Applications

I've been investigating possible school options for next year. We may stay put. Or homeschool. Or we may get lucky and win the lottery making private school an option. I'm looking at them, in any case. We are lucky to have quite a few private school options in our area, including several specifically for gifted children. Unfortunately, most of them cost significantly more than sending my kid to the University of Illinois for a year. Admissions procedures for these schools vary, but are mostly a pretty straightforward, with some kind of cocktail of forms to fill out, recommendations to obtain, and test scores to submit. One school for gifted children, however, also requested a five-page, twenty question parent questionnaire. I was kind of intrigued by the questions, although I suspect answering them will send me back to that catatonic state I inhabited my senior year in high school. Some of the questions ask the parents to assess the child's schooling and list extracurricular activities. A few other questions:

• What kinds of building or artwork does your child do? Please describe your child's favorite building or art materials and the work that he or she creates.


• Does your child like to make up stories, plays, rhymes, or intentional puns? Please describe any ways in which your child has used language creatively.

• Please describe how your child adapts to the spatial environment. For instance, does your child give you directions on how to drive or walk to a familiar destination? Does he or she show an understanding of how to find his or her way around the neighborhood? In other familiar places?

• Does your child play a musical instrument? Or demonstrate musical, artistic or theatrical ability?

• With whom does your child share interests?

• What does your child like to do:
a) When playing or interacting with others (children or adults)?
b) When alone?

• How does your child react to new situations and people?

• Describe your child's verbal language (vocabulary, sentence structure, clarity, etc.)

• Describe your child's attention span. How does it vary in different situations?

• What are the things that you and your child enjoy doing together?

• How does your child respond to parental directions?

• Does your child show an awareness of concern for global issues? If yes, please give examples.


These are pretty interesting questions, but also, I think, a bit invasive. On the one hand, I think they'd get a pretty good idea of what AJ's about if I filled these out. And I like that they seem to be trying to get at a variety of ways of being gifted, although I'm not sure it will really accomplish what they are hoping. On the other hand, I'm not sure why some of these things are any of their business. If the public school asked us about some of these things, I might be inclined not to answer. As if that weren't enough, there is also a recommendation form that needs to be filled out by a current teacher. About half of this form asks the teacher to assess not the student but the parents, specifically whether the parents are clear-headed as to their child's abilities.

Worrying

Has it really been nearly a month since I've posted here? It's not for want of things to write about, only that the news on the gifted education front is depressing.

AJ, while having his snack today said, "I wish I could have challenge every day." He proceeded to tell me about the things they're doing in his challenge class, which meets once a week on Mondays. Next year he was supposed to get a second day. But it is not to be. Next year, there will be no gifted program. It was one of the first things on the chopping block.

"I wish you could too, AJ," I said. "But next year I don't think you'll have it at all.

"Aren't there gifted schools?"

"There are and they're great, but very, very expensive. I wish I could send you there."

And here we are. A kid who's dying to learn and a school system that appears to be failing him. This seems so wrong. Doesn't he have any rights? If a kid were learning disabled and his school couldn't accommodate his educational needs, he'd be sent elsewhere. Is that an option for AJ? Or is our only option homeschooling? I feel trapped here. I could ask for acceleration, but I think it would be an enormous fight and I'm not convinced it's the best thing for AJ, nor do I think it would really help all that much. I could homeschool, but that would be difficult for our family for a number of reasons and again, I'm not sure it's the best thing for AJ.

One more possibility that I've been afraid to think about is private school. I don't see how we can afford it on our own, but we might qualify for financial aid. Then again, we might not. But it's probably worth investigating. We have a number of schools to choose from, all in the 15-20K/year range. If we got rid of our health insurance, we could do it. But that doesn't quite seem like the way to go, does it?

Right now, all I've got are questions.

Thanksgiving

Today marks the end of the first grading period at AJ's school and the beginning of Thanksgiving break. AJ is far more excited about getting his first real report card than he is about having a week off from school.

In AJ's school, third grade is the year they start traditional letter grades. I find this a little odd. I'm pretty sure we didn't have letter grades until junior high -- just a system of checks, pluses and minuses. AJ is sure he's doing great -- and I'm sure he is too. But I'm also prepared for surprises. Past experience suggests there will be some.

I'm much less interested in the report card than in our conference next week. We'll meet with both the classroom teacher and the gifted teacher. I'm trying to assemble a list of questions. The big one is about why the math in the classroom is so much easier than the gifted math and why can't there be more advancement. The other is why are the spelling words easier than first grade.

But the big thing I'm looking for, I won't ask about. I'm gearing up for what is likely to be the next big fight. The financial troubles our district is having are dire and art, music and the gifted program are probably going to be eliminated next year. I'm trying to prepare for what to do if and when that happens. It is likely we'll petition for acceleration. It would be easiest to do it next year or the year after, as next year there will be a big student shuffle as they redistrict schools and the following year, in fifth grade, all of AJ's grade will be merged at one central middle school.

Big things ahead.

Twinkle

Tomorrow night marks the beginning of the peak of the annual star show known as the Leonids meteor shower. Astronomers are predicting this year's Leonids will be more spectacular than usual, with a rate of upwards of 500 meteors per hour.

AJ and I have enjoyed starwatching since he was very small. In the semi-rural area where we live, it gets mighty dark at night. Star viewing is pretty spectacular. But we've had trouble with our identification. We like looking at star charts, but we're not so talented at mapping them onto the sky.

But this week, I discovered an abolutely amazing computer program to help us look at and learn about the stars. And it's completely free.

Stellarium is an open source planetarium program. The graphics are great. You can set your latitude and longitude; it gets the date and time off the computer. You can set a variety of background photos. You can chose to overlay any number of things -- constellation labels (from any of 10-12 cultures), constellation pictures, planets, planetary orbits, etc. You can adjust the amount of star detail with a slider. You can make the atmosphere go away so you can see what the stars would look like in the daytime, if you could see them. You can add shooting stars. We're still exploring and finding new things.

We had a good time looking at the constellation legends from different cultures (we checked out Navajo and China). But my favorite thing is that the background screens show the horizon and the compass directions, so we won't have any of the problems we have reading the flat star charts. There's even a dim feature, which turns the screen darkroom red so it doesn't interfere with your outside viewing.

We'll do some reading to go along with our star viewing. A Child's Introduction to The Night Sky by Michael Driscoll is one of our astronomy favorites. It also with a glow-in-the dark star chart, one several we've been struggling with. We also really like Stars: A New Way to See them by H. A. Rey, better known as the creator of Curious George. We'll also be looking at some Greek Mythology. Andy loves the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, but we haven't yet read a lot of straight up mythology. I'm hoping I can get him interested in the originals with D'Aulaire's Greek Myths.

Guidelines on Acceleration

The Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration, The National Association for Gifted Children and the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted have released new Guidelines for Developing and Academic Acceleration Policy. This document is designed to help schools, but it looks as if it might be a tool for parents trying to work with schools as well. You can download the pdf here. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I'll report back when I do.

History begins at home

This morning, I was reading at one of my new regular stops, Playing By the Book about her latest book-inspired project, a mural-sized family tree that she made with her daughters (check out the whole blog -- it's full of great ideas for pairing books and activities with kids). It got me to thinking about how I ended up as an historian. I was pretty disdainful of history as a class in school. I think I may have had an exceptionally dry bunch of history teachers. But I read a lot of history as a child, especially after we moved to England where histories for children were more cultural than political. I was particularly enamored with the works of R. J. Unstead, especially the book on English history he wrote for children, Looking at History: From Cavemen to the Present Day. I checked the book out of the library so many times, that my parents eventually bought it for me. It is a tome. After I'd committed that to memory, I moved on to Unstead's books for adults, which I liked nearly as much. But it wasn't just the books that drew me in. It was that while living in London, I was in the middle of history. It stared at me from every corner. The flat I lived in was nearly 200 years old. There were places to go where the roads were built in Ancient Roman times. There were castle ruins to be visited, a statue of Queen Boadicea to touch, stone circles to find in the countryside. History meant something to me there, because I could see the stories everywhere I looked.

There was another book I loved, one that I'd actually discovered before I moved to England and which I returned to when I went back to the States. This one was not about history but about how to be an historian. David Weitzman's My Backyard History Book is part of the Brown Paper School series that first came out in the 1970s, about which I've raved in these pages before. The entire series is about outside-the-box thinking and it should be in every teacher and parent's toolbox. My Backyard History, as the title suggests, takes the viewpoint that history starts at home. Look at your own history. Follow it back. What do you find? Make a family tree or a time capsule. Think about what makes your time different from other eras. Talk to your relatives and your neighbors. What are their stories? How do we preserve our history? How can you preserve yours? These are all questions that continue to interest me. I ask them daily in my own research.

AJ isn't inherently interested in history, or, at least, he suffers from being the child of two history freaks. But we've figured out ways to work family history into other projects. For instance, every year for Veteran's Day, AJ's school has each child decorate a star on which they write the name and branch of service of someone close to them. For the past couple of years, AJ has written his great grandfather's name. Since AJ never met his great grandfather, who died many years before he was born, I used the opportunity to tell him some stories about his grandfather and to look at pictures together. This year, AJ decided he wanted to do someone he had actually met. So we wrote to my great uncle B, who was a career army officer. He wrote back an amazing letter with many details I'd never knew. He enlisted in the army at 18 during World War II and trained in the infantry for a Japanese invasion, but was spared combat when Japan surrendered in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At 19, he went to officer training school and became a second lieutenant and learned to govern occupied territories. He was a paratrooper in Korea and flew a helicopter in Viet Nam. After he related many exciting stories, sometimes funny , sometimes sad, he wrote a paragraph that was heart-wrenching, addressed directly to AJ. He told AJ how hard being a soldier was sometimes, but how rewarding it was too. He told him how he still felt guilty about some of the decisions he made, but that he had done the best he could and he trusted God to forgive him. It was incredibly personal, just the kind of thing you almost never see in history books. Just the kind of thing that means more coming from someone you know.

Later today, AJ and I will read this letter together. We'll both learn something about our Uncle, about our family, and about our national history. If you're not lucky enough to be surrounded by history, make your own. Find a copy of My Backyard History and get out and start talking to people. You never know what kind of stories will emerge. I'm thinking that the letter from his great great uncle and the book his father wrote for kids about the Korean War might do the trick.

Math methods

When I was in school, I was pretty consistently a math underachiever, always scoring in the top percentiles on standardized tests, but rarely succeeding in class. My mother blames this tendency on my second grade teacher, who liked to announce to the whole class when I made a mistake. Some of it may also be due to gender bias -- girls weren't supposed to be good at math. But whatever the reason, it was my own lack of confidence in math that kept me from achieving well. I second guessed myself all the time. Frequently I would look at a problem and know the answer, but without knowing exactly why I knew it. Then, in trying to prove it to myself, I'd make a mistake. It wasn't until I was in sixth grade, while at the American School in London, where my math issues were identified appropriately. I didn't need remedial math. I needed more challenge and confidence. So along with 3 or 4 other kids in my grade and the grade above, we were pulled out of our regular math class and put with Mrs. Heumann.

Mrs. Heumann was one of the very best teachers I ever had. She was tiny and wildly energetic, one of those people who seemed to inhabit her whole body and also several inches of the space beyond. I had thought I'd been thrown into remedial math, but Mrs. Heumann didn't seem to know that. She worked us hard. On the very first day, she took away our pencils and paper. "We're doing math in our heads. Because you need to know that you can." And I could. We all could. And we were good at it. I moved away before the end of that school year and I was very sad to say goodbye to Mrs. Heumann. But amazingly, some of her lessons stuck, especially the one about "you can do it." I still battered my head against the wall sometimes with math, but I kept at it. I was even on my junior high math team for a year. I couldn't believe it.

But after high school calculus, I never took math again. I went to a college without distribution requirements outside the major. The closest I ever came to math again was a microeconomics class that was so bad, I stopped going to class after the first month. The teacher was canned after a single semester and I got the only D on my college transcript. Pretty good, considering I only ever showed up on test day and rarely cracked a book.

But as I see AJ struggling in similar ways, I've been thinking about all this again. AJ has a brain that absorbs higher math concepts readily. He's had a good understanding of complicated issues since preschool. But those things that require memorization or tedious practice often give him enough time to talk himself out of the simple solution and into something more complex and erroneous.

One of the things that can, I think, help students like AJ and like me back then (and maybe me now) are some alternative ways of thinking about the problem. One of the great strengths of the Everyday Mathematics curriculum that AJ's school uses is its support of multiple solving methods. But as the curriculum is actually taught, there are not that many methods endorsed. I've been digging around for other possibilities to help. AJ is very visual and physical, so here are two that have interested us in particular.

1. Finger Math. At one point in my own math struggles, my mother came home from the library with this book, or one very much like it.

I was fascinated. Based on a system used in Korea, Finger Math takes counting on your fingers to a new level by assigning different values to your fingers. The fingers of the right hand are worth 1; the thumb is 5. The fingers of the left hand are worth 10; the thumb is worth 50. This allows you to count to 99 on your fingers. The book also explains how to use fingers for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, although I no longer remember the methods. I need to reacquaint myself with it. Here is a website that explains the same system.

2. Chinese method. Earlier this week, Dedicated Elementary Teacher Overseas posted a video of a Chinese method of addition that fascinated AJ and I. It involves drawing lines to represent the columns of numbers and adding the points of intersection. AJ and I were both fascinated and need to play around with this a little. Here's a video explanation:



Do you have any alternative math methods or tricks you like to use? Fill us in!