Mine did nothing but resting for the first two months. But during this last month, she is reviewing all math curriculum leading to precalc since basic math. She has learned the concept, but never had adequate practices and forgot majority of them. She was concerned if she would fall behind in her coming precalc course.
It’s quite intense 5~6 hours practice each day, with Aleks.com online curriculum. I would say in 4 weeks she is doing more than the kids in the OP article, who are covering a whole year’s course in six weeks.
Recently I was reviewing the Aleks.com’s Algebra II and the school’s Precalc curriculum, I see the line is getting blur, and a lot of concepts in Aleks’s alg II is repeated in the school’s precalc. I am not sure what’s really review and what’s really preview any more, as it seems precalc is half repeated in alg II and half repeated in calc.
At any rate, she will do what she does, and I always encourage her to do what she wants to do.
In the bottom line. Studying is student’s business and more studying is generally a good thing, as long as the student is not overworked and willing. Isn’t it? Or should we constantly worry if our kids are not getting too much advantages and not fairly competing by studying too hard?
Next Summer, she wants to take a 4 weeks full time workshop. In a European atelier’s New Jersey branch. By full-time it means morning to evening with adult artists. While not an academic program, the intensity will make it more work than a year’s work of a typical AP Studio Art course, not with an academic credential, but with equally valuable portfolio to show. It will be giving her huge advantage where a good portfolio matters. But she will do it for the love of doing arts. How would that be different from a Lawrence school kid taking 6 weeks long math program that covers a whole year’s curriculum, if the kid loves math? What rights do we have to hold them off?
This “previewing” thing is just bizarre. I don’t think I’d quite consider it “cheating” or “unethical”, but it doesn’t feel 100% right either. My solution would try to find a way to make sure it’s listed on a student’s transcript - no idea how you’d enforce that though. Then colleges can decide for themselves what to think about a kid who got an “A” in a class after having taken it before Personally, I would say it means that the transcript overstates the kid’s native academic ability and I should assume they aren’t as smart as their GPA indicates.
I feel much differently about taking a class during the summer to get enrichment or to get ahead so they can take a more advanced class during the year. Fine by me if people decide that’s how they want to spend their summers and their money. One of our kids went away for an intensive robotics/computer class during the summer just to see if they liked that sort of stuff. It was 3 hours a day, so they had plenty of time to do other things and to socialize with their friends, etc.
Another big benefit at that age was that it lets them be on their own for a few weeks, socializing with other students and being responsible for managing their own time and balancing work and fun without mom and dad around. I think that’s actually more important than whatever they’re learning in class since they can figure out what works for them and they can make their mistakes when the stakes are low. Better than crashing and burning when they go off to college.
Summer enrichment for low SES students to help them get ahead in life sounds pretty cool to me too … assuming the programs work, of course.
This happens a lot at my D’s school, and both of my kids have taken summer courses to knock out a requirement (gym) or to take a first level science class in order to take an AP level the following year (child’s choice to do that, not mine). The school does not allow a student to take the same class again, though.
I admit that it never occurred to me that this was creating big advantages for the wealthier kids but it’s plain that it does. The question is, how do you stop this train?
Our school lets kids check out text books over the summer. I suspect that few do. My kids did. Son was more likely to read over the summer than my daughter. For a physics class he ended up reading more than half the text book over the summer. No one pushed him to do that. He just did it on his own. Probably gave him something of an advantage at least at the start of a class. Should that not be permitted?
There is nothing wrong with taking some courses over the summer. Yes, having $ for additional classes, tutors, etc., is an advantage, but most AO’s at elite schools will take that that into account.
The real issue is the high pressure environment it can create in very competitive school districts, where you HAVE to take classes over the summer, just to keep up with your peers.
The difference to me is when a kid pretakes a class so that when they take the class at school they will appear smart to the teacher and they will get easy As. Like it or not, part of what’s being assessed is how readily students master material. We don’t allow high school calculus students to go back and retake their algebra 1 final exam to improve their grade, even though their algebra 1 skills have likely improved substantially by then with all the subsequent years of practice. Nor do we allow 12th graders to go back and re-write that 9th grade English paper they got a B or C on.
In this context, yes, taking the entire course beforehand and then enrolling with students who have not previously taken the course isn’t very ethical. Our high school doesn’t allow pretakers into summer school.
If a student is very interested in a subject and wants to take it for credit over the summer, or wants to check off some school requirement for health or something like that so that they can spend their time during the school year doing things of more interest to them, I don’t see a problem with that. Summer school every single summer though isn’t a good idea since I think it deprives kids of unstructured time that is also important for their development.
Are these overprepared, hyper-performing kids achieving the assumed goal, that is, getting into HYPSM? If they have become uninteresting, uncreative, cookie-cutter drones, then no.
What about all the kids who take AP classes and then go to private colleges that don’t give credit or placement? My daughter took AP Chemistry and AP Biology and had to repeat them. It wasn’t until the middle of the second semester that she did a lab she hadn’t done in high school.
That the assumed goal of education is getting into HYPSM is more a problem than the over-competitiveness being complained about here. Though its more an assumed goal here than in the real world.
Those kids should have checked the policy of the college before applying if they didn’t want to be forced to repeat. And yes, it’s a problem. I remember a post a few years back about a student at a LAC who was discouraged in calculus. Turned out they were the only one in the class who hadn’t already taken calculus.
This is why you don’t preview the course in your own school system’s summer school. You go to a private program. And I suspect that you don’t mention it to anyone at your high school or on your college applications.
“Those kids should have checked the policy of the college before applying”
They couldn’t have known what colleges they were applying when they were registering for the AP course, more so on what colleges would accept them.
" if they didn’t want to be forced to repeat. "
I have been keep hearing that the entry courses at top colleges are so much harder and richer that it is interest of the students to repeat what they have already taken with AP. So probably they didn’t mind it from the beginning, but only want to do what was most challenging at the moment.
“Turned out they were the only one in the class who hadn’t already taken calculus.”
That’s what happens when you trust Ada Wong
"You go to a private program. "
That doesn’t even have to be expensive. $20/mo subscription for Aleks.com works better than anything at the moment for my daughter.
A private school in a nearby school district offers “preview” and “full versions” of many AP math/science courses over a 5 week term in the summer. 4 hours of classes Mon - Friday plus tons of homework. Not sure how many kids in our district take those courses, but they are quite popular from what a friend who lives in that area told me. It’s not something my kid would do.
There are summer athletic camps and summer music camps for students to hone their skills. No one seems bothered by that. If some kid wants to spend 10 hours a day the entire summer taking an academic class or two, why should that bother the NY times writer so much? At any rate, all these “advantages” that the upper middle class have are already well known to the adcoms, so I am not sure why the NY Times keeps trotting out these types of articles.
Because many parents and educators think that being a kid is not about doing academics 24/7. And they think that academics have value in themselves, and are not just the means to a perfect GPA or an elite school. And they think that life is more than a race to grab some brass ring at all costs, a brass ring that always seems out of grasp.
That’s very common here. One year my son had an AP class in the fall and every student had taken a “get ahead” tutoring class in that subject during summer except for my son and one other student. My son was initially concerned, afraid that the teacher might move at a faster than normal pace, but that didn’t happen and he did fine.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned how mind numbingly boring school must be for students who do much of this. Previewing a class by being taught the entire class for no credit and then retaking it? I don’t understand how the really smart kids manage to do this for more than an odd class here or there.
And a student reviewing class books on their own, like Hermoine Granger did in HP, is vastly different. If they do it in depth, it’s still more like the difference between reading Spark Notes (or Cliff Notes for us old people) and then a novel vs reading a novel twice in the span of a month.
Looking in the rear view mirror with 2 kids out of college and in the workforce, I have to say the jobs they had as teens probably “helped” them in life more than the value of a move-ahead class in high school. It really is different strokes for different folks. I guess I was more concerned with throughput…meaning “through college and into the workforce” rather than through high school and into a college.
Personally, I would say it means that the transcript overstates the kid’s native academic ability and I should assume they aren’t as smart as their GPA indicates.