One of the things I’ve learned in preparing presentations is know your audience. i originally typed Point/Counterpoint, but worried it might have been too obscure a reference, since the Dan Akroyd/Jane Curtin versions far outnumber the James J. Kilpatrick/Shana Alexander ones on YouTube. Skidad had to explain the origins to me back when i was in shorty skis. @lookingforward
Data10’s experience was similar to the experience that a colleague’s son had, where a teacher recognized that he was “operating on a different level” and arranged for him to be greatly accelerated. He wound up taking a graduate math class as his first math class in college. When this sort of thing happens, the student inspires the teacher to take action. But the teacher has to be oriented in this way to begin with. The local school was on record in the newsletter to the parents as opposing acceleration in math, because then the student would need to take college courses in high school, and would “miss out on the social experiences” in both high school and college. I could not make up something like this! In my high school, the teachers actually liked smart students. This is not universal.
In this geographical area, a student who takes university courses in math will be taught almost exclusively by non-English speakers (going very deep–up to senior-level college courses), which adds a complication to letters of recommendation. Also, since rather advanced mathematics is taught in their countries of origin, a high school student in their classes (up through sophomore or junior level in college) will be studying what they studied in high school, and therefore not looking very unusual to them (just not held back, like most American students).
I knew a graduate student from Taiwan who needed to take an electricity and magnetism course at the university. To help her out, I showed her the texts for various E&M courses. When I showed her the senior-level E&M text, she started to laugh, and said, “Oh, I think this is easy. I learned this in high school.” She took the graduate-level course and did fine (A/B), with only one minor blip that was directly due to a language problem.
In terms of chances overall, I have posted on other threads that I have seen an element of randomness in admissions. This is not to say that they are totally random, just that an admissions outsider (me) can have pretty good knowledge of the whole picture for a few top students, and yet find the outcomes impossible to predict (which probably makes chancing pointless for me to do).
When a student I know pretty well is admitted to some “top” schools but not others, or not admitted to any as sometimes happens depending on where one draws the cut line for “top,” I always wonder whether the relative (competitive) weaknesses that the admissions staffers saw in the applications were 1) real, 2) due to omissions from the application that the student might have filled in, but failed to fill in, 3) due to inaccurate impressions that the recommenders or GCs created inadvertently, or 4) based on misinterpretation of statements in the application that might have been interpreted correctly by another reader. (“Not enough beds,” “can’t admit 15,000 more students,” etc., I get that.)
I draw on specifics (as you may have noticed). In my daughter’s case, part of her acceleration in mathematics was based on a conscious decision that she made at the 7th grade level–and not of the category that you might think. She was in the group that ucbalumnus would call one year ahead. The school did not accelerate beyond that. So, taking 8th-grade honors math in 7th grade, she found herself in a class that was 80% male. So far, fine. However, 7th grade boys are not particularly mature, and a few of the other students were below the normal maturity level of 7th grade boys. The teacher was often elsewhere when the students entered the classroom. A few of the boys frequently made crude remarks (extending to explicitly mentioning rape–I am editing this to indicate that no one was actually raped!) before the teacher came in. The girls took to hiding out in the teacher’s office until the teacher got there. It was just a few minutes, but it was enough to create a decidedly hostile environment for the girls. My daughter decided that not only did she like math quite a lot, but she also thought that she could qualify for acceleration at the local university that the more troublesome boys could not qualify for. With some trepidation, my spouse and I agreed to that. Of course, this explanation of her acceleration did not go into any of the application materials. It might have looked like a case of pushy parents, or a student just hoping for admissions advantage; but it was something very different, unpredictable and undetectable to admissions. She was admitted to 7 of the 8 places where she applied, and chose a great fit from among those. (But one wonders from time to time about the big fish that got away.)
Just to add to the previous post: My daughter was very effective at standing up for other students who were being bullied, because then she felt that she had the clear moral authority to do that–just not so good at effectively standing up for herself when she was in the group being bullied. One young man was part of my daughter’s middle-school group of friends (all girls aside from him). Students in the year ahead teased the young man pretty badly about being “gay” because of he was part of their group, and not a male group. My daughter and her friends told the people who were teasing her male friend to stop, quite unequivocally. They didn’t stop. My daughter and a few of her friends spoke with someone in the school administration, who arranged to have two teachers on hand, near the lunch room where they could observe the teasing. It stopped after that. My spouse and I did not hear about this until it was over. My daughter and her friends were pretty egalitarian, so I won’t say that she was the “leader” in this set of actions; rather the leadership was shared equally among a few of the girls. I thought they handled the situation pretty well.
281--I mean non-native English speakers, among the math profs! Not non-English speakers!
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Looking back to my earlier notes, I can’t help but wonder what bullying, non-native TA’s, math curriculum, etc. have to do with this topic? Can we get back on track please?
The idea is: this isn’t about our view of our own high schools or even individual kids we know who met with success. Or not. Adcoms at top schools are dealing with a national pool, how kids learn, stretch, pursue goals, and think, across the nation. Yes, there are variations and allowances for that. Of course.
So the chance-me responders who can only compare to what they know in their own high school, district, from meeting others at some competition or online, aren’t doing the asker a service. Imo, when we talk about top and tippy top colleges, the OP would benefit if he/she is open to the right suggestions, able to evaluate what is legit. We get a funny issue where kids believe the advice that they need to win a national competition or take that 1520 higher and miss the rest. Or they’re lopsided, but a couple of posters rave and the OP misses a chance to fine tune.
Again, not sure it’s unethical, but it is sloppy.
Talk about bullying!
If the idea is that we are going to fill page after page of scaffolding for advertising with original, on-point ideas about “chancing” high school students (or their imaginary better selves), you are probably SOOL on that.
However, the stuff you mention was not that far afield. We were talking about how admissions staff might regard dual enrollment classes on a kid’s transcript. @QuantMech was talking about all the factors that might go into whether or not a kid took dual enrollment math classes. One of the anecdotes was that the child formerly known as QMP took college math courses not because she wanted to accelerate, but because she wanted to avoid the specific boys who were harassing her in her high school.
Well, she was also quite interested in math–but the boys were certainly a factor in her decision about how far to accelerate. (Also, it wasn’t non-native-English speaking TA’s, it was the math profs who were not native English speakers, in math classes too small to have TA’s.)
My underlying point is that “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” No one can tell the whole story in a college application. No one outside of admissions can really tell whether mentioning a part of the story would help or hurt.
Thank you, JHS, for placing my comments in context. You accurately connected my recent posts to one component of chancing–namely, how are college classes regarded–just classes taken in the sequence of things, or more than that.
? Data gave an example of drives and moving to fulfill them.
DE is DE, no matter the reason. (Of course, making wise choices in which classes is good.)
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
And, we’re done. Closing thread.