I'm re-raising this thread after all this time to provide a one-year-out update. I know that I updated things just after Christmas this year in the Brag thread, but wanted to address some things more specifically with the benefit of some additional hindsight.
I'm
so glad that we didn't follow through on having my DD evaluated by the ADD/ADHD and mood disorder specialists that she was slated to see.
I have no doubt in my mind that at the time, she could easily have been diagnosed with depression, a generalized anxiety disorder or ADD, and maybe even ODD. I feel like we really lucked out in not having that happen, because it would have cost us dearly in both time and money to get all of that sorted and reevaluated by specialists just to get those incorrect labels scrubbed.
The plethora of symptoms
VANISHED as soon as the school year ended. Yes, really. Within a week we had our daughter back, and she had a terrific summer.
I look back on this period of time as an object lesson in some respects. Several things to note there, which is why I re-raised the thread, because it might be tempting to frame this as a poor school fit issue (which in some ways it was, and in some ways it wasn't), or perhaps as a cautionary tale from the radical acceleration front (which would be profoundly misinterpreting things, IMO).
1. No matter HOW good you can make everything else in a child's life, if the educational environment is fundamentally inappropriate, every little bump in the road (and let's face it, there are a lot of those in growing up) is a potential derailment.
2. Perfectionism can grow to monstrous proportions even in a kid who has had teachers and parents do everything humanly possible to
prevent it from being established.
3. Adolescence is just plain hard on all kids, and asynchronous development can make it much harder and lonelier.
4. I might think that my child is a "good" kid who would "never do" certain things... but all kids are individual people with individual wills of their own. We had no idea the scope of the computer escapism that was happening under our noses, and we're pretty savvy and
we are home with her all the time.5. Kids are kids, no matter how bright, and they lack life experience to draw from when making emotional judgments. DD lacked more rigid/strict parenting models in her comparative world (which was mostly comprised of friends whose parents are truly 'free-range' parenting afficionados). Naturally, moderate modern parenting looks 'stifling' and 'controlling' by comparison with
that. LOL. Now that she's got a few friends whose parents are less permissive than we are, she has a lot less angst about her own situation.
In retrospect, this was a perfect storm that no amount of planning or foresight could really have predicted. We had a super-achiever entering high school without ever having been sufficiently challenged,
plus adolescent angst and hormonal mood-swings,
plus grief,
plus perfectionism,
plus lack of an authentic peer group,
plus some degree of positive disintegration and questioning of self-identity happening all at once.
DD just turned 13, and I'm very happy to report that she is not even remotely the same deeply anxious and unhappy waif that she was 15 months ago. This last school year, at least on the face of things, should have proven far, far more difficult; we had some critical administrative changes, a nasty science teacher who took an instant, active dislike to my daughter and several of her peers (ultimately so bad that we insisted on a different teacher second term, and weren't the only ones), a second teacher who was so wildly inconsistent in grading and so awful in communication that it nearly drove DD crazy (this teacher's parting shot to DD was a quick note telling her that she should be especially proud of her A in his honors course, "considering her age"-- AUGH!!), and a parent disabled for months by a severe injury. Astonishingly, she weathered all of it with a great deal of grace and resilience.
She's made new (better??) friends, expanded some extracurricular activities, and is happier than we've seen her in years. While she still doesn't love the school situation, visiting our local high school and speaking at length with them last fall made a huge difference to her (I think it felt "real" to her and more authentic, as though she were not really an "imposter" but truly a peer of any of those students), as did spending more time at our local university. She has also grown about four inches and no longer looks so obviously like a young child... she can "pass" enough to fly under the radar in high school and college settings, which pleases her enormously. It was an epiphany for her to visit the university library and get a courtesy/resident card.
She will be 'skipping' 10th grade and officially become an 11th grader year next fall. We elected to press onward and get her a high school diploma in the most expedient and least painful manner possible, and then get her into college classes where the situation will improve w/r/t fit.
I'm very certain that radical acceleration didn't cause any of her problems-- those problems might well have been far worse without it. If anything, we may have erred in not being more aggressive with acceleration. We have spent the past year working on developing DD's
study skills, and being willing to step in when the school gets it wrong (before, I think we were too afraid of seeming like helicopter parents).
She has made tremendous strides in a number of areas, maturity-wise; she's better about time management and task persistence, better about being
self -motivated even with intrinsically unrewarding tasks (e.g. 'busywork'), better about being willing to fail as part of LEARNING, and better by far about note-taking and the other bothersome minutiae that we deemed areas needing better development prior to post-secondary education.
We, in turn, have admitted more openly that there are some ways in which her school is a failed model, and we have agreed that while we may 'play the game,' there will be NO MORE pretending in our house as to drinking the Kool Aid. Don't ask, don't tell is one thing, but we're done lying to ourselves and we're done being
used by the school. Crap is crap, and we won't defend it or sugar-coat it anymore, even if we do tell her when she has to play along anyway. "Yeah, sorry-- but you DO have to take even stupid, multiple-choice, trivial pursuit exams closed notes if those are the rules, but you CAN and should call teachers to ask questions if things are weird, ambiguous, or flatly incorrect." (She makes a lot of phone calls to teachers. Heheh.) We will offer
real alternatives to the stupid and meaningless as long as she holds up her end of this bargain. Authentic learning and mastery are what WE (meaning she and we) care about and determine for ourselves, not necessarily what earns 100% from any particular class teacher. Grades are kind of arbitrary in this system given what assessment looks like, anyway, and anything above 90% is generally fine by us. If things dip below that, she can expect that we'll ask why (but with an eye toward helping her to figure out how to FIX THINGS, not in judgment). She has responded very well to this, and as expected, excellence
generally produces its own A's automatically. Dean's list honor roll, but now without all of the sound and fury, quite pleasantly for all of us. No more Olympic-level procrastination-as-motivation!! Hallelujah!
She has also stepped back into roles as a student leader, and returned to a more philanthropic way of viewing the world.
Fortunately, she has had a remarkable English composition teacher repeatedly since 6th grade, and will have her again next year for AP. She's HG+ herself, demands really remarkable
thoughtful work from DD, challenging her and offering a truly meaningful educational environment. DD just polished off TWO honors English courses this past year (one with the aforementioned teacher), and aced them both quite handily. This did two things-- it taught DD that she
could cope with a lot of writing at once, and it also conveyed to her that we (meaning her parents, and the school counselor/administrators) respect her choices and trust her to make the right decisions for herself personally.
Two advanced English courses at once was a much better balance for her. It provided her with a lot more literature to sink her teeth into, which was far more appropriate and less choppy/frustrating for her personally. Next year, she'll take some AP coursework, but we've carefully vetted which teachers will be teaching those courses, and chosen classes with teachers in mind, since this is a very important part of things for DD as a learner.
She
needs direct instruction and interaction as part of her preferred Socratic learning process, and now she sees that college has that to offer. Her school (Connections Academy) has moved further and further away from that model, unfortunately, in preference for a "student should 'own their own learning' (oh BARF) model" and therefore canned, prerecorded instructional multimedia clips and an all-online platform is their "vision" for the future. (Yes, really. They are phasing out physical materials like textbooks and laboratory exercises, synchronous live instruction, etc. in favor if "e-books" and "virtual" labs.) Oy. I have my own opinions about that shift and how it relates to Pearson's acquisition of the company, and the for-profit nature of this corporate entity, but that is neither here nor there.
This is placing us in a race against time, thus the additional acceleration. Why bother at all? Well, two reasons; a) DD is an NHS officer, and she's proud of her accomplishments academically-- she hasn't asked for a lot of things in her life, but walking with honors at age 14 (maybe even being Valedictorian) is one of those things, and b) in our state, a person MAY NOT sit for a G.E.D. until they are 18 years of age, and no public university is necessarily obliged to offer admittance to any person without either a GED or high school diploma.
The difference, though, is that with honest dialogue on everyone's part, she now KNOWS that we are her advocates. Always. Therefore, she is far more cooperative with our requests/demands/instructions, and the trust we've reestablished here has paid dividends in helping to tame that perfectionistic monster-- we step in right away when we see evidence that it is trying to surface.
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The short version? Don't panic--
it gets better. Sometimes kids go through a rough spot that doesn't necessarily point to pathology; look to environmental causes first and foremost, and trust your gut. Sometimes problems are just the result of asynchrony and frustration, and there's nothing more complicated going on.
Adolescence with an intense HG+ child is not for the faint of heart, and in a child that has been an e-ticket ride from the start, it certainly doesn't get easier in the preteen/teen years.
