Last night I checked the school website for the first time in months. I noticed there was still a link for gifted, even though the program has been eliminated by budget cuts. I clicked it.
“Due to budget cuts, the gifted program has been eliminated. Any differentiation for students will come solely from the child's classroom teacher. If you have any questions you can contact XX, former gifted resource teacher.” The former gifted resource teacher will be teaching fifth grade this year. At another school.
In a week and a half, AJ will start fourth grade. We've decided to leave him in his current school and grade, at least for now. It will be his fifth and last year at his elementary school (our district starts middle school in grade 5). It’s the first year we will have no formal assistance with his curriculum, the first year class sizes will top 30 (AJ’s grade will be one of the most overcrowded at 34 per class), the first year with a 5.75 hour day instead of 6.5 hours. We don’t really know what to expect out of this year or even what to hope for in terms of teachers. There are just too many wild cards.
On Wednesday, the class lists will go up and on Thursday, we’ll be meeting with whoever will be AJ’s teacher for the next nine months. At this point, it’s kind of a formality. The school has an enormous file on AJ. But it makes sure that the teacher’s seen that file and lets us get a sense of what to expect and how we might be able to help with his curriculum. And the preparation for the meeting gives us a chance to think about what we want AJ to accomplish this year. Now that AJ’s getting over, I want to include him in some of the thinking. What does he want to accomplish? Does he want to do some projects? Learn something new? Have more time to practice piano or make some art?
We are trying to view this period of change as an opportunity. The shortened day gives us time to do more work at home, which may ultimately be a good thing. I've always thought a combination of public and home school would be good for him and now we have a chance to try it. I suggested to AJ that we work on a foreign language and he picked Latin. He’s had some Spanish, so he’s able to read some basics already. Thanks to Percy Jackson, he’s interested in mythology, which we’ve approached to date solely from the Greek side. But he knows the Roman names from his interest in astronomy. His fascination with all things disaster led him to do some reading about Pompeii, so he knows a little about the culture from there.
Although Latin is not my strongest language – I had several years of it in high school, but didn’t much pursue it beyond the Latin I use as a musician or during the time I was a music director for a schismatic Catholic church that did the pre-Vatican II Mass where everything was Latin but the homily. But I didn’t have to think twice about a textbook. We’re using the wonderful Cambridge Latin Course, which unlike many Latin texts, teaches it as if it’s a living language. There is a ton of cultural information in the books and lots of beautiful pictures. Although I used the book in high school, there is nothing here inappropriate for a bright nine-year-old. Best of all, the series’ website (see link above) includes online activities for the books, including a feature called “explore the text” which lets you read the texts in the book with the option of clicking on any word to get a definition. These materials are free. If you’re not confident enough teach Latin yourself, there’s even a distance learning option for a fee. We had our first lesson today. I’m hoping it holds his interest. We’ll let you know how it goes!
Showing posts with label homeschooling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeschooling. Show all posts
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Transfer students
I've been finding links to this story, about a home-schooled gifted boy who tries to go to public high school, in a lot of gifted forums over the last couple of days. I feel for this kid, I do. Schools can be really frustrating to work with, as the parents of this boy know -- they pulled him out of public schools when the school's couldn't adequately handle his needs. And no one should have to take the same classes over again if he's already passed them. But I also feel like this is not totally responsible journalism. This is a very one-sided article. The school cannot adequately respond, thanks to privacy laws. And no investigation into their point of view appears to have taken place.
I think the problem here is not so much the giftedness that the author focuses on as the transfer of home-schooled students into the public schools. Schools have strict guidelines they need to follow in order to ensure students have met state mandates. This may or may not be the right approach for any given kid's education, but it's the way public schools work. It does seem to me that community college classes should count for high school providing they meet the requirements of the equivalent class. But do they? The author doesn't tell us that.
Maybe this school really is the bad guy. But in my experience, many, if not most, schools can be convinced to do the right thing if you handle it in the right way. When I was about to start my junior year in high school, I moved to a large urban public high school in Indianapolis, IN, after spending my first two years of high school in Connecticut and France. My Connecticut schools were public too, but were smaller and much more like college prep. I arrived at my new school a year ahead in English and French, and I'd finished the Latin curriculum the new school offered but wanted to keep studying. I was behind in history because, after spending a number of years in Europe, I'd never studied American history. And as my previous school had reduced gym requirements, I had to take freshman gym and health in my senior year -- oh, the humiliation! The school could have told me to just take the courses they offered. It was a huge and very bureaucratic place. But they didn't. In junior English, when the class read Macbeth, which I'd studied the previous year, I worked on Hamlet as an independent study. At every juncture where I'd studied something previously, the teacher let me choose another relevant work instead. In French and Latin, I attended a regular class and got practice speaking, but the teachers assigned me my own work that I did on my own in the back of the room. For the rest of my courses, I was able to make adjustments on my own. By high school, I was my own best advocate. I didn't need my parents' help. And my teachers were just happy, I think, to have a student who wanted to work more instead of less.
As far as I can tell, the difference in my case is that I didn't ask for alternate classes, only alternate work. I wasn't trying to get out of high school early. I just wanted to be challenged. I didn't have to deal with the administration or school board. I worked with the teachers themselves. If there was any red tape to be handled, they handled it. I also wasn't trying to transfer in credit from community college or homeschool curriculums, which may be more difficult. But it seems to me that if the issue is keeping a child challenged, going through the bureaucracy of the school is not the only way to handle it, nor is it even necessarily the best way.
I think the problem here is not so much the giftedness that the author focuses on as the transfer of home-schooled students into the public schools. Schools have strict guidelines they need to follow in order to ensure students have met state mandates. This may or may not be the right approach for any given kid's education, but it's the way public schools work. It does seem to me that community college classes should count for high school providing they meet the requirements of the equivalent class. But do they? The author doesn't tell us that.
Maybe this school really is the bad guy. But in my experience, many, if not most, schools can be convinced to do the right thing if you handle it in the right way. When I was about to start my junior year in high school, I moved to a large urban public high school in Indianapolis, IN, after spending my first two years of high school in Connecticut and France. My Connecticut schools were public too, but were smaller and much more like college prep. I arrived at my new school a year ahead in English and French, and I'd finished the Latin curriculum the new school offered but wanted to keep studying. I was behind in history because, after spending a number of years in Europe, I'd never studied American history. And as my previous school had reduced gym requirements, I had to take freshman gym and health in my senior year -- oh, the humiliation! The school could have told me to just take the courses they offered. It was a huge and very bureaucratic place. But they didn't. In junior English, when the class read Macbeth, which I'd studied the previous year, I worked on Hamlet as an independent study. At every juncture where I'd studied something previously, the teacher let me choose another relevant work instead. In French and Latin, I attended a regular class and got practice speaking, but the teachers assigned me my own work that I did on my own in the back of the room. For the rest of my courses, I was able to make adjustments on my own. By high school, I was my own best advocate. I didn't need my parents' help. And my teachers were just happy, I think, to have a student who wanted to work more instead of less.
As far as I can tell, the difference in my case is that I didn't ask for alternate classes, only alternate work. I wasn't trying to get out of high school early. I just wanted to be challenged. I didn't have to deal with the administration or school board. I worked with the teachers themselves. If there was any red tape to be handled, they handled it. I also wasn't trying to transfer in credit from community college or homeschool curriculums, which may be more difficult. But it seems to me that if the issue is keeping a child challenged, going through the bureaucracy of the school is not the only way to handle it, nor is it even necessarily the best way.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
More adventures in public schools
In November, AJ recieved his first report card of the year and there were more than a few surprises. It has taken me a while to digest it all. This will be the first of what will no doubt be a series of posts on the challenges we are facing with making sure AJ's educational needs are met in a public school.
AJ's report card, while not bad, was not at all what we would have expected. [I wrote about this in detail at spynotes if you're interested, but will recap more succinctly here]. For example, AJ had been coming home from school for weeks complaining about how boring math was. In fact, the day we got his report card was parent visitation day. The first thing AJ did when I walked into the classroom was to drag me over to his desk, open to the back of his math book and say, "Look! See how easy this is?" So I'd been assuming that his teacher (who, I must reiterate, we think is fantastic) hadn't been giving him more challenging math assignments the way she'd been doing in reading. I chalked this up to the fact that either she had too much to do (AJ is in a class of 27 children) or AJ hiding his abilities. But it turns out that his teacher had repeatedly been trying to offer him challenges and he had been turning them down.
I'm not sure AJ was entirely sure why he was engaging in these two contradictory behaviors: begging for more challenging assignments at home; turning them down at school. But later, on a walk to school where AJ and I do our best talking, he was able to articulate it.
"AJ, did you know that when I was a little girl I had to do all my assignments by myself in my class too?"
"Really?"
"I loved having my own work. But I sometimes wished I could be with the other kids."
AJ stopped walking and stared at me. "That's exactly how it is for me."
We talked to his teacher for an hour about AJ's dual needs for challenge and for social engagement. She's very much on the same page as we are. We asked her to stop giving AJ a choice for assignments, because, I think, it's a choice he doesn't really want to have. He's too conflicted to make the decision. We also talked to AJ about how and why he should accept the challenge assignments, and how he will still be able to have time with his peers.
Most of our meeting with AJ's teacher was strategizing for the rest of the year. That part was all good. But at the end, she gave us a word of warning. "In second grade, it's going to be harder. There's much less individualization. You're going to have to be a real advocate for him."
"I'm fully prepared to be as much of a pain in the ass as I have to be."
"Good. You'll need to be."
All of this has returned us the the dilemma that we seem to revisit every year: is this the best place for AJ?
I've begun exploring options and will be writing about it here as I get the chance. First, I've been reading a couple of books on gifted kids. The first, Carol A. Strip's Helping Gifted Children Soar examines a variety of situations and possible solutions. I like that it emphasizes educational fit and I like its tone. There is less of the gifted child/parent as victim stance that turns me off of so much literature. The other book, which I haven't really gotten into yet, is Lisa Rivero's Creative Home Schooling for Gifted Children: A Resource Guide. The one thing I'm fairly certain of at this juncture is that I'm not planning on homeschooling AJ. I don't think it's a good idea for a fundamentally social kid who is also an only child. But I wanted to gain some insight on the homeschooling perspective, to get ideas about what I can do at home, and to come up with ideas that could be implemented for an individual kid working within a standard classroom.
I've also started sketching out options for the future.
1. Stay at current school, in current grade. This is the most likely scenario. AJ's happy there, the school has shown itself willing, if not always able, to help AJ. And it's free, which allows us to enroll AJ in extracurricular activities. If this happens, though, I want to get some kind of plan in place with the school so I don't have to go through this curriculum adjustment process every single year. It takes too long to get it going. AJ wasted two months doing math problems he knew cold 3-4 years ago. It's not fair to him to do this every year. I need to figure out how to get a plan in place that will move with AJ from class to class.
2. Stay at current school, pursue acceleration. Frankly, I've pretty much rejected this option. The school doesn't want to do it. AJ is very much a six-year old in everything but intellectual capacity. And he's demonstrated that he's becoming sort of bilingual in that he'll talk one way to his classmate friends and another way to teachers and us. He seems most comfortable these days with his friend next door, who is in fifth grade. They are much more compatible intellectually and enjoy many of the same things. I'm also not sure accelerating a year would help much. AJ's reading approximately 6 grade levels ahead and doing math at least 2 grades ahead (and I think this might be higher if I were better able to meet his mathematical needs).
3. Change schools. I've made a list of area schools, none closer than 7 miles, none farther than 20, that cater to the gifted or have a reputation for working well with accelerated curricula. I hope to start school visitations in late January/early February. The cons for these are both expense (how on earth would we pay for private school?) and also social (playdates would be rare if his friends live far away). But working under the assumption that scholarships may be possible and relatives might help us out, we're going to investigate anyway.
4. Thinking outside the box. I don't know if the school would go for this at all, but one possibility I'd wondered about was whether AJ could be in the regular classroom for part of the day and homeschooling or doing extra-curricular activities at his level for part of the day. Or perhaps just add extra curricular activities outside school. Can we find a mentoring program? Is there someone at the middle school who could help us with materials? The Center for the Gifted at Northwestern offers online courses. Could he do these at school in lieu of standard curriculum?
The other question we have is about testing. I'm generally opposed to testing, especially at this age. It's less reliable when kids are younger. It's expensive. It labels the kid. I don't see the point unless it's going to get us somewhere. The school will test at the end of second grade, if we can wait that long. But some schools and extra curricular programs will require testing. We need to decide whether it's worth it to us.
That's where things stand. I plan on trying to schedule a meeting with AJ's teacher as soon as I can to follow up on some things we talked about at our conference, namely the possibility of trying to find a child in another class to read with him occasionally so he's not by himself and also to fill her in on his vacation math escapades. Wish us luck.
AJ's report card, while not bad, was not at all what we would have expected. [I wrote about this in detail at spynotes if you're interested, but will recap more succinctly here]. For example, AJ had been coming home from school for weeks complaining about how boring math was. In fact, the day we got his report card was parent visitation day. The first thing AJ did when I walked into the classroom was to drag me over to his desk, open to the back of his math book and say, "Look! See how easy this is?" So I'd been assuming that his teacher (who, I must reiterate, we think is fantastic) hadn't been giving him more challenging math assignments the way she'd been doing in reading. I chalked this up to the fact that either she had too much to do (AJ is in a class of 27 children) or AJ hiding his abilities. But it turns out that his teacher had repeatedly been trying to offer him challenges and he had been turning them down.
I'm not sure AJ was entirely sure why he was engaging in these two contradictory behaviors: begging for more challenging assignments at home; turning them down at school. But later, on a walk to school where AJ and I do our best talking, he was able to articulate it.
"AJ, did you know that when I was a little girl I had to do all my assignments by myself in my class too?"
"Really?"
"I loved having my own work. But I sometimes wished I could be with the other kids."
AJ stopped walking and stared at me. "That's exactly how it is for me."
We talked to his teacher for an hour about AJ's dual needs for challenge and for social engagement. She's very much on the same page as we are. We asked her to stop giving AJ a choice for assignments, because, I think, it's a choice he doesn't really want to have. He's too conflicted to make the decision. We also talked to AJ about how and why he should accept the challenge assignments, and how he will still be able to have time with his peers.
Most of our meeting with AJ's teacher was strategizing for the rest of the year. That part was all good. But at the end, she gave us a word of warning. "In second grade, it's going to be harder. There's much less individualization. You're going to have to be a real advocate for him."
"I'm fully prepared to be as much of a pain in the ass as I have to be."
"Good. You'll need to be."
All of this has returned us the the dilemma that we seem to revisit every year: is this the best place for AJ?
I've begun exploring options and will be writing about it here as I get the chance. First, I've been reading a couple of books on gifted kids. The first, Carol A. Strip's Helping Gifted Children Soar examines a variety of situations and possible solutions. I like that it emphasizes educational fit and I like its tone. There is less of the gifted child/parent as victim stance that turns me off of so much literature. The other book, which I haven't really gotten into yet, is Lisa Rivero's Creative Home Schooling for Gifted Children: A Resource Guide. The one thing I'm fairly certain of at this juncture is that I'm not planning on homeschooling AJ. I don't think it's a good idea for a fundamentally social kid who is also an only child. But I wanted to gain some insight on the homeschooling perspective, to get ideas about what I can do at home, and to come up with ideas that could be implemented for an individual kid working within a standard classroom.
I've also started sketching out options for the future.
1. Stay at current school, in current grade. This is the most likely scenario. AJ's happy there, the school has shown itself willing, if not always able, to help AJ. And it's free, which allows us to enroll AJ in extracurricular activities. If this happens, though, I want to get some kind of plan in place with the school so I don't have to go through this curriculum adjustment process every single year. It takes too long to get it going. AJ wasted two months doing math problems he knew cold 3-4 years ago. It's not fair to him to do this every year. I need to figure out how to get a plan in place that will move with AJ from class to class.
2. Stay at current school, pursue acceleration. Frankly, I've pretty much rejected this option. The school doesn't want to do it. AJ is very much a six-year old in everything but intellectual capacity. And he's demonstrated that he's becoming sort of bilingual in that he'll talk one way to his classmate friends and another way to teachers and us. He seems most comfortable these days with his friend next door, who is in fifth grade. They are much more compatible intellectually and enjoy many of the same things. I'm also not sure accelerating a year would help much. AJ's reading approximately 6 grade levels ahead and doing math at least 2 grades ahead (and I think this might be higher if I were better able to meet his mathematical needs).
3. Change schools. I've made a list of area schools, none closer than 7 miles, none farther than 20, that cater to the gifted or have a reputation for working well with accelerated curricula. I hope to start school visitations in late January/early February. The cons for these are both expense (how on earth would we pay for private school?) and also social (playdates would be rare if his friends live far away). But working under the assumption that scholarships may be possible and relatives might help us out, we're going to investigate anyway.
4. Thinking outside the box. I don't know if the school would go for this at all, but one possibility I'd wondered about was whether AJ could be in the regular classroom for part of the day and homeschooling or doing extra-curricular activities at his level for part of the day. Or perhaps just add extra curricular activities outside school. Can we find a mentoring program? Is there someone at the middle school who could help us with materials? The Center for the Gifted at Northwestern offers online courses. Could he do these at school in lieu of standard curriculum?
The other question we have is about testing. I'm generally opposed to testing, especially at this age. It's less reliable when kids are younger. It's expensive. It labels the kid. I don't see the point unless it's going to get us somewhere. The school will test at the end of second grade, if we can wait that long. But some schools and extra curricular programs will require testing. We need to decide whether it's worth it to us.
That's where things stand. I plan on trying to schedule a meeting with AJ's teacher as soon as I can to follow up on some things we talked about at our conference, namely the possibility of trying to find a child in another class to read with him occasionally so he's not by himself and also to fill her in on his vacation math escapades. Wish us luck.
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