The Uneven Student

silversas
Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:11:48 +0000

I am so glad you started this thread… I was actually reading the old “lopsided” thread when you started this one!

I would like to add to the mix. My son will be a challenging applicant. He is a Junior now, at a teeny, tiny private school with no AP, honors or even regular classes. He is really only recently paying attention to academics, and is extraordinarily gifted in math. He is pretty much teaching himself calculus self paced, and we haven’t completely figured out what he will do senior year, maybe take MIT’s open courseware physics with calc course as an “applied math” course.

On the other hand, although he writes really well from an elegant, grammatical, persuasive, vocabulary point of view, he hates anything having to do with metaphor or poetry, hates and has difficulty reading (dyslexic and other issues) and his actual knowledge is hit or miss because of his school being organized by topics rather than full year courses.

As for actual grades, his GPA (nothing to weight) is about 3.4, which includes an F and C in reading group in 9th grade, after than he was graded pass no credit in reading group (English) until he was able to do enough work to be graded. Otherwise pretty much all A’s and B’s, and IMHO graded very hard – he has gotten B’s in Calculus even though he is doing 100% correct work as the only Calc student because the teacher thinks he can do the work at a faster pace (he does have really severe processing issues, but I don’t like to interfere with high standards and argue about grades!)

EC’s were nonexistent, and can still be said to be nonexistent unless we get creative. School has none, and he is anxious. On the other hand, he just built his 4th computer… and for a school project this time he wrote and documented a “how to build a computer” manual. He runs some sort of server, and a more than typically complex network for our house. He taught himself more Japanese than my other S learned in a semester course at college.

PSAT was high enough for merit commendation, not high enough for merit scholarship in Maryland. I was surprised at how well he did on the reading and writing sections because of his LD. He is taking SAT’s soon, but he refuses to do prep because he doesn’t want to play the “game.” (S1 took that position as well, but did a little prep to raise scores a second time around. We shall see).

Next week we are looking at Johns Hopkins… not because we think he has a snowball’s chance to get in, but just so he can see what an intense, competitive, strong math science school of that size is like. We’ll also look at Goucher, which seems like a reasonable option, and another day we are looking at U. Md. Baltimore County.

I don’t need a specific response about my son now… I feel pretty set in where we are in the exploratory process… a lot to learn… But of course new ideas always welcome!!!