Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment An Update from MyHeartBrks

Hi everyone,

I wanted to give you an update and thank you for this Board.
I really feel like you saved me from more heart break. Here is the link to my thread :

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/78273/1.html

Well I enrolled my DS10 in EPGY he has been on it for 3 weeks and already has been bumped up. He is still scoring in 95-100%
He has been sparked (reborn)and loves it!

I also submitted his IOWA scores to Dukes TIP and they accepted him as well so he will take a couple of their courses.

We are considering taking the Explore as well.
As I have stated I have never been a "label" or a test person.
It was a not a great expirence for me as a child and I just didn't want it for my children. I also watch my older son go through with "labels" and it never felt like a "fit" for him.
It is such a different era for todays children and I have to get on "board" soon... so I don't lose him to boredom.

He also finished a whole singapore math book 4A he did that in 3 days... apparently he loves fractions and geometry.

I do have a couple of questions regarding EPGY. They state that they WANT them to be testing between 70-80% that it indicates that they are challenged...BUT my DS freaks out if he scores low. Do they take the different personalities of gifted youth? I do have the choice to leave him at the current grade level, right?

He is not much a Math person(his words)...his strength is really Science and Social Studies.

I swear I am so tired of people looking at me like my child was born from an alien...
Yes... my son wants to go to a Museum over Disneyland...So What!!! Phew...

It has been such a crazy summer...and we are traveling a lot.
I hope to make an appointment with a Psychologist that specializes in Gifted youth. I am going to try to add some of the Duke courses to his Catholic schooling as well as continuing the EPGY. I have been talking to lots of others and really trying to understand what happen to the Catholic schools in the last 10 years. I had my two oldest graduated Catholic HS in 99 and 02 it seemed really strong but they are not the same today.
I am giving it 1 year and if there is not a change then I will homeschool. I have 2 other mothers that are seriously considering it as well. Together the three of us make strong teachers our backgrounds are in Medicine, Engineering and MS in ED. I still don't have confidence doing it on my own...but you know what? If I have to I will !

Well Thank you again !!! I haven't been here in awhile so I am going to do some catch up reading.
"My heart is healing" :-)

ha ha, I love this! My son only wanted math and science camps this summer. We get the same reaction from people...what an alien!! Glad your heart is better! Nan

My dd9 has been using EPGY math for most of the last year as a supplement. She is a bit above grade level on it but not a lot. However, we aren't using it a lot (maybe an hour/week when she was really doing it more and an hour/month total over the summer).

She gets 100% correct on most of her sessions and overall has stayed pretty consistently at around 98% correct. We did bump her up right at the beginning b/c it started her 1/2 a grade below her current grade and she already knew that material. She was getting most or all of them right and she wasn't learning much.

Once she was moved up to right to her current grade level, she continued to get most or all correct but there were new concepts so it no longer seemed too easy. During the school year she moved through a little faster than one month of EPGY in one month of time, so, like I said, she's maybe 1/2 a year ahead of her current grade level in placement right now and that continues to seem appropriate.

I don't think that the child needs to be missing 20% of the questions to indicate that s/he is learning something new. If s/he is getting 95% correct and there is new information, that is still probably great and better for the child's confidence especially if he gets upset when he misses too many.

I do wonder if there is a difference btwn not knowing 20% or even 50% of the material you are going to be taught in the lesson and not getting the answers correct to 20% or 50% of the questions after you have been taught the material. I do think that dds would be frustrated if they were missing that many of the questions.

I don't necessarily think that the level of instruction is inadequate b/c the child is getting most of the questions correct as long as he can continue to move on to new concepts once he has shown that he learned most of what he was just taught.

MHB, thanks for the update and glad to hear he's feeling positive about math again!

Dottie, thanks for sharing the info from the Rusczyk talk. It reminded me of something Grinity said on another thread about teachers thinking above level work is somehow "dangerous" to kids. It frustrates me to no end to see schools avoid giving challenging work because it's seen as damaging but turn around and allow in-school advertising exploit young children who can't fully understand persuasive intent.

Dottie- thanks for mentioning the RR talk. I almost skipped out but decided to go and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

Something else that he said that jumped out at me was that anytime the question is already presented, that's not thinking. Kids should have to figure out what the problem even is first. This really resonated with me and is something I've been pondering for DS. Clearly math is too easy if he can have a book open in his left hand and be reading it, while also answering math homework ;-)

The tyranny of 100% is ruling our lives right now and I need to find a way to break it. DS got 11/12 on his last spelling test after months of 12/12. He was livid. He is not learning to work hard, make mistakes and work through them. He's just learning to coast. Time for more advocacy when the fall comes.

CAMom, this really resonates with me. I really try to encourage that sort of deep thinking from dd4; I think kids are capable of a great deal more nuance and discernment than schools give them credit for. If one allows them the room to be intellectually curious, they are capable of thinking about the implication of things, and of, like you said, spotting problems. Anecdotal evidence that it's working for us -- we recently started reading SOTW, which has a lot of built-in questions in the narrative. I've noticed that half the time, by the time we get to the question, dd has already brought it up and either answered it or discussed it. The same sort of thing happens with science -- when you follow the logical thread of things, you will come up with the next content (or at leas the question for the next content) before you actually read it. It's very cool to see.

Re your DS -- school (in general, of course there are exceptions) teaches kids to fall into the grade trap. What gets rewarded is good grades -- whether or not that involves learning or creative thinking. Grr.

Good Morning!

Thanks everyone for the encouragement !

@Nan... too funny ...my son picked an engineering camp and science camp ...LOL

@ cricket2... I think EPGY takes the "age" and places the child.
They also placed DS at 4.5 and I also Bumped him up to 5.0
prior to even starting (he will be in 5th in the fall). He was on for approx 2 weeks and they are giving him stuff in 5.5-5.7 on his graph. He is assigned at 5.3 at the moment...so slightly above. But he LOVES it...

Dottie ...I would love to have heard RR talk. I am new at this and I have no idea who he is, but now I will go look for his info. Problem solving seems to be my DS weakness. I think because things have been easy for him and he has sailed through.It seems when he is challenged he just moves the other way.

His dad is the same way. He got into Photography and when he ordered a camera and couldn't figure it out...he bought a different one and when that one didn't come easy another one. Once he understood the working of the camera, he tackled the other cameras...Now we are dealing with editing software...LOL
My husband is gifted ...but he will deny it because his brother was so much MORE gifted. He graduated HS at 16 and was valedictorian...He was in college calculus at 16 (best grade in class)...but not gifted.

CAmom...my DS is the same way...had 99.8 in spelling. He missed a word because of his writing, his cursive "m" looked like an "n". Handwriting is his enemy...of course it's not easy for him so he "hates" it.

It was this attitude that has made me think that maybe he is just "smart" I assumed "gifted" children thrived on challenges.

Gifted children really have not been examined enough in this country in fact they have been pushed under the rug to fend for themselves.
We wonder why we are no longer top in Medicine and technology?

We are blessed to have the resources to feed his addiction to learning. It is not cheap...a trip to the book store can really add up. He want to HAVE books...we tried the library but he didn't want to return the books.

Gotta go Phone is ringing off the hook

This has been an issue in our house, too.

What I found helped was to explicitly tell DD that clicking "give up" was the way of telling the program "I don't understand what you're asking about at all, so next time explain it to me more." And that trying to figure it out, but being wrong on both attempts, also told the program to explain it better the next time. And that the reason the program wanted her to be getting 70-80% right was that it expected her to need more explanation of some things, and the only way to ask for more explanation was to be wrong.


There's no requirement to manually adjust the level, and if he's not getting all 100s, I personally wouldn't. (The EPGY guideline for a half-grade bump is a month-equivalent of 100s.) If he's getting almost all of the problems right on the first try, the program will zip through the material until he starts needing more in-depth explanation.

I don't believe there's any way to stop moving on to higher-level material, other than to do poorly on the end-of-grade assessment, though.

The Calculus Trap by RR is worth reading

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?page=calculustrap

as is
Why Discrete Math Is Important

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?page=discretemath

For those with DYS children, the RR talk is available on the private DYS site.