Reading all these comments from well-intentioned parents just makes me sympathize with what the OP and other educators must have to deal with.
Putting the top 5 percent of kids in dedicated gifted classrooms that are the same size as regular class rooms costs nothing assuming the district is large enough. As I said above our district does this based solely on their evaluation criteria. Not based on outside testing or even on teacher opinion. One of my kids tested in, the other did not. She was a smart, hardworking kid who got good grades and is doing great on cillege. Parents should not think their ordinary smart kids must be placed in gifted programs to be successful.
@intparent, were those perhaps SRA cards? I ** loved ** them too! I just googled and they’re still a thing.
We did SRA,. wasn’t the highest purple? I finished quickly and my teacher let me read what ever I wanted the rest of the year
Yes, they were the SRA cards. 
I also loved SRA. Still remember a few bits, like, “Horses are Hams.”
Btw, our public school system doesn’t endorse ‘homogeneous’ education, offers a few opportunities grudgingly. (I’ve seen this attitude in official writing.)
I empathize with all sides. I just hope parents realize there’s a balance between what the child wants to self determine or exclusively focus on (I’m referring to few posters, in general,) and the myriad lessons to be learned. And I do wince at some descriptions of the slower or “average” kids, some seeming to say they’re dead weight. Individualized works both ways.
So, I took OP’s first comments to mean, how parents can help direct their kids, expand their learning, without necessarily moving them to a much older age group. It seems to be a sort of hybrid between good homeschooling and moving “up.”
For the OP, one interesting thing regarding parents’ sometimes misguided beliefs that their kids are gifted. I discovered that I had to meet with each teacher at the beginning of each year (or semester). I would send them all of the psychological and psychoeducational testing and summarize it in a brief memo explaining what the testing said. The testing implied that it was likely that he was one of perhaps two kids in the high school with that Verbal IQ level. I would actually explain the mean and SD etc. Second, that he had significant learning disabilities and how I would expect them to play out in this teacher’s class and hence what kinds of accommodations would help him.
I learned a couple of things. My comments to the teachers were treated as noise (“another upper middle class father who thinks his kid is gifted”) despite the extensive testing but that this year’s teachers would listen, often very carefully, to last year’s teachers. My assumption is that, as is noted above, not all pretty bright students are really gifted even if you want them to be. My experience, interestingly enough, is that teachers will ignore not just parents’ comments (which may be a pretty unreliable source of information as most parents don’t have enough comparative data) but also years of test results.
I was going to share the same Calculus trap link that @Mom2aphysicsgeek shared in post #23. For math, you can’t always slow them down that much, but AoPS can be useful for “branching out” in math.
We were lucky to have a series of teachers for S17 from K-6 who were creative about challenging him. Because of that, we didn’t have to do anything that would make him graduate early. I wish all districts and teachers could be as flexible.
He also was lucky to have a math peer in his grade and probably some reading/writing peers (though that is harder to tell because it’s less sequential). Teachers did things like brought him “Guns, Germs and Steel” from their home library to read instead of whatever the class was reading.
As far as math, his teachers from 2nd on mostly formed (without prompting from parents) a small advanced math group and got parents to help with the group – having them play games like Set and do workbooks like the Ed Zaccaro books. So, essentially 2-3 parents homeschooled 4 kids in math at the public school location.
His area where he “could stand to grow” was holding a pencil well enough to get his thoughts on paper. For him, it took until about 3rd grade to catch up on fine motor skills.
Early on, I taught him that “I’m bored” wasn’t a useful thing to say to teachers. He could ask politely for more challenging work.
His math peer was more impatient than him with the Alg1 in 7th grade track and accelerated on his own more–taking Calc 1 the summer before 9th grade and being in junior level college math courses at our local UC by the time he graduated from HS. DS only skipped Precalculus and did science things with his summers, so he took Calc BC in 10th, which is the path for about 2-3 students per year at our HS.
7th and 8th grade were kind of a problem except for one excellent science teacher, both history teachers, and Spanish (which was new to him). I steered him to branch out into computer programming instead of extreme math acceleration when he was especially bored. That worked well for him. He took 3 AoPS programming classes in 6th-8th and the AP CS test in 8th, then learned on his own.
Once he got to HS, they were very flexible about kids taking science APs without prior science classes and then taking college classes when he’d run out of HS math, science, and CS courses. It wasn’t the best of all possible worlds, but it was pretty good.
But Shawbridge, what did you want the teachers’ reactions to be? You tell them that your child is a genius, and the response is (crickets)? If they’ve never encountered this before, and it is likely they haven’t if he is one of 2 in the school, how should they respond? Were you asking them to adjust assignments, to grade them on a different level? I think it is likely they figured they would wait and see how it played out.
My kid graduated HS at 18. They took Calculus BC at 12. When they were in HS they drove their car over to the local university and took college math classes. They almost completed the math the requirements for the university math major. They had lots of friends then and still do now.
Without making any value judgments I would say the following two things at the elites are true. They like their admittees to have not skipped a grade because there can be too many social problems. Secondly very few home schooled kids get admitted.
Great post and genetic predisposition or not my SIL (sister in law) is a gifted super bright braniac who CANNOT HOLD A JOB.
CS degree UCLA 4.0
MSEE 3.9
She has never held a job more than 1 year and is almost 40 now, why? She is he most overbearing, I’m the smartest, I’m the best, did you ever think of this?, you are doing it wrong?, my way is better?, I’m just smarter than you!, type of person on the planet.
Her husband doesn’t have the intelligence she has, but makes 140k as a DOD contractor he is chill, great with people, and fun.
None of this is applicable to your post except that “can you work with others” is as important as any other skillset and maybe a slice of humility and grace as well. No one likes arrogant know-it-all types!
At our high school, with a magnet program drawing from 5 or so “regular high schools” the AP/honors/IB teachers have a 0.1 percenter in pretty much every class. Tbey dont meet with parents to diacuss it.
@collegedad13 Very few homeschool kids are admitted to elites? The real question is how many are admitted compared to applied. Considering that homeschoolers at the high school level are probably less than 1% of the school age population, what % of those actually apply to elites? (Probably a very small %. I have been homeschooling for over 2 decades and most homeschoolers do not continue through high school. The vast majority of those who do are not elite college focused.)
Fwiw, on this forum alone there are several homeschool parents whose children attend tippy top schools. I am a member of an online community where there are several elite admissions every single yr. (1 young man was just accepted to MIT.) My ds’s math coach in high school’s kids attended MIT and Stanford.
Then you have families like mine that chase merit $$. My kids have been very successful via that path.
A couple comments as an ex-special education public school teacher:
- Very few homeschoolers are admitted to elite schools because very few apply (since relative to the general school population, "very few" are homeschoolers). Percentage-wise, I believe MIT admits homeschoolers at a higher rate than other students. (One year it was a 20% admit rate)
- We practiced self-directed homeschooling by following my son's interests. He began algebra in 2nd grade, physics in 6th, and finished high school at 18 with some graduate level physics and upper division math under his belt. He was and is incredibly social and went very wide (national level chess rank, national math and physics competitions, MVP baseball player, serious musician, worked since age 13, began college classes at 12, and so forth) and very deep in his areas of passion (math and physics, and to a lesser extent, language arts). Wouldn't have done it any other way; it worked for him.
- Socialization. Staying with the same aged peers is over-rated. My son knew how to get along with adults, kids his age, younger kids and so forth. As adults, we have friends of all ages and backgrounds, yes?
- Our local public schools would not have worked. At all. Being bored? No, that's not even scratching the surface of why the local public school might not be a good fit for gifted children. Non-sequitur.
- My son very fortunately got into all the schools to which he applied including Princeton, Penn, MIT, Caltech and so on. He graduated from MIT.
- Homeschooling worked for us. It's certainly not for everyone, but it's an option when there aren't good alternatives (and even if there are; some of us just prefer this lifestyle).
One size doesn’t always fit all.
My wife and I were both pushed ahead. I finished HS at age 17 and she finished at age 16. I did fine academically, she did not, but we both suffered socially so we decided our children would not be pushed ahead.
Both our kids are gifted. Our D is roughly at the highly/profoundly gifted boundary, and S is deep into profoundly gifted territory (learned algebra on his own at age 7, created his own proof to the Pythagorean theorem at age 9, etc.).
When they were young, we chose to move to a town with a very strong school system and keep them in their age appropriate level. While school through junior high remained a joke, they thrived socially. Both have a great group of friends and S was even elected school President. Fortunately school started becoming moderately challenging in high school.
Curious about this “pushing ahead”. What does that mean exactly? I ran to catch up with my son; I couldn’t keep up with him. Maybe you mean a (parent? teacher? admin?) grade-skipping a child? Is that what “push” means? I seriously don’t know exactly.
My father was twice grade-skipped and graduated high school at 15. One day, they just pulled him out of one line and stuck him in another. (This was back in 1930’s or 40s). He said he got beat up for being younger, but there really was no other way with my dad. He stuck out like a sore thumb. Graduating early was a gift. He did great in college, career (engineering physicist) and life. At age 90, he still has a sharp mind and great sense of humor. He had a terrible childhood and needed to get out. If that is what is called “pushed”, I guess in his case, I’m all for it.
Let’s just not diss homeschooling. There are many great, appropriately rounded kids from this experience. The best are amazing, empowered, interesting and well equipped for a rigorous college experience.
You have distorted what I said and then, having created a strawman, respond to something I never wrote. You’ve lumped together 2 posts: one from me and one from another poster and responded as if they were written by the same person and were part of the same argument. After quoting me, you quote a DIFFERENT POSTER, saying:
You then go back to MY example, saying:
Since I’m the one who cited an example of someone TAing math at Harvard, you imply that I wrote the second post, quoted above. I didn’t. And, the student I wrote about didn’t become a TA at Harvard as a sophomore without learning to work with the rest of the department or his students. I said he was a really good kid.
He was my kid’s classmate at a public school for academically gifted kids. He stayed with his age cohort–or one year above–in all subjects EXCEPT math. He finished high school at age 17. The ONLY claim I made was that when someone is that gifted, (s)he should be allowed to go “deep.” I made no claims about the “undeveloped morality and sense of justice” of his classmates. His only superiority over his classmates was his mathematical aptitude.
I disagree with you as to the importance of early schooling in math for math geniuses. It has NADA to do with the age at which someone got his/her PhD. The young man in my example didn’t start college until he was 18; he did, however, take all the required courses for a math major at Columbia while he was in high school. I think he was about 26 or so by the time he got his PhD.( He took time off between college and grad school. )
I wasn’t promoting going to college at a young age. Nor was I saying that geniuses don’t need to learn social skills. I was reacting to a post that said someone with that sort of gift should be told to “go read.”
I actually don’t recall the name of the Indian mathematician I wrote about. You may have the right person. I said that he was an average graduate student at Cambridge—which at the time had the best math department in the world. I didn’t say he never achieved anything as a mathematician. Were his achievements in mathematics achieved when he was a grad student? If he’s the same person, I can tell you the answer–NO, they weren’t. Your statements about what he achieved later do not disprove the fact that he was NOT a star while he was a graduate student.
I KNOW he taught himself. That was part of my point. I ONLY stated that his professors at Cambridge all said that IF he had received adequate instruction when he was young he would have been the greatest mathematician of his generation. He achieved a fair amount in mathematics, but he was NOT the greatest mathematician of his generation.
What I said—rather than what you distorted my post to say—was
I did NOT say that a person who is extraordinarily gifted in math can’t achieve anything in math if he isn’t taught mathematics at an appropriate level when he is young. I ONLY said that he won’t achieve his full potential. And, yeah…I’ll take the word of his professors at Cambridge that he IF he had had an appropriate education when he was young he would have achieved more.
About 3.5 million kids graduate high school in the US each year
On average 3 or 4 of them will be profoundly gifted.
About 350 will be exceptionally gifted.
I have met more than that on the internet though.
I think there is a lack of standardization on what HG and PG means. Hoagies uses an IQ boundary of 180 for PG, or and yes that would be roughly one in a million assuming 1sd=16.
On the other hand, Davidson Academy targets the top 0.1% as PG. Johns Hopkins CTY SET program, which also targets what they call PG children, has perhaps slightly higher criteria.
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