Thanks for clarifying for others reading this. I just know we decided she would follow the typical track at her school… one that did not require summer classes.
@emi722 I get that! My D approached us about the summer math session because other kids told her they were doing it. It would never have been on our radar otherwise.
Yes, our middle school also offered exceptional students such opportunities. My daughter had a few subjects (incl. languages) she excelled in, and was invited to take HS-level classes in the last year of middle school, which she did - because she was ready. There were even some non-academic subjects for which she had to walk over to the high school a few times a week.
But none of that was pre-planned at Middle School orientation, and it certainly was not because of any long-term college-admission strategy. Rather, the only (and big!) concern was that she would actually be happier being in class levels that kept her captivated and challenged, than getting bored and distracted.
My daughter still refers to Middle School as the “worst” time - not because of the school, teachers, or academics - but just because on how disoriented she and all the kids felt during those formative years. I very firmly believe that much damage can be done by parents piling on even more pressure than they are already under at that age.
So when I hear from the original poster that this is taking place at Middle School Orientation, I’m absolutely horrified.
Some of this middle school anxiety in our school district is fueled by a lack of transparency or consistency on the part of our public school system. If a child is good at languages, only Spanish in 6th grade leads to an AP Spanish in junior year. AP French is only in senior year. Not a big deal , but the HS is stingy in its AP offerings, and so a kid wanting a rigorous schedule in junior year is usually advised to take Spanish - mostly by their peers who had older siblings or parents who have deconstructed the entire 6-12 program of studies booklet. My older son took French; he was in a regular track and languages weren’t his thing. My second son took Spanish - he loves learning any language. He would have been somewhat upset with the AP switcharoo had he taken French.
Math students are tracked in 7th grade, but there is still not a lot of information to parents about what that implies. Thankfully, our school district will not accept any summer or online classes for credit, esp. in core subjects. So at least that nuttiness is not prevalent.
I remember reading a comment from years ago where a girl said that after receiving her college admissions results, she wished that Amy Chua had been her mom. (I searched for it on NYTs, where I think I read it, but couldn’t find it.) While some kids may look back and wish they had had extra time splashing in the pool, some might wish that their parent had bought them a copy of Math Minutes. You have to know your kid.
In our district, students took FL starting in 7th grade, unless they were exempt. It’s the standard progression here, so any student who sticks with a language for all of high school will likely take the AP for that class as a senior.
As for AP calc, yes, students need to be on the advanced math track to take it in high school. There are many other AP options and students don’t have to take AP Calc to be successful in college admissions or in life.
Sample of one, but my kid currently works with grads from HYP and WASP. She also has coworkers from colleges known here on CC that most people wouldn’t consider to be prestigious. It’s the person, not the college, that matters.
looking back her middle school had open House about the program before students picked their classes.
If I remember correctly it was in the Library. Principal, GC and Program Leads along with a few 8 grade students in the program were there. ( or could of been 9th graders that came back not sure now)
Power point about program, hand outs to take home, Q and A with Faculty and Students.
It was very well organized and gave an honest picture about the programs
Here’s another sad story from our local middle school. I used to volunteer a couple of hours a week in one of the science labs and one day I had to comfort a sobbing student. He had just received his latest SAT score and it wasn’t to his liking. He told me that his family organized for him to take the SAT twice a year starting in middle school until he got a perfect score. (I now understand why so many colleges are moving away from using it as an evaluation tool, but that’s a different story) I didn’t know what to say because what I really wanted to say was “this is nuts”.
I could say that you just ignore all that and let your kids take the lead but in reality your kids will be hearing all the craziness at school everyday. Some of my daughter’s peers would cry over Bs on tests, fight tooth and nail over every point on every test etc. One of her teachers once asked the class to raise their hands if they did not experience pressure at home to get good grades and she was the only one. I feel that she experienced all the pressure nevertheless through her daily interactions with her peers. I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t blame the kids and I don’t blame their parents (many of whom are highly successful immigrants that make our Bay Area town a delightfully diverse place to live in).
After experiencing the accelerated math track with my daughter (she tested into it in 5th grade, as did my son) we opted out of it with my son (with his approval) to hopefully avoid this ultra competitive peer mentality, but part of me is thinking that I’m clipping his wings. There are no case controlled studies in the raising of our kids and so we shall see…
So OP, I originally was going to start my response with don’t fret and let your kids take the lead but I realized through my musings that if you live in a pretty competitive community you will end up fretting along side everyone else.
Much of the competitiveness can be be traced back to parents and schools. Not all parents, but all you need is a few, and their kids will transmit it to the rest of their social group. Since these parents also tend to be parents of kids in the gifted program, science and math club, etc, these are the groups where this type of competitiveness will be most common and most intense. My guess is that there is a different type of competitiveness among the kids on the sports teams, but that is just as likely to come from coaches as from parents.
Aside from parents and the school, though, STEM ECs themselves are heavily based on competitions. The kids spend most of their time preparing for this or that competition. It is not very far from “I need to win competitions, and I especially need to win prestigious competitions” to “I need many acceptances, and I especially need to be accepted to prestigious colleges”.
In my opinion, this is the reason that so many of the parents and kids who come on here, devastated because they weren’t accepted to a more “prestigious” college, all say different versions of “was it all for nothing?” They saw their (or their kid’s) entire school career as nothing more than prep for the “College Competition”,
Even high schools like my kid’s, which is very much against the “who got into the best college” competition are still sending their math and science teams to competitions as their major activity. Anecdotally, the kids on those teams, who my daughter knew because of her Middle School activities (and still hung out with in high school), were the only ones in her friend groups that engaged in the college admission competition. Relatively mild, because the high school and the parents frown on that type of behavior, but still there. The other kids in her friend groups (art and dance kids and social activists) did not really engage in this type of competitive behavior.
On the other hand, the HS which my brother’s kids attended was a much more typical upper middle class high achieving high school, and it was rife with college admission competitiveness. This came from both parents and kids.
The original post started…
I don’t think any middle school kid would ever worry about college for a second without parents projecting fear and concern to them.
…or hopes and dreams, whether grounded in objective reality or not…
This. Every single year that I have been on CC I have seen kids on here feeling that it was all ‘wasted’ effort. That’s the heart of the Applying Sideways (link above) advice: you do the things you do b/c they are the right option for you.
ps, yes, STEM ECs tend to have a lot of competitions, but as been noted elsewhere in the thread, you can be a STEM kid and not do STEM ECs! The physics Collegekid (now most of the way through a PhD) did theatre and art in HS. Same as above, I’m not advocating one direction or the other- just pointing out that MS & HS ECs can genuinely be chosen to suit the student, not necessarily for vocational purposes
How far along are the others on their college application essays ?
My D22 once had a kid in SECOND GRADE tell her she was never going to get into a good college if she didn’t do better on her math test! Luckily even at 7 years old she recognized that for the crazy talk that it was, but the kid who said it must’ve gotten it from somewhere — parents, older siblings, somebody.
“the “new friends” from orientation talked mainly about the math competitions.”
Yeah, not much you can do about that, if your kid is not interested in them, definitely don’t push it
“So when I hear from the original poster that this is taking place at Middle School Orientation, I’m absolutely horrified.”
As others have posted, orientation programs from the middle school don’t cover this offiically. It’s the kids and parents that do during the orientation, in I’m assuming, side conversations.
Definitely not true, most of the kids that come on here that say they won a prestigious competition or are on the US olympiad team for a subject, do well in admissions, as long as they represent themselves accurately. I think 60% of olympiad winners are at MIT or Cal Tech, 25% of Intel Science winners are at Harvard. Getting into MIT means you have to show you’re one of the best stem students in the country, and MIT adcoms blog from science fair competition, which according to them, is the type of student they look for.
The number of kids who come on CC includes some that are prestigious medal winners, but from what I can tell that is not the vast majority of students. Most kids who are shooting for the elite schools are some variation of “average excellent” or “average extra excellent” and among that cohort there are a lot of disappointed kids who spent a lot of their formative years in pursuit of a “prestigious college” instead of enjoying their childhood and involving themselves in activities they actually enjoy.
Since my point was that parents and kids look at admissions as a competition, I fail to see what your counter argument is.
Saying that many kids who win competitions also are accepted to “elite” colleges does not, in any way, prove that they weren’t looking at admissions as a competition. Just because a kid was accepted to MIT, Stanford, AND Harvard does not “prove” that they were not engaging in toxic admissions competition games.
You have to do what is best for your child and your family. A brilliant, highly driven kid that is in the very tippy top academically in the country and wants to do all the after school enrichment go for it. Your “normal” kid … let them be a kid. Middle school is a time of change socially, physically, emotionally and academically. You have to let all of these have a chance to develop.
Explore what your child is interested in. Do they want to learn golf, chess, robotics, music, dance, soccer, football, etc? Let them try. Don’t push what they do. This can burn them out and make them resentful.
Other than taking advanced math and starting spanish we didn’t think much about college. We discussed what they might want to do in the future to see if there were things we could do to let them see what those jobs really were. Other than that they didn’t do many clubs or academic things outside school. Mine played sports after school. In the summer they went to summer camp for a month (no technology, old fashioned Parent Trap sort of camp).
Even in high school we didn’t follow the “take as many AP classes as possible” route. We went to a high school with a program ds was interested in. He did ECs but out of school not in school (other than through the program he was in that had work after school). Did we try for Ivy’s or top 50 schools? No, but we didn’t even look at the rankings except by the degree he was interested in and even that we just ruled out the very bottom schools. Was that awful? Did we fail by not pushing him to do all the AP exams? Nope. He is a second year vet student at the top of his class, president of the largest club in the school, happy as he can be! He went in to grad school unstressed, not burnt out (unlike a lot of his classmates), and ready to learn.
Enjoy middle school (ok we didn’t enjoy all of it - kids do some dumb things), do what you feel is right for your child!
Let the middle schooler be a middle schooler. Let the kid explore and do what s/he likes to do. Instead of pressures and imposition of rules, try to guide and facilitate her/his pursuits/interests, whatever they are. Education is highly valuable to any kid, but the focus of that education should be to equip that kid with the knowledge and skills s/he may need for success in life, not to measured by what college(s) s/he gets admitted to.
FWIW, my S attends a tippy top college that’s the best fit for him and is currently at the top of his class by some common measures. I never directed him to do anything that he isn’t interested in. I never looked at a single piece of his homework or test result since his kindergarten days. I never hired anyone to tutor him. I let him play all sorts of video games (he owned all the video game consoles). We did talk a lot about many things but they were all outside of what he was supposed to be learning in school. There’re many ways to raise a kid.
I suppose this depends on what you define as “college preparation”.
Back to the original post on other posts:
Yes, my kids were involved in activities in 7th grade. It’s better than sitting on the couch watching their phone screen, and they are activities they enjoyed. They eventually were leaders in some of them because they were passionate about it.
Yes, they started a foreign language in 7th grade, as everyone in our school district does.
Play sports? Yes, Soccer and softball starting when they were little. Physical activity and socialization with peers is a good thing.
Music - two instruments each by 7th, because music is a tremendously enriching experience throughout life.
Academics - they went to our local college’s gifted elementary weekend programs because they enjoyed them. “The Science of Harry Potter” three week summer program was a big hit.
When they decided they didn’t enjoy some of them (swimming, TKD, sports by high school), they just stopped doing them.
I would find it odd if people are offended or think we are terrible parents because they were involved in these activities early.
No, not because they were involved. My daughter was in all kind of accelerated, G&T, “Select”, etc. programs - because of all the reasons you stated: those programs were suggested to her because they matched her abilities, and personal aspirations.
That’s completely different from parents going down a checklist of presumptive looks-good-college-applications 6 years down the road and pushing kids down whatever parallel paths…
vs
people are offended or think we are terrible parents because they were involved in these activities earlyIf you are going to quote use the whole sentence
2 different meanings when using the whole sentence instead of just part of it
Just Sayin