<p>My guess is Lorem is either a ■■■■■, or he’s just an attention whore for his son. Seeing as his post count is so low, I’m inclined to think it’s the former.</p>
<p>Is it just me, or does anyone else hate it when parents post on high school forums?</p>
<p>^ yeah. I personally think it is kinda creepy too. 0_0</p>
<p>Bsmd11 and nwgolfer321, do you REALLY believe that a “helicopter parent” can just waltz into the local high school and enroll a 9-year-old on a whim? Educators and staff psychologists scrutinize the request very closely and err on the side of refusal.</p>
<p>The 9-year-old high schooler we’re talking about here learned 6 school years of math and 4 school years of English in the 6 months before starting KINDERGARTEN. He was able to calculate squares up to 100 in his head at age 5 and squares up to 1000 in his head at age 6. At age 5, he was reading Harry Potter and at age 6, he learned algebra. He skipped kindergarten, went directly into 2nd grade and was promoted to 3rd mid-year because he wasn’t learning anything new in 2nd. We then had him privately tested with a psychologist who specialized in the highly gifted; he scored 99.99th percentile. That is when we decided to homeschool him for awhile; the alternative was to have him skip every other year of grade school.</p>
<p>My advocacy, which you call “helicopter parenting,” was due to the need to carefully balance academic needs with emotional ones. We placed our first son in high school at age 9 because he was not only brilliant, but also exceptionally tall for his age AND very much an extrovert. The second one was more quiet and self-directed, and early acceleration was not appropriate for him.</p>
<p>Our second son, who just got the perfect 36, is no less academically brilliant. I watched him self-prep for 4 extra AP tests in a month in his spare time while juggling the daily demands of 9 classes. He taught himself a entire semester’s college-level class, AP Physics C Mechanics, in a single 3-day weekend, then moved on to his next subject.</p>
<p>These sorts of exceptional kids really do think differently and need both advocacy and occasional help understanding mainstream expectations, because they tend to be perfectionists who are reluctant to participate until they are experts in the material they are currently studying. I think advocacy for such individuals is very different than typical “helicopter parenting.”</p>
<p>Sounds like your kids need a hobby besides studying.</p>
<p>^ Exactly. Maybe a life?</p>
<p>“We placed our first son in high school at age 9 because he was not only brilliant, but also exceptionally tall for his age AND very much an extrovert.”</p>
<p>Height is not synonymous with physical maturity by any means (and let’s not even get into how his social maturity is far from developed). A 9-year-old kid is simply too young for high school. You are not doing him a favor by having him skip all these grade levels, unless you want him to be 12 when he goes to college. Imagine a 12-year-old among all the 18- to 22-year-olds on campus. No relationships, no friends his age, basically no social life at all. It doesn’t matter even if he himself is socially advanced for his age. The fact is that a young, pre-teen kid cannot have a life in college.</p>
<p>I call B.S. on the physics C, btw.</p>
<p>Oh, and can you imagine a socially awkward, extroverted nine-year old in high school?! Good god. poor kid</p>
<p>Agreed. Poor kid.</p>
<p>Cool story, LoremIpsum.</p>
<p>Hey, I read harry potter at age 7, I’m pretty close to LoremIpsum’s son. Woot</p>
<p>Lorem Ipsum, your entire story sounds like complete BS. I’m not asking you to prove anything, but what you just said means that you have 2 super-genius kids. Sorry if im just a little skeptical that you would have even one of those.</p>
<p>^There are a couple geniuses out there for every county, it’s not a huge deal. Just because he’s a genius doesn’t mean he HAS to go to highschool at age 9. There’s no point in ALWAYS being academically challenged, acing school and SATs and ACTs is enough.</p>
<p>@RAlec14 I understand that, but this guy still sounds like he’s just messing with us. And i agree, even with the miniscul .0000000000000000001% chance that this is true, Lorem’s decisions are way out of line</p>
<p>*miniscule</p>
<p>It doesn’t sound like he’s messing with us. Arrogant prick, yes lol, but he has no reason to lie and there is no evidence that he’s lying. </p>
<p>I went to a math competition at a college and I saw plenty of supernatural geniuses that could fit LoremIpsum’s son’s level.</p>
<p>Hey folks, I’m not the adversary here. By all means remain skeptical of anything I have posted, but discard your prejudices of what others are potentially capable of because, at its core, that also contains a self-prejudice of what YOU can accomplish. How many of you skeptics have grown up around people who said you can’t do that now, you’re too young, it’s too hard, you’re not yet mature enough? Every kid, as he grow up, needs an adult mentor who realizes he’s not perfect and doesn’t expect perfection, yet still believes in him and his abilities and knows that he’s a work in progress with great ultimate potential.</p>
<p>Yea, maybe some helicopter parents are nurturing spoil brats. But sometimes in life you see an opportunity that you really, really want, that you know in your heart you can do, even if it takes a tremendous amount of extra effort – and some advisor, rule or bureaucrat stands in your way. Would you want your parent or adult mentor to tell you, “Oh, it’s too hard for you,” or “Do it yourself!” or would you want one that seriously discusses the pros and cons of the issue with you and then says, “OK, let’s go fight for it together?”</p>
<p>If you don’t yet have someone like that in your life, find one – parent, teacher, uncle, the retired professor who lives next door. Personal success and growing self-confidence comes from doing things YOUR way and proving the skeptics wrong, not from lobotomizing your talents and abilities in an effort to appear “normal.”</p>
<p>Meh. Either it’s bull *<strong><em>, and I don’t care, or it’s not bull *</em></strong>, and I guess what… still don’t care. Seeing how intelligence is mostly genetic, and how most of the rest of it is environmental, having two “genius kids” rather than one isn’t that unlikely of an occurrence.</p>
<p>Well my assessment starts with the genetic tree. I question the wisdom and motives of a a parent goes to an anonymous online forum to tell a bunch of jealous high school kids that a 9 year old just owned them on the ACT and life. </p>
<p>But whatever. I heard of those 12 year olds going to college, and guess what, I never heard about them again. Maybe, with their high capacity of intellect, they figured out that living a good life wasn’t about being the next Einstein.</p>
<p>+1^
Ten char</p>
<p>I like being normal in many ways. I disagree with your philosophy. Average =/= Normal.</p>