Encouraging "gifted" students to branch out rather than just go up

Parents Forum
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I don’t even know what to say in response to those comments. Especially about my female gifted kid. You are really just pulling stereotypes out of the air. Plus, part of the point stated further up in the thread is that it is frustrating to have to deal with scheduling and transportation issues to a local college for expanded course offerings (and some schools, possibly like the OP’s school, don’t support this at all – my kid’s school didn’t). At the risk of repeating myself, I think technology could be a big enabler to allow schools to accelerate students more easily.

Also, no one is saying that these kids shouldn’t complete a normal HS curriculum – foreign language, music, art, etc. But this attitude that they should fill their time with extra doses of those things because the school doesn’t want to provide them more advanced opportunities in core subjects is ridiculous.

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Single variable calculus is the typical college-frosh level math course (or high school AP course). The typical college-soph level math courses are multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and discrete math. Calculus-based statistics is also an option. Most high school students who get to that level would need to take such courses at a nearby college.

“Calculus, calculus, and more calculus” may exist at high schools which offer AP calculus AB and the rest of AP calculus BC as separate year-long courses, plus multivariable calculus as another year-long course, which basically spreads what is a 1.5 year sequence in college out to 3 years, even though a high school student who is that far ahead in math to be able to take all of that in high school should be able to handle the material at college pace easily.

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@collegedad13 wow, that is just the best reason for not accelerating gifted kids I have ever seen posited. If students don’t “branch out” rather than “go up”, they will turn into nerds who can’t hold their drink and harass women.
OP take note, more suggestions for differentiation for gifted kids in your elementary school math classes: let them practice dating, respectful treatment of the opposite sex, and responsible intake of alcohol. Anti harassment training, eligibility determined by math ability. The number of parents annoying you with their kids’ math prowess might go right down.

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@collegedad13 Not sure anyone can top your completely insulting stereotyped caricature. You do realize that not all gifted individuals lack social skills anymore than not all non-gifted individuals lack empathy for situations that cannot directly relate to?

I am so thankful that my children were not subjected to adults with similar attitudes controlling their educations. I will never forget when I realized *how neglectful I had been *toward recognizing my own children’s abilities. One of my sons had just turned 6 and we were baking cookies. While we were placing the cookies on the pan, he told me he had made a discovery. He said if we put 3 rows of 5 cookies we would be baking 15 cookies, but 4 rows of 5 cookies would make 20. I stopped what I was doing and really listened to what he was saying to me. I asked him how he realized that. He told me from just looking at things. He said the windows had 6 rows of 3 panes and that was 18. When he was playing with Legos, he realized that rows of #s were like repeated addition. He knew all of his multiplication tables without ever having even heard of multiplication. And…that was just the beginning. It didn’t take people teaching him things for him to master them. Exposure to ideas led to constantly seeking out of more information. By the time he was in 8th grade, he had left me far behind.

I am incredibly thankful he was not forced to sit in a classroom controlled by people who assumed he had no people skills (he is very social), or lacked breadth (he loves philosophy, literature, theology in addition to math and science), or that it was impossible for him to master what he did bc of his age (he took his first high school level math class, algebra, at age 10, and that was with me slowing him down as much as I could!)

This thread has made me more grateful than ever that our family has been blessed by the opportunity to homeschool. I cannot imagine such narrow-minded adults dismissing ability and controlling my children’s academic decisions.

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@yucca10 AoPS https://artofproblemsolving.com/school/catalog (number theory, counting and probability, and advanced math topics interwoven into the “typical” high school math sequence.

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@collegedad13,

It is clear that you have no direct experience with a child that loves to learn, to the point that learning is as essential as breathing. When my son was age 7, we gave him money for a book fair at school. We expected him to buy a book on cartoons, or perhaps about the Red Sox.

Instead he came home with an algebra book. We laughed about this. He always loved math, and had taught himself two digit multiplication by age 5. But it still shocked me that within a few weeks of getting the book, he was able to solve algebra problems with multiple equations and multiple unknowns, and was starting to self-learn the basics of linear algebra. There was no parental pushing in any of this.

Because we didn’t want him to only focus on math, we encouraged him to try other activities. We introduced him into ones that we knew he might like (i.e. involved a great deal of learning) and for which mastery was difficult. But after he won the national championship in that activity, he has returned to spending more time on math. This is where his primary interest lies, and to take that away from him would just be cruel.

Good thing then that the same kid had the social skills to be elected as school president a few years later.

You really ought to give it up with your stereotypes, @collegedad13. It doesn’t help you or the rest of the world.

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Have been kind of dreading jumping in here, but here goes…

S1 is pretty much self-taught. We redshirted him for Kindergarten (November birthday in a 12/31 cutoff district) and at the end of the year, the principal at the small private school he attended said to skip 1st grade. Taught himself math, programming, how to read, etc. When he started at the neighborhood public school in 3rd grade, things became toxic quickly. It was never a question of us pushing him – he would come home from 3rd grade and say he had to “feed my brain” because the environment was so hostile. He pulled us along. He picked up a lot of advanced concepts from mastering the Zoombinis, figured out different ways to solve problems, taught himself code, read The Number Devil and other math books. The neighborhood school was actively antagonistic towards him; his 3rd grade teacher refused to give him 4th grade math because I’d have to schlep him to UMD for calculus as a sophomore. Meanwhile, he’s deriving Fibonacci and Jacob’s Ladder on the chalkboard and she’s telling him that’s not a mathematical sequence. He was 7. He did a book report on one of the Redwall series and the teacher didn’t believe he’d read it, and questioned him for half an hour in front of his classmates, then said that his ability to read long books was why he didn’t have friends. Other parents who happened to be in the classroom told me about these incidents, and the teacher herself bragged about them to me. The teacher told me S would wind up like Ted Kaczynski one day.

The neighborhood school screwed around with S for the HG specialized program. Principal wrote a letter to us citing his test scores (way above the minimum cutoffs for consideration), said they were not going to let him test because of emotional disabilities. No mental health diagnosis or assessment done by the school, mind you (and we’d had a private assessment done indicating both intellectual capacity and emotional health), and blatantly a violation of ADEA. We appealed for S to be allowed to take the second level of testing for application. (Note we were not insisting on admission – just a shot to apply.) Principal caved based on the letter brief DH prepared, and S tested. School then blackballed S on the recommendations and apparently wrote some really appalling things. We found out about this from the head of GT for the county, called me, told me what the school had done, and told us exactly how to appeal and the specific criteria to use. This woman saved my son’s life. We got to the appeal meeting and the first question was “Why is S1 in 3rd grade math?” Um, his teacher. That’s when they told us exactly where S’s math scores stood in comparison to the rest of the applicant pool.

I understand the principal and teacher were reprimanded; both were gone within a year. They did NOT mess around with my younger S. He got an appropriate academic and also escaped to the HG program in 4th grade.

S was accepted and once he was in the program, they tested all kids for math placement. He was skipped three grades in math, along with six of his other 4th grade classmates.This was where the magic began happening. He had intellectually appropriate education with AGE PEERS. He found friends his own age who liked the same things he did. He started building a Pokemon website with one of his buddies. He needed a TI-84 for pre-Alg in 5th grade and he started programming on it.

Went to selective admit public middle school and HS STEM programs. Absolutely blossomed. Skipped another semester of math. Taught himself a couple of programming languages and did simulations for science fair projects. Won them. At the high school program, BC Calc was a one-semester class and went beyond the AP curriculum. MV, DiffEq, LIn Alg, Complex Analysis, comp sci classes, etc. were one-semester classes – deep and fast. The teachers assigned homework using problem sets that alums brought back from top colleges. Ran through the math and CS catalog in HS. He did a little math team, made AIME, but the math was mainly to support the programming. Did lots of programming competitions, locally and nationally. Won big awards. Joined the student newspaper and Philosophy Club. Taught AP CS AB programming lab. Taught Computer Team. Was not always the smartest kid in the room. Turned down MIT so he could do the Core at UChicago (i.e., go broad in an intellectually challenging way) but still get top math/theoretical CS. Spent two summers at MIT and at his current employer, which helped balance out his various interests. Is happy, emotionally healthy and successful doing meta-projects for a major SV company. Has an active, albeit alternative social life. He has said many times that if he hadn’t had the magnet programs, he probably would not have survived HS.

DH and I are not professors or engineers. We were along for the ride. We were d****** lucky that our school system offered programs where he could do these things with kids his own age. I have many friends who had to look at early college as the only alternative for their kids, and that was a scenario DH and I struggled with. While S could have gone to the local flagship for math junior and senior years (a short bus ride from his HS), he was not comfortable with that. That was fine with us. He did go there to work with a math/CS mentor, which was the appropriate comfort level for S. But branching out? Not with this S. He has been drilling deep his entire life.

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It’s funny how it often comes back to math. Personally as the parent of gifted kids, I find the math hole easiest to plug. There are so many options online and off. There are other holes however which I have to think about for a long time. My 6th grader wanted to learn ancient Greek to read Greek Myths in their original language. Hmm. I did find an online course but it was for homeschoolers and would conflict with school times. Still looking though. Boy, I wish I could find it and use some of the time they waste sitting in the classroom to be learning Ancient Greek. This is what OP just doesn’t get.
I sure do hope my kids don’t ever listen to people who want to place them in a neat little box. It’s been a struggle as a parent. Not to mention it’s been expensive. I do see the value of homeschooling. Just could not bring myself to break the social ties they have with friends. They are years ahead in school. They do learn a lot by working things out with their peers. They also understand that most people don’t learn the way they learn.
Geez, I hope those other posters aren’t on to something. I hope they don’t turn out to be social deviants who can only communicate in Esperanto. LOl. ( Ahh, the stereotypes like most stereotypes don’t fit).

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It is great to have a way to let students “grow out”, but the problem is more that they are also expected to do the grade-level work. For a kid that already knows the material or learns it on the first go, it can be excruciating. My son used to read under his desk and his 4th grade teacher told us that he would call on him randomly to try and catch him not paying attention, but he always knew the answer or where to pick up reading. He was able to process both his book and what was going on in the classroom at the same time. He was also the kid that when we were moving his friend asked if DS leaves, who will know all the answers to the teacher’s questions? He had to be told that he did not have to raise his hand to answer every question and it was ok not to volunteer, even if he knew the answer.

At the time, the elementary GT program was a one day per week pull out for the top students (top 24 kids per grade with about 350-400 kids per grade, so less than 10%). It was enrichment, but the students were expected to do the homework and classroom work they missed when they returned.

He is an introvert and is likely a bit behind socially. I don’t think MORE time in a regular classroom would in any way have helped with that. He was already the one (in early elementary school), the teacher used to “help” the other students. That, along with being the kid that knew all the answers while reading under the desk did not make very popular.

I think this thread is focusing on the highly gifted kids, which is typically 3 standards deviations from the mean or 145+. Those kids are very different from average kids and even from moderately gifted students. I agree with the post above that said that a public school cannot be expected to create a perfect curriculum for each student, and it is difficult to differentiate. But that doesn’t mean the schools have no obligation to offer something.

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The core problem seems to be that many school administrators and teachers in this country are not really dedicated to the idea of an academic education. Perhaps they did not receive a rigorous education themselves, or perhaps it is just easier to cater to the lowest common denominator. In any event, no wonder parents have to advocate so vigorously for their kids. The schools won’t.

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Some school districts are more concerned with helping kids at the bottom of the achievement scale than those at the top. That was true of ours when my kids were enrolled. The district offered a decent array of courses in upper years of high school but little to nothing for gifted kids before high school. The response we heard on occasion was “send them to [name of private school 80 miles away]” when we asked about offering more of a challenge to kids who were highly intellectually advanced. Even the nearby university (we live in a university town) barely got into this area. Of course for students in music or the arts there were some opportunities. And in high school there were come competitive organized activities in math (and our son competed very well in those at the state level). But the broader curriculum remained rather plain and unchallenging (English, history, language, science, art, etc.).

We witnessed another world for a year when my family lived in Palo Alto when I was on sabbatical leave. The district catered to and encouraged the intellectually advanced kids. Of course they had more resources than we had in our own community. Our older child was very successful in math competitions in middle school in Palo Alto, competing against kids who had had the benefit of superior schools for many years. But in that community, the emphasis seemed to be on one side of the brain. For our (then) 4th grader, a typical assignment in spelling-reading might be, “Here are 20 words. Learn the definitions of all of them, and use as many of these words in an essay about X [topic given].” This drove my daughter crazy. She had been a very advanced and engaged reader, but this kind of assignment demanded that she be a puzzle-solver. Sort of like constructing a crossword puzzle out of spelling homework.

In the end, most of the responsibility for assuring that intellectually gifted kids get to explore and develop their own interests and talents falls on the parents – and relies on their own resources (time, money, and intellectual ability). Our kids had an advantage over many others in this respect. And the kids found niches within the system to do some remarkable things prior to college – benefiting from our resources to send them to special summer programs in art, debate, and so on. But I know some very bright kids – classmates of our kids – who couldn’t break out during K-12, and in some cases their later careers don’t reflect the potential that the kids had as children.

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I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all recipe here. Many school systems have no capacity to help the kid broaden or go deeper, per @mackinaw’s post. I think acceleration ought to be possible by subject, which happened for @CountingDown’s kids, but as @mackinaw stated, this often requires parental resources and knowledge.

My father was an extraordinarily gifted man – the chairman of the MIT Physics department who told me that my father was one of the smartest people he’d ever met and was told by another physicist at an NAS meeting that my father was a virtuoso mathematician among theoretical physicists – who didn’t invent quantum computing but did in fact do a lot of seminal work in a precursor field among other seminal things. I transferred into an advanced math course as a freshman in college and the professor when approving the transfer said of my last name, “XXX is a very famous mathematical name. Is your father X, Y or Z?” It was Z. My father had no homeschooling to the best of my knowledge as his parents were poor and struggling to get by but apparently he taught himself to read the NY Times by age 3. I see that he graduated high school three months after he turned 16. There was undoubtedly no acceleration of math, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt him (though as @juillet points out, we don’t know the counterfactual).

I also think the stereotypes per @Happytimes2001 and @roycroftmom, are like many stereotypes – there is an element of truth to them but they don’t fit everyone in the group. Regarding the stereotype issue, my father was seriously on the Aspergers spectrum. Of course, so were most of his colleagues, a number of whom were Nobel prize winners. (As were many of my professors/mentors/colleagues at HYPSM schools). Sitting around learning social skills in 1st grade probably wouldn’t have worked unless maybe you taught him the psychological principles for doing so. It’s not clear that being inept socially hurt any of them. although one of his colleagues told me that if he had been more political (and less generous with ideas), he could have been more recognized, though he was quite well recognized and he didn’t really care as long as he was doing interesting physics.

I had to learn social skills as they weren’t being taught at home and didn’t come naturally. I didn’t know how to relate and my wife thinks it was touching that I took up ham radio as a kid to talk to people and had a programming job in HS at a Bell Labs before being a programming nerd was cool. But, I did consciously try to learn social skills in college/grad school. At my 25th or 30th college reunion, a woman who lived in a suite across the hall from me for three years of college told me she was stunned by the contrast as she said she just couldn’t make conversation with me back then. My son, who was clearly gifted, is a proud nerd (playing chess over lunch in the HS cafeteria and games of strategy are a passion) but learned social skills from ShawWife, who fortunately for me has an overabundance. One of my friends, who is probably one of the most famous scientists in the world and the president of our university wrote a rec for him that said he was the smartest human being the president had met, has oodles of social skills and did when he was in college. In addition to being brilliant, he’s a hustler and self-promoter. So, one size doesn’t fit all – whether for the best education or the stereotypes.

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(bold added for emphasis)

This is more illustrative of a societal issue than picking on a single poster. Because it’s just assumed that it’s the boys who are good at math. :frowning:

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Here is another example of how gifted education can support both math & social achievement while branching out.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Life-adding-up-for-Cal-s-15-year-old-math-whiz-12458319.php

PM me if you want contact info for the mom’s consulting business mentioned in the article.

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@Mom2aphysicsgeek

I couldn’t agree with you more. I can be biased, because my situation was very similar to yours.

When my D was in kindergarten, we’d had already known that she was “unusual.” On a trip from San Diego back to the Bay Area, she sat quietly in the back seat. We thought because she was tired after two days at Sea World.

When we stopped to eat at Pea Soup Andersen’s, she suddenly declared, “Now I know how to multiply by 4!” My wife and I looked at each other, “What!” “See, to multiply by 4, first you multiply by 5 (which she’d already figured out), then you subtract the other number, the number that is not 5.” She had just discovered a(5-1) = a5-a. Later on that day, she generalized her discovery to a(b-1) = ab-a.

Before she finished kindergarten, we asked the local school district for help. The answer, “We have the GATE program, but we don’t test students until the end of 3rd grade.”

We applied her to a private school that required an interview. We were allowed to look through a one-way mirror. We saw the puzzling vice principal during the interview, then we saw her calling for the principal. The principal came in, talked to my D for about 15 minutes. Then he looked puzzled too.

He called us in, “I’m happy to admit her. She should be in 3rd grade, but since she has a small figure, we’ll put her in 2nd grade, but will be going to 3rd grade for math.” Then he pulled us outside the room, “But I don’t really want her in my class. It would be very distracting because she is different from other students. Even putting her in 3rd grade is not a solution. It will only delay it a few years. Sooner or later you’ll have to find a solution. I really think you should consider customized curriculum.”

We ended up sending her to a different private school, known for above-grade curricula.

Just as the predicted by the principal, it lasted two years. The second half of my D’s 3rd grade was torturous, both for her and for us parents. She came home everyday complaining about friends not understanding her, about “why the teacher had to say it 5 times,” about “it’s a waste of time.” A lot of time she acted up in class and got sent to the principal’s office. Finally she refused to go to school altogether (note that she was not even 8 years old).

Two weeks before the end of her 3rd grade school year, we decided to homeschool her. The principal asked her if she would stay 2 more weeks, otherwise he could not issue the certificate that she’d completed 3rd grade. She said, “It’s OK. I don’t need the certificate.”

We signed her up for Stanford EPGY. At the time, there was a “condensed” math class which combined all math before pre-algebra. She finished that in 6 months. She took pre-algebra when she was 8. At the same time she took English 9A/B/C at EPGY (I guess equivalent to highschool 9th grade English). At 12, she completed highschool, including AP Calculus, AP History, AP US Government, AP English Language and Composition, AP Physics 1, and AP Latin. At 13, academically, she was ready for college. But we decided to keep her home, taking college-level classes until she was 16.

She has her shortcomings, but not socially (she was a Latin tutor) nor sport (she swam 5 miles every week).

Amen.

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@Pentaprism

That’s the point I wanted to make earlier. She didn’t need to wait until she first studied division, fraction, and arithmetic speed with larger numbers before exploring algebra concepts, which for come kids, come first and not in the order of standard math curriculum.

Do you have opportunities to take advanced math courses at local 4 years universities? I would definitely recommend looking for them. They are expensive compare to community college courses I know. But mixing 1~2 of them per semester can be very helpful for kids like yours.

Some local 4 years universities may have a fixed set of courses for Summer, but then unofficially open the rest once a student do well on those (e.g. Santa Clara University in Nor Cal), and some universities have open enrollment programs (that they use as revenue source/ e.g. UC Berkeley and other campuses)

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^ “But I don’t really want her in my class. It would be very distracting because she is different from other students.”

My 12 year old 7th grader is highly/profoundly gifted, and is especially off the charts when it comes to creative endeavors. He also has a central auditory processing disorder that was confused with possible ADHD when he was younger. When he started public school kindergarten it was immediately apparent that the local public elementary school was not an ideal fit. I looked into a highly regarded progressive local private school and thought it would be great for him, and applied. They turned him down. When we met with the director of admissions she raved about how bright and creative he was, how sweet and empathetic, and how he showed unusual insight. She clearly recognized that he was gifted. And then she said “but we think he will be too much work, and will distract from paying attention to the other students.”

My son currently goes to a wonderful public magnet school, and I’m very grateful for the support they give him. They are aware of his gifted testing results, and his auditory processing disorder. He is followed by the support team, and they make several accommodations. He is in all G&T classes and a combined magnet program. The principal is wonderful, and adores him. Yes, he is bored in math and some of his classes at times, and I basically do supplemental homeschooling with more advanced programs, but I’m very grateful that the school accepts him and is willing to work with us. It’s not perfect, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that any school will provide everything for such asynchronous kids, and I’m fortunate to have the resources and ability to provide for another level of opportunities that challenge my son and help him grow, in many ways.

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I wonder how many unusual students like those described here have their talents lost because their parents do not have the resources or availability to send them to an appropriate alternative school or home school them if the regular public school is unsuitable.

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^ “But I don’t really want her in my class. It would be very distracting because she is different from other students.”

That’s because it was a 3rd grade classroom. It can work differently at college.

An art professor told to many of her classes that, she once asked her dean for a permission to drop a barely 11 years old student who registered to her studio art course because she didn’t want a child in her class, but everything she thought changed once she saw that student working on clay with shocking skill and dedication. Then the student became the teacher’s pet taking 5 more of her classes in the following semesters. The classes had very supportive and fun atmosphere, and the young student made many good friends, including some elderly students there.

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@SculptorDad

It’s all behind us now. My D is now 22 years old, in 3rd yr of a CS PhD program.

Before college, she did take college-level math and physic classes at Stanford. When she started undergrad at UC Berkeley EECS, her work at Stanford was evaluated to 27 semester units, essentially could fulfill the math/physical sciences requirements for her major. But not wanting to fight with UCB bureaucrats, she used those units to fulfill the prerequisites for more advanced classes (e.g. taking Numerical Analysis instead of Calculus).