school's ability." The model our school has adopted is basically 1 hour pull out on Friday's for a STEM group activity.

They also have placed ten-ish GT kids into one classroom to comprise 50% of the class (clustering). The homeroom teacher told me she runs two classes simultaneously on different sides of the room. (Boy is she young and energetic!) But she is not the gifted teacher. The gifted teacher is shared between 4 elementary and 2 middle schools. She is the one doing the weekly Friday pullout.

The gifted program has only been done this way for 2 years. Before that, gifted programming started in 8th grade in our district. GT is mostly selected using CoGAT scores. I am told this year's crop of GT is the biggest ever, but it's a small school. Only 4 classes per grade level--less than 100 kids--or roughly 700 kids in the entire school. Out of those 700, there is one super genius kid who skipped a grade or two they are using as a guinea pig to see if they want to allow other gifted kids to grade skip.

I really like the kids in the program with my son. Some of them he went to private preschool with, and has long-term friendships with. They are a vast improvement from the last year's gen-ed/inclusion class, where he faced bullying and harassment on a daily basis. So I'm no longer thinking about whole grade acceleration. But it probably won't be offered as an option.

A year or so ago, my son was privately diagnosed with ASD 1 or 2 level (depending on how tired he is), severe ADHD, anxiety, and sensory processing issues. He has been in speech therapy for a couple years. In 2nd grade, the school performed evaluations where a short version of the WISC-V brought it to their attention he was also gifted. His verbal abilities are a weakness compared to his pattern recognition. Which fits his speech delay and communication issues. These continue to improve each year. Despite that, the academic tests revealed him to be 4th or 5th grade level for both math and reading while in 2nd grade. Plus he finished timed subtests the proctor had never seen a child finish before.

At the time, (last spring) the school made a big deal of it, and told us they had never seen anyone like our child before. The assistant principal talked about possible acceleration or compacting and whatnot. I had been advocating for gifted testing since kindergarten since I am a former weirdo gifted kid from an extended family of gifted weirdos. My son was reading at age 2 and obsessed with numbers, counting, patterns, mazes, machines, etc. So I knew he was like the rest of our weirdo family.

However, the big issue is his classroom behaviors which make him an irritating and obnoxious kid to have as a student. He has an IEP and is on meds for ADHD. He gets speech and OT for fine motor and social skills in school 4 days a week. We just stopped out of school OT, but he is doing running club and swim team for gross motor and bilateral coordination.

Now that the school put him in the clustered GT classroom and sorted his ASD IEP out, they stopped all that talk of doing any other sort of supports like compacting or faster paced material. The gifted teacher in June told me to talk to her in August. In August, she told me to talk to her after she'd worked for a month with my child. Now the first 6 weeks of school is ending. So I messaged the homeroom math teacher and GT teacher to check in. GT teacher has not answered.

Homeroom teacher immediately brought up his problem behaviors (in a very nice way) and said he needed to stay put right where he was with the other GT kids. We talked about the area of math he struggles in--word problems--which she feels is due to his age level. But I see it as part of his disability to have difficulty organizing and prioritizing information in a written passage. His processing speed is high, but his working memory is low. He has difficulty remembering what he reads, despite being a pretty good reader. (said the speech language pathologist.)

I'm really bummed out. I asked for a parent-teacher conference so we can talk more in-depth than emails will allow. I didn't realize the behaviors were still causing so many issues again, as a bunch of smiley faces were mostly coming home in my kid's agenda. But stuff like vocal stimming, melt downs, inflexibility, hyperfixation with tablet time, etc. are long-term issues he may struggle with for several more years. We can offer more support and management techniques, but there is no immediate magic bullet cure.

Beyond that, I'm bummed out because my son has been teaching himself math since around age 3 using videos on Youtube. Now he plays Prodigy, Boddle, and DuoLingo Math in his free time for fun, not all the time but a few minutes a day. He has been ahead of the curriculum ever since kindergarten. When they were teaching addition, he was learning multiplication. Now they are learning subtraction, and he is teaching himself division. I'm suspicious that during actual instruction time during class, he is tuning the teacher out. And when it comes time to do worksheets, he relies on what he already knows.

I feel like it's so unfair that he can't find a math teacher who is excited and loves his passion for numbers enough to try to meet him where he's at, and instead is insisting he continue at the pace the state curriculum has set. Why should he have to teach himself if he has a perfectly good teacher available? I understand he has holes and gaps in his knowledge that need to be filled, but if 80% is mastery and he's getting all 100s on his test scores, why can't we move on? 6 weeks into the material, he has not been introduced to any concept he didn't already know. He will continue to teach himself and continue to stay ahead of the material if the teacher does nothing different at all. But if his teacher would encourage him and be a bit more aggressive teaching him math at the pace he's capable of, I feel he will make tremendous progress. I'd like to see what my son is actually capable of with the right kind of guidance.

I want to have this conversation, but I don't want to be THAT parent who is a stench in the nostrils of school personnel. I don't want to come across as arrogant and entitled. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing my kid's issues. I don't want to sound like I'm out there in lala land somewhere, oblivious to the limitations of the public school system. Over the past two years, I've had to navigate the IEP system and advocate again and again. I might already BE that parent. But I feel compelled to do something and not just sit here on my thumbs

I'm really sorry I made such a long mega-post. Please forgive me.

I’m not sure how relevant my comments would be since my son didn’t have any inherent learning difficulties to overcome, but considering our DSs have the shared experience of self-learning maths at a young age with YouTube videos, I thought I would offer a reply based on our experience.

Throughout primary school, DS has always had a much better understanding of maths than any of his teachers (their comments in his school reports have all included some form of such acknowledgement). Even at high school, by Yr 8, the Maths HoD, who was the only teacher capable of teaching the highest level of secondary school mathematics, made a comment to me that DS was superior to her entire faculty in his knowledge and problem solving abilities.

Their great positive contribution to his extraordinary pace of learning was acknowledgement of the above and their active search of ways to enable him to self-learn. They never imposed grade level work on him - in the early grades, we modified his tasks such that he did the same math sheets, but he provided his answers in Roman numerals, binary, or other number bases and by Yr 4 (after he achieved a perfect score in the national numeracy assessment for Yr 3 students) they let him spend time on class computers researching whatever maths topics piqued his interest.

In this digital age, there are so many subscription based and free resources that kids can use to self learn. In his primary years, DS used his access to class computers to watch ‘Numberphile’ videos that posed a lot of thought provoking questions such as what rational vs irrational numbers would look like plotted on a Euclidean plane. Our local high school arranged subscription based access for all students to Maths Pathways which is a self paced maths program with built in teaching videos. When uptake was low due to the $60 annual fee, they switched to Maths Online with an annual fee of $12. Both of these programs are tailored to the Australian curriculum, but I suspect there’s a large overlap with US curricula, given each state has developed their own. Whilst we’ve only used Khan Academy for the occasional topic, I understand that it broadly covers the topics taught in US schools.

In summary, all of DS’s knowledge and skills were self-learnt and we owe a debt of gratitude to the teachers who recognised that providing access to materials was the best way to support him. It’s stood in him in great stead for university where his independent learning approach enables him to get the most out of lectures and tutorials.

Primary school teachers have around thirty students to cater for and high school maths teachers would typically teach a class of thirty at each grade, so they simply won’t have the capacity to accurately track students working beyond grade level. I’d encourage your DS to continue self learning and invite him to discuss with you what resources and support he needs to continue learning, so that your advocacy is specific and targeted, rather than expecting a teacher to individually track each student who is working beyond the grade level, when their main priority is to ensure the rest of the class achieves grade level competency.