<p>I was about to mention the “Physics First” idea, which I am in favor of. (I am a physicist.) My son took Bio last year, in 8th grade, skipping Earth Science. His 7th grade MS Science course was a complete waste of time. He finally escaped it by taking the final partway through the year, and then doing an independent project the rest of the year. Skipping ES was suggested by school personnel. The Bio course was too easy for him, but much better than ES would have been. He took CTY’s HS Physics this summer, and did extremely well. It was an incredible experience for him on many levels.</p>
<p>NYmom: My S did the CTY HS Physics class and was very well prepared for AP-Physic. He enjoyed the class enormously although the students were older than he. The experience made him determined not to take an Honors Science class in HS since the CTY course showed him the materials could be covered in much less time than in the typical school year. S did get worried that too much time had elapsed since he took AP-Physics, so in 11th grade, he took a college physics class for which the AP-Physics test was a pre-requisite.</p>
<p>So much depends on your state. Are you in NY, as some of the others are thinking?
Unless your kid is also a math genious, don’t go more than a year or two above the normal science sequence for 9th grade. He can probably handle 9th grade bio as a 7th grader but it gets harder - my D had AP Physics concurently with pre-cal as a 10th grader. Hard slogging!
Playing devil’s advocate in my field - our country needs good earth scientists! Don’t write it all off as “science lite”, although that’s what usually happens. IF your kid will be a humainities major, this may be the only science class they have to be their base for later political decisions re global warming, etc. They need good tools for forming opinions.</p>
<p>dragonmom, I hope I did not give the impression that I was writing off earth science! I was writing off MS science courses, at least at our public MS. My son took the earth science book home and read it out of interest.</p>
<p>My son is also accelerated 2 years in math, and he found that algebra II (a prerequisite) was not really required for the CTY physics course. I am not sure about the AP Physics courses, but I was under the impression that some are calculus-based, and some are not. </p>
<p>Marite, our school does not offer AP physics at all, or any calculus-based physics course, to my son’s dismay. We are hoping that he will manage to get into a private school next year, but if he doesn’t, we’ll have to find something for him outside the public school.</p>
<p>In many schools, AP-Physics must be taken concurrently with or after AP-Calc. No wonder your D slogged through AP-Physics with only Pre-Calc. </p>
<p>Earth Science could indeed be a great course; much depends on how it is taught. It sounds like it is not better taught in the US than in my French school (it was the 7th grade science curriculum).</p>
<p>Sorry for incorrect info. on NY. Thay was my eroneous belief.</p>
<p>NYmom:</p>
<p>Your son could take the EPGY AP-Physics class. I’ve heard good things about it.</p>
<p>NYMomof2: AP Physics B does not require concurrent or previous calculus, but AP Physics C requires at least concurrent enrollment in Calc (preferably BC). Prior to the year my son took Physics C, the teacher would not accept any students who had not already completed calc. He changed his mind when the calc teacher agreed to rearrange some of the material in Calc BC to ensure the physics class did not get ahead of the calculus instruction. Evidently it worked fine, as most of the students did very well on the AP Physics exam.</p>
<p>9th grade physics: My daughter was in the guinea pig group in our school district for this idea, last year. It did not go well, perhaps because only three teachers in the entire district had been trained, and her teacher was not one of them. A bigger problem, one that will not be repaired by hauling the rest of the teachers in over the summer for training, is that the math level of the students ranged anywhere from pre-algebra to pre-calculus. Of course, the instruction was geared to those at the lowest math level. I think basic physics concepts can be covered in a non-mathematical fashion if the teacher understands physics well enough. My son, who attended a small independent school for the middle/junior high years, had such a course in 7th grade and it was a wonderful experience; however, his teacher had a PhD in another natural science and was generally well-educated in the sciences. That is not the case for many 9th grade science teachers. </p>
<p>The worse part about the rearranged curriculum is that many students will never take a real hs physics course now, because after all, they already had “physics” in 9th grade, and they hated it because it moved so slowly and was taught by a general “junior high science teacher” rather than a physics teacher. </p>
<p>I also think the notion that one cannot learn basic biological concepts and facts without a prior physics course is silly. I’d be more willing to buy the argument that prior exposure to physics would make the first part of a general chemistry course less mysterious.</p>
<p>I think that Midmo has covered the issues surrounding Physics, both Physics First and AP-Physics very well.<br>
S did find that learning physics first (though in his case it was AP-Physics) helped with Chemistry; chemistry in turn helped with biology. The connection between physics and biology, however, was more tenuous. As well, biology involved a great deal more memorization than either physics or chemistry (and to him, was therefore less attractive).</p>
<p>I took physics in college and was baffled by the last couple of weeks of the course which apparently assumed I had taken the beginning college chemistry course. I don’t think there is one right answer except I do think if you do physics first, it might be better to set it up as a middle school course or have different levels based on how much math kids have.</p>
<p>Your son should go for the acceleration. If he can learn the
earth science by reading the book, ask to keep the book, and
have him read it. If he could informally take the final after he
reads the book, I’ll bet it would give him a lot of confidence
to prove to himself that he can learn on his own by reading.</p>
<p>Earth science is great (I have a degree in it myself), but <em>real</em>
earth science requires quite a background in all the hard sciences.
So, no harm done in going ahead with the high school sequence
even if he should decide in the end that he wants to seriously
study earth sciences.</p>
<p>Thank you for all your thoughts.
The school is still open to letting him do whatever we think is appropriate, but, A BIG but…
Since I first posted this threat, both P and VP have been after me, trying to make me realize that by pushing him forward I am not making him smartert or better educated. VP, who usd to teach science for many years, had this long talk with me yesterday about the 7th grade science curriculum and how important it is as a ground knowledge for all the other sciences S will ever take in his life. I agreed, saying that however the whole material is presented in kind of a simplistic way and that S, and school is aware of that as they were the ones administering the tests, tops their results both in Math and LA and is therefore more than ready for a more advance way of instruction.</p>
<p>I checked with HS, they do not know that if he would be getting a credit or not, more likely not, but they were kind of willing to put him in Bio class (the going sequence for learning science here is the same as presented by Marite).
The Bio however is in the worst possible period for S, so I am thinking that for now we are going to be quiet and let him do just regular 7th grade work, possibly with some supplementation by the teacher. I hate to be the pushy mom 
Makes me sad though, that the school has tons of people and tons of programs designed to help learning disabled who are struggling and lagging way behind in their results. My S is also “learning disabled” but in the other way - he is in the top 1/2% of the population for his age and he also needs a differentiated instruction and curriculum in order to progress. However for kids “disabled” the way my son is, there is absolutely no money. But I am touching on a totally different subject here…</p>
<p>I had to take an earth science course a few years back for my Washington state certification–despite having an MIT degree, I’d never taken any geology–and was deeply pleased to discover how useful it was. Geology is literally all around you, and the earth science course changed how I looked at scenery. Yes, I knew basic geology, but I didn’t have a system. </p>
<p>It is a shame that geology and earth science are seen as second class sciences. To my mind, they should be up there with physics, bio, and chem as essentials. Perhaps it’s the association with mining?</p>
<p>You are not the pushy Mom, you are trying to get your son the appropriate education for his ability. You wouldn’t make a good skier stay on the bunny slope. It wouldn’t make him a better skier. When my son got SAT scores in the 92nd percentile for high school seniors, I think it helped the school realize that just maybe he was actually ready for high school work.</p>
<p>dmd77, I would like to thank you for your comments about geology in post 33. Many decades ago, when I was a history major, I found I was compelled to take one science course before I graduated. I chose geology on a whim, and absolutely loved it. I was so pleased that I started to take other science courses even though my history program did not require it. In the end, I acquired doctorates in biochem and molecular biology. I just sent my son off to college with the suggestion that he take a geology course at some point because the information is so useful and interesting.</p>
<p>That said, our public schools here do a lousy job of teaching the subject, as many seem to do. It really is too bad. The lab is all around us, measurements are easy, the basic equipment is inexpensive.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why the association with mining would make earth science a second class academic citizen. Without mining, we’d be pretty primitive as a society.</p>
<p>Midmo: I thought it might be because mining is definitely not “white-collar work” (I once heard miners described as “black-collar” workers.) Let’s not forget that not that long ago people who “worked with their hands” were considered lower class by definition. (Jack Kelly, father of Grace Kelly, wasn’t allowed to enter Henley (crew regatta) because he wasn’t a gentleman–he was a bricklayer <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Kelly,_Sr[/url].”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Kelly,_Sr.</a>.) (I had the pleasure, in high school, of rowing on the same crew team with Kelly’s granddaughter.)</p>
<p>Many of those “black collar” workers have produced grandchildren and great-granchildren who now move in the same crowds as descendants of the Mayflower immigrants. Both of my husband’s grandfathers were miners. One of them was on the cover of a major national news magazine some years back as an example of the last of his kind: a coal miner from southern Illinois.</p>
<p>For others, of course, mining was a dead end, sometimes literally. We all owe a debt.</p>
<p>Kelowna -</p>
<p>It sounds as if the P and VP are double teaming you. I don’t
understand this “pushing him forward” talk. First, it sounds like your
son is doing the pushing (or the pulling). Secondly, it’s just different
content, and only slightly more advanced. It’s not like Biology
is rocket science.</p>
<p>Kelowna:</p>
<p>We found that scheduling was the biggest concern. Both the k-8 school and the high school had rotating schedules; alas, they did not rotate along the same axes:(. But the teachers were very supportive, as was the principal, who wrote a letter to the high school principal on S’s behalf as required by the district. It also helped that AP-Physics was in the afternoon, so there was no going back and forth between the two schools; but that involved tweaking the k-8 schedule to make it happen.
As for pushing a kid or trying to make him “smarter,” we were just trying to prevent S from being bored. And it was the 7th grade science teacher who told us that 8th grade curriculum was going to bore S. The Physics class did not appear either on his k-8 or high school transcript, but that did not matter to him or us.
Regarding the high school atmosphere, S went straight to the Physics class, and from there, straight to his after school activities. So he was not jostled about or bullied by bigger high school kids. </p>
<p>As for geology, I don’t know why it’s taught in middle school. Students would get a whole lot more out of the course if they took it after they had learned some physics, chemistry and biology. The year my S skipped 8th grade science was the year a substitute was hired. He did not have a background in science but he was fascinated by hurricanes and tornadoes, and I understand that he got the students hooked on science through his discussion of meteorology.</p>
<p>I’m another who thinks that if the MS course is going to be superficial and dull for your son, he should skip it. It can be a great class, and it was one of my favorite classes when I was in 9th grade, but how well a class is taught is so important. If your son is just going to be bored, perhaps the school could let him skip science class altogether and so something through self-study. There are so many great distance ed. classes available now. I expect there’s no way the school would ever pay for your son to do a CTY class in school?</p>