Online can be expensive. Not all districts underwrite the cost. You can’t assume this is as easy for all as it is for one. We’re talking reality, not ideal.
Suggest to hold her back a year.
Then meet her in the middle and keep her in with her grade.
@lookingforward connections academy is public curriculum and free option. I do my schooling from houston independant school district. They send books and give you software needed.
I don’t think I explained myself at all actually. I do have add, my doctor thinks so as her daughter is almost the same as me.
I think a bigger issue is having never been forced to work and actually being able to excel without it causes smart kids with add to get into trouble later on.
I actually tried to work, really hard in studying. I would put in 12+ hours into school. I couldn’t get above a 3.5 gpa because I couldn’t focus. This is attributed to having mild add(my mom has this and is actually on meds) and never having worked before. I never learned how to overcome it as many kids had, and I found myself just depressed and upset about my grades. This year I finally got on meds as a reccomendation from my doctor, very low dose of add meds and I have a 3.778 gpa with 9 courses and 5 of them being ap level. AP eng lit 4 ap us gov ap environmental science ap earth and space science and ap art history.
This mentality is something which also drives some loopy activists and their political allies to try eradicate gifted and selective public magnet high school programs in the name of “equality” where equality really means forcing all students to be taught to the LCD. A LCD which often means the standardized pacing is that of extreme low end of average in many public school districts to avoid criticisms from parents and those very activists that the school is “too hard” for kids at the lower end of the average or below and is thus, “elitist.”*
It was also the mentality used by some junior high teachers/admins to justify keeping the junior high bullies in school even after the local police have caught them red handed assaulting other students and local passersby.
In my mind and those of classmates and our parents…it seemed those educrats/many teachers were more concerned about protecting the local juvenile delinquents** and complying with their parents’ wishes than ensuring the school provided a safe educational environment for those of us who were even taking our education even halfway seriously. Did I mention I was attending what was and is still regarded as one of the best middle schools in NYC if one doesn’t include specialized G & T schools.
And this mentality among educrats isn’t restricted to the urban inner-city.
One computing client I had ended up having to use his extensive experience as a retired DA to help his granddaughter and her parents fight educrats in one of the wealthiest school districts in a midwestern state who were trying to keep a violent stalker IN THE SCHOOL despite the fact he was convicted twice of assault and stalking when he threw the granddaughter down the stairs and both sets of judges openly stated that in their assessment…he was too dangerous to be allowed to stay in that high school and that he should be sent to a “reform school” or educated in juvie hall.
Seems like the convicted violent stalker was from a well-off family with some influence with the local school district which factored into their seeming fanatical efforts to keep him in the school regardless of the fact that would mean he’d be in close proximity with the victim of his violent assault and stalking.
- In contrast...while not necessarily a better system, the educational systems in many other societies up to the end of middle school/junior high tended to be a single track geared towards the academically top portion(top quarter to half) with the academically bottom portion expected to do their best to keep up or be left by the wayside. In those societies, it was parents of those at the academic bottom/average who were expected to seek help and outside tutoring...not those in the top portion. While this system has its own issues, it also meant far less students needed to be skipped or to take more advanced classes as the pacing was already set to cater more to their academic needs.
** When visiting my junior high campus several years afterwards, bumped into a police officer who remembered dealing with those delinquents back when we were attending junior high. According to him, they all ended up serving lengthy terms in Rikers/upstate prisons once their advancing age and frequency/seriousness of crimes meant even the public school educrats who were inclined were no longer able to protect them from being prosecuted and imprisoned for increasingly serious crimes including felonies.
Not all districts endorse or accept online, much less pay or provide books. And that’s for various reasons, some that make little real sense.
Nor is homeschooling a one size fits all. I’m a huge fan, when done well- but that’s far from just putting a kid in front of online courses.
What this thread is revealing is many tales and different takes. It shows how hard the decision can be to have a kid leap or sit back. Most of us adults- and some of our kids now in college- seem to have weathered whichever choice. But in terms of how the kid evolves to, say, 20, the decision is complex.
Neither of my over 20 year old kids can drive though they both took lessons and the younger one claims he’s going to work on it again. He actually went to the driving test last fall, but was missing paperwork. So frustrating! Honestly he can’t afford a car, I’m not anxious to pay the big jump in insurance. Some of his friends drive, but of those only a tiny handful have a car of their own. Many live in NYC now and don’t drive.
There are no perfect solutions, but my son was a lot happier doing third grade math than first grade math.
@lookingforward It’s statewide, only 1 school does connections academy in 1 district
I live 200 miles form houston and I’m a part of hisd
Sometimes you don’t know what the future will bring. When I sent my 4.5 year old to K (about 3 months younger than should have been allowed by the state cut off), she was the size of a typical 5 years old, she was very verbal, very bossy, had good pre-school skills. She was ready for K. I didn’t know she’d become an athlete and be looking for a scholarship when she was still growing physically. It would have been a lot better for her if she’d had another year for everything - athletics, academics, maturity, driving the car (she has a license, just hasn’t driven all that much)
So in today’s comic strip, not only is Sarah admitted to the presumably prestigious private academy and allowed to skip first grade, she is also getting a full scholarship. Dr. Morgan was getting ready to discuss tuition when he was told so clearly the family didn’t apply for it! And also clearly not need based.
@cobrat:
Yep, schools definitely are based around the LCD, and worse the whole structure of them is to basically force all kids down to that level. Doing that makes it a lot easier for teachers to create these detailed lesson plans that have everything all neatly planned out to the middle, but have zero latitude if a kid is outside that. Worse, the teachers instead of enjoying the challenge of a bright kid, often resent the fact that the kid disrupts their neat little lesson plan and regimented classroom, and when a parent tries to get in touch with them when they feel the kid is having trouble, the teacher will refuse to talk to them, or will make cutesy statements like "oh, another parent with their ‘little genius’ (I apologize to the good teachers who at the very least will admit that the school rules don’t allow them to do much and express frustration at the system). What is even worse is you get “oh, if your kid finishes their work fast, they can help the slower learners” (um, this is a kid, not a teacher’s assistant, and while helping the slower learners might in theory help the teacher, it doesn’t do anything for the bright kid), and the BS about how this prepares a kid for ‘real life’ , I wonder what would happen if we told the baseball coach or the football coach that they had to play everyone and that if the star athletes didn’t like it, ‘they should get used to it’?
Parents don’t help much, the biggest argument for getting rid of G and T programs is “that is elitist, it isn’t fair”…yet the same parents will turn around and vote to spend a million bucks on improving the football stadium, yet sports is as elitist as it gets, since only those good enough to play the game are on the team.
The reason for even thinking of skipping kids is as a bandaid for the reality that the one size fits all classroom doesn’t work for a lot of students.
Si was a savvy kid from when he started school. He resented getting more work than the other kids if he finished the class’ work early. He preferred getting different work than his classmates. Why should he be punished for being at a higher level than the curriculum by having to do more work than his classmates?
@shellfell:
What you describe is pretty typical with the bright kids who finish early, the teacher turns around and gives them more of the same worksheets they had already finished early to ‘keep them busy’, with the obvious problem that the kid isn’t learning anything (if they finished the work they were doing, let’s say in long division, how does doing more problems in the same area do anything, it is obvious the kid already knows how to do it). It tells how many teachers see the bright kids, rather than seeing them as something to be challenged and nurtured, they see them as an irritant disrupting the rest of the classroom (giving a kid more of the same work they had already finished is like a parent plopping a kid in front of the tv set or on the computer, it is using the tv or computer to distract the kid, it is to get the kid from ‘bothering them’, rather than trying to actually do something for the kid).
The other problem is that the assumption is that gifted kids are simply kids who learn things faster, and that causes problems too, because gifted kids are a lot more than kids who learn things fast, they also tend to learn things differently. I can remember back in grade school, we were learning about decimal numbers, adding/subtracting/mutliplying/dividing them, which I already knew how to do (and the teacher knew it, she had run me through some material when I told her I knew how to do it, and she admitted I knew it well). Anyway, by that point I already understood scientific notation, so I could do decimal math via exponents, so when I was made to do the problems, I would challenge myself and do them that way. I did that on a test as well, and the teacher gave me an “F”, even though I got the answers right, telling me that “I had to do it the same way”…and then sent me to the principal’s office when I protested that I knew how to do it the other way. Fortunately neither of my parents were in awe of teachers (my dad had taught me scientific notation) and when they found out what happened they were livid and they backed me up.Basically, what the teacher and the principal argued was that it was important that kids in the classroom do things in lockstep, follow the curricula, so the classroom could be an 'orderly learning experience", which basically translates into their nice little machine paced to the middle.
I have heard plenty of these stories, so this is not unusual. My son was in a youth symphony, not surprisingly there were more then a few out there kids in it, and I remember one mom almost in tears with frustration with her daughter. The girl was in like 7th grade, and was reading at something like a post bachelor level of reading.The school was typical, they had a class where they had the old ‘reading groups’ and such, where the kids went through a standard reading textbook, reading each story then having a test on it. The girl read the book in a couple of days, told the teacher, and he didn’t believe it, gave her the tests at the back of several chapters, including the final test the book had, and she pretty much aced it…and then told her she had to go through the book with the rest of the class. Worse, when the mom tried to get in touch with the teacher, he refused even to return her calls, and when she complained to the principal, she said that “you have to understand, the teachers are busy people” (too busy to talk to a parent about a student? What the hell are they doing, solving global terrorism or working out how the Higgs Boson works?).
What is really despicable is many teachers groups go out of their way to claim that gifted kids don’t exist, either they come up with some sort of kumbayah "all kids are gifted’ nonsense, or they make claims that gifted kids don’t exist at all, that gifted kids are a construct of parents seeing their ‘little dears’ as geniuses and pushing for them to get special attention, rather than it being what they are, kids with different abilities. I remember one of the big gifted kids advocacy groups (woman by the name of Silverman runs it) went ballistic, when the NEA at one of their big conferences actually had a presentation on “How gifted kids really don’t exist”, and apparently the gist of it was that the concept of gifted kids was a construct of advocacy groups with an agenda and pushy parents, and how their experience showed that kids did best when they learned to follow the rest of the class, that the ‘fast learners’ could find fulfillment in helping the slower learners, and that the real problem was the parents and gifted groups ‘interfering’ in the world of professional teachers…basically, self serving drivel (though the NEA seems to like gifted kids when school districts have things like gifted program coordinators and the like, because that means extra $$$ for those moved into those positions).
And of course, it doesn’t help much that many parents and ‘ordinary’ people see gifted education as some sort of frill to ‘help the elites’ and resent it. One of the biggest ironies happened in a a local district, that had a decent G and T program, they eliminated the G and T program due to 'budget constraints, but in the same budget they allocated something like a million bucks to redo the football field with field turf and a new fancy scoreboard, and they floated a 15 million dollar bond issue on the ballot to build a new field house and athletic facilities…the irony there being that one form of giftedness, athleticism, is ‘okay’ while for kids who are out there in terms of intellectual ability, it is ‘elitism’ and ‘unfair’, so spending millions on a football stadium that benefits the kids on the football (and usually track and maybe soccer) teams is okay, who make up a small percent of the school population, but on challenging gifted kids it is ‘elitism’.
Welcome to the world of factory education, designed to turn out product for society.
All very true, musicprnt. Our school system’s G&T program was watered down to where it was useless. By state statute, all schools have to do is identify kids as G&T, but they don’t have to do anything. There were also school board members who took the attitude that all kids should have these opportunities, including taking AP courses, regardless of prior testing or teacher recommendations. Their rationale was that G&T only benefited a small group of students, but, of course, didn’t use the same rationale when it came to the athletic teams.
Yep…this is the same BS several friends who attended M.Ed programs including those in the top 3 were exposed to from many courses in the Ed school curriculum and Ed school classmates who in their words “drank the kool-aid”. Some HS classmates who dealt with such teachers in K-8 later on mused on whether some of this was “hating on the gifted/intellectual/above average smart kids” because of personal jealousy as we’ve all later found Ed schools…including top 3 graduate M.Ed/Ed.D tended to have far lower undergrad GPA/GRE requirements than other divisions within the same given university*.
A former roommate who attended one of those top 3 M.Ed programs also found most of what he learned in his M.Ed in order to get certified to teach was inapplicable to the classroom once he started student teaching and moreso once he became a full-time middle/high school teacher in a STEM field.
- My former post-college roommate and a dormmate from undergrad were both admitted to a top 3 M.Ed program with sub 3.0 cumulative undergrad GPAs and GREs a few hundred points below what would be considered minimums to be viable candidates in the university's academic Arts & Sciences/Engineering MA/MS/PhD programs.**
In fact, both were actually awarded 50% scholarships to attend despite the fact neither were URMs and one came from a well off full-pay family.
** This phenomenon is from what I’ve observed is very well-known among grad students in other graduate divisions and a few Arts & Sciences PhD students along with law/med students I’ve known on the same given elite university campuses tended to regard their graduate Ed school counterparts as being of a much lower academic caliber than themselves or counterparts in other divisions.
In fact, a few older relatives and family friends who attended an elite U(Columbia) for grad/professional school recounted such attitudes by grad students outside Teachers College towards TC students were already quite openly expressed among grad classmates back in the '60s. Something which didn’t seem to change much during my frequent visits to grad student friends and a few grad/Professional student dates I’ve had from Columbia.
Since there is no real kid at issue here and we are posting advisory opinions I am very glad I had my now middle school Christmas baby held back for a second kindergarten when she was 4. I think she has had some real advantages to being on the older end of the spectrum. It helps that she is in a amazing stand alone gifted program so intellectual challenge wasn’t an issue. I was skeptical at the time but at puberty am grateful. I look at her one grade higher peers (who she was once in kindergarten with) and see a stark physical difference.
@shellfell wrote “Our school system’s G&T program was watered down to where it was useless”
When we were looking at houses in the Atlanta area I was simultaneously looking at public elementary schools. When I asked about the G&T for one school they opened a broom closet where they had set up a chess board and said “the smart kids go in here to hang out”. This was a school where the majority of the kids were still learning to speak English, so the G&T kids were a tiny minority and not the focus.
It still sticks in my head after all these years-it felt very Harry Potter-y cupboard-under-the stairs-y. I was looking for Hogwarts…
@shellfell:
I don’t know where you live, but what you describe is NJ in a nutshell, they have mandates at the state level that schools have to support “accelerated” learners, but the state has neither guidelines what those students are, they don’t mention what should be done to support them, and of course, offer 0 bucks to schools in funding them. When our dear governor was asked about G and T and the fact that NJ does nothing about it in the public schools, his response was something to the effect that if parents felt the schools didn’t offer the right program for their kids they could take them elsewhere, meaning private school…I remember years ago, of all people, When Mike Huckabee said that our education system was a disgrace because it did little to nothing for the brightest students, I was in shock.
I live in an area that is known for good schools, that turn out something like 90% of the kids going to college, where test scores are pretty high and so forth, and the county as a whole has some really good schools as a whole (even the lowest achieving towns in the state are light years ahead of trouble spots like Newark and Paterson), yet what passes for G and T is usually some form of one day a week ‘pull out enrichment’ program, that usually gets kids in 6-8 or maybe 4-8 out of some class like Health or something. The irony is that the NYC schools, with all their problems, actually do have setups for bright kids, things like the Hunter school, or the gifted programs in various districts, not to mention the specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. I think my father had it nailed, I remember when I was in high school, and at some event (NHS induction maybe), and the principal was boasting to a group of parents about how well the students in the high school did, going to good schools for college, etc…and my father asked him “But what did you really do? Look at the background these kids come from, the parents for the most part are college educated, lot of engineers, doctors, other white collar parents, what did you do but simply use what you were given?” and over the years I realized he was right, that they were perfectly happy turning out the product they had and didn’t really care about improving it.
There was an issue a couple of years ago, the school ended up turning a science classroom into office space for some administrator (I think district), and when asked why they would do that, they said that they needed the space and didn’t want to spend the money to create new office space, so a science lab was sacrificed (despite what they claimed, a reporter confirmed the lost lab space was that, lost) and some people (sadly not a lot) were up in arms. Meanwhile, while claiming fiscal poverty, the district tried to float a 20 million dollar bond issue to build new field houses for both high schools in the district and to build state of the art football stadiums with digital scoreboards and all kinds of things. I realize this was a bond issue, not operating budget, but those bonds would still be paid by the district, which would be money not spent on education. I was very thankful there were people who paid attention, that bond issue was voted down (and the sports parents were vocally up in arms, funny, never saw them complain when they cut back academic programs or teachers or had to let go a music teacher), but it tells a lot about attitudes. There is this weird belief in this country, that IMO underlies some of the political stuff we see, that somehow it isn’t the bright kids who create new futures, that somehow the future comes from having people in ‘the middle’, that keeping people in ‘the middle’ is where we should be, it reminds me when someone extols a political candidate and says “I want to vote for someone just like me, that I can understand” and all I can do is think “If I am going to vote for someone, I want them to be different than me, someone better than me, I don’t want a dummy voting for me in congress or otherwise running around”.
@MotherOfDragons :
That closet you mention is appropo of the way many schools think of bright kids, they are grateful that the kids blow out test scores without a lot of work, but they otherwise would like to lock them away in a cupboard someplace and not have to deal with them.
walk into a high school, and it is obvious, they often have a display case with trophies and such. I debated in high school, got to know a bunch of the kids from other schools, and while some of them won state and national tournaments,had all kinds of distinctions for their debate program, if they displayed the trophies and such not won in athletics (if at all), it would be in the debate coaches classroom or a small display case inside the offices of the school, not exactly seen as being part of school pride. My high school debate team my senior year won a multi state debating tournament, a big one, and I think it merited two lines in the school paper and the trophy and plaques we got were in storage.
@musicprnt we finally did find an elementary and middle school that had a good G&T program.
In the middle school the robotics team has their own trophy case in the front. The girls put more than a few in there during their stint ;), but I agree with you that seeing the case with non-sports trophies (they also had a spelling bee trophy case and several other academic ones, in addition to the sports trophies). makes an impression on the kids in a positive way, and those trophies should be displayed.
Such an interesting thread. I didn’t have to deal with advancing my sons, just whether they should start kindergarten with late August birthdays in our schools which have a 9/1 cut-off. With my oldest I didn’t think twice… he was so ready academically and socially so he started school about 8 days before his 5th birthday. Plus he made the deadline, so why hold him back? With my second son, he was ready academically but really didn’t socialize as much with his preschool peer group so I really thought about this. If I held him back (with a birthday one day different from his brother) would it bother him later when he realized 3 years behind instead of two? Would he be bored if we held him back? Would he make friends if we didn’t? I talked to my oldest son’s first grade teacher and she said to hold him back so he could be a leader as he’d be one of the oldest in the class. In the end we looked at my son and his personality. It was already clear that he was more quiet and introverted. We decided that it would be worse to NOT be a leader when he was the oldest in the class, than to not be the leader because he was the youngest. It turned out that starting school on time, as the youngest, was the right decision for him (and my oldest). Two of his best friends ended up being a whole year older than him (one had a September birthday and one had the same birthday a year ahead) so socially he did fine. (He wasn’t the most popular, but did have a good amount of friends for his personality.) Academically he did great - was the valedictorian of his large high school (as was his older brother). I can’t imagine holding either of them back. I did hate though that so many people did, so my kids (who went to school in the right time frame) were not only the youngest by 12 months, but sometimes the youngest by almost two years. Looking at those “older” kids, they may have had the advantage in some school sports, but none of them were so academically ahead or the leaders of the class.
P.S. - In our area sports, most of the intramurals etc. are based on age. For soccer and baseball, my kids ended up playing a year “behind” making them the oldest on the teams. My kids are not really athletically gifted, so this did give them a little help for their elementary years. For their school sports, they played with their grade and they had fun but never were the starters/stars - more for ability than age. They went out for the robotics team etc. in high school which was more their interest.