Need advice for 7th grader 29 ACT

Parents Forum
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<p>Hello,</p>

<p>I've been reading the archives here and found them very helpful.</p>

<p>I'd like to hear if anyone could provide any suggestions about this situation.
I'm in over my head homeschooling as teacher/guidance counselor for this kid! I would
appreciate any feedback you might have.</p>

<p>We just got back his ACT scores for the Duke TIP program, and I'm wondering what
our options are as far as acceleration. He is 12 years old and his ACT scores
(with percentile compared to recent high school graduates) were:</p>

<p>English 32 96%
Usage/Mechanics 17 96%
Rhetorical Skills 15 92%</p>

<p>Math 22 62%
Pre-Alg/Elem. Alg 12 66%
Algebra/Coord. Geometry 10 52%
Plan Geo/Trig 12 73%</p>

<p>Reading 33 97%
Social Studies/Sci 16 93%
Arts/Lit 18 99%</p>

<p>Science 28 94%</p>

<p>Composite: 29 94%</p>

<p>When he took the test he was still finishing pre-algebra. I'm baffled as to how
he was in the 73% for Plane Geometry and Trig. The English isn't too surprising
because we do pretty heavy grammar, but we don't do a formal reading or science
curriculum. He does lots of reading and science, just interest-based instead of
formal learning.</p>

<p>If this were your child, would you accelerate based on these scores? I'd say I
have him working at about an 8th grade level at this point--but nothing
radically above grade level.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance for your input! I really need some guidance and am open to any
suggestions.</p>

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<p>I’d explain to student that this test was preliminary. In fact, it was taken so early that it is pretty much meaningless.
If student is doing well a grade above, then let it be that and no more.
Student has a lot of living, a lot of studying, a lot of playtime, a lot of time before such tests become relevant.</p>

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<p>One thing I learned with homeschooling my two boys was to not underestimate their ability to learn quickly and thus to limit them to whatever a standard curriculum might include. Ironically, it was educational computer software that led me to this conclusion – such software just allows you to continue at your own pace and should you finish off a year’s worth of material in 3 weeks, well there’s next year’s level waiting.</p>

<p>My older son went through 5 years of math – from adding two-digit numbers to doing multiplication of fractions – in the 6 months prior to when he was supposed to start kindergarten. There were a few strange bumps along the way: he already understood the concept of negative numbers, so subtracting 2- and 3-digit numbers was a bit confusing for him because he would forget that you needed to “borrow from the tens column” rather than produce a negative in the single digits column. Later, long division was a problem because his handwriting was not yet small enough to finish such problems on a single 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.</p>

<p>I also took him through several years of English grammar books at about 3-4 weeks per book (maybe one hour a day). To save time, I just had him orally answer the homework questions at the end of each chapter.</p>

<p>Most of school time is wasted, waiting, moving around, doing endless unnecessary homework problems. A typical child being homeschooled can learn twice as much in half the hours school would take – and an exceptional one can learn at 10 times the pace.</p>

<p>We ended up moving my son into high school at age 9, half-time by custom arrangement, so that he could learn advanced material as taught by experts – and also have a paper trail for college. He graduated at 14, after taking a year off so that we could travel the world for 3 months.</p>

<p>Radical acceleration worked for this boy because he was very outgoing. My other son stayed on a more age-appropriate track because he was very shy and lacking in confidence. He broke out in high school, however, radically accelerating himself – taking his first college class while still a high school freshman.</p>

<p>If your son is ready and eager for more, don’t hold him back. But don’t push him along just because of test scores, either. Personality can play as big a role as intelligence in the appropriate timing of providing this acceleration.</p>

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<p>The Duke program should be giving you information on how to treat the test scores, of any level. I know the Northwestern program gave excellent advice back when our son was at that age/grade. The reason to take the tests through one of the country’s regional gifted/talented sponsors is for the followup. It may take longer to get the followup information than to get the test scores themselves. Ask the Duke program your questions.</p>

<p>In our situation our good G/T program had already done the grade acceleration (on top of early entry for a fall birthday) so the results information just confirmed the grade acceleration was appropriate- this was for the EXPLORE test in 5th grade (I compared his results for both a 4th and a 5th grader).</p>

<p>You also need to talk to your child’s school. You need to find out what they are doing with the test results. It may mean talking with both his classroom teacher(s) and a guidance counselor or G/T person- perhaps a supportive resource teacher or whoever’s job that is. Your school may already be aware of his abilities and is meeting them as best they can.</p>

<p>You need to be reading the gifted literature. Hoagies and the Davidson Institute websites are the two that come to mind with many references to follow up on. Your son may benefit from courses outside of your public school- Duke will of course tell you about their summer options. </p>

<p>Regarding dealing with your son. He already knows how smart he is, this just confirms it. This test is NOT meaningless- it is highly relevant that he so far above his grade peers. You may find a discussion with your son will yield how he is coping with the education he is receiving. He may be bored or happy with the pace. Being gifted means not being in synch with one’s agemates. He may or may not wish to change things.</p>

<p>In our case I was surprised at how my son never smiled in kindergarten but was delighted with the prospect of spending time with the first graders. He ended up needing a multiple grade classroom the following year- maturity levels and growing up needs are just as important as academic/intellectual levels. There is no way to make a gifted child fit like other kids- square peg/round hole (or the converse). There will always be a discrepancy between intellectual age and chronological age- maturity above his agemates but perhaps grademates. You go with the best fit at the time.</p>

<p>It is very possible to meet academic needs and still provide a good unpressured childhood. Some children thrive on intellectual stimulation- they prefer that to be constantly bored. I once asked another gifted child’s mother why her 7th grader enjoyed playing with my 6th grader who was about 2 years younger- even UNO was more fun for her son when played with someone who was as quick at it. Later, especially when the older child went to HS their interests diverged. We were also lucky in our neighborhood that there were several boys all with near gifted IQ’s- they could play and his ideas were understood.</p>

<p>Addenda. Gifted education is my passion. Crossposted with above. Operative phrase- don’t hold back. There is a poem I knew of years ago that involved analogies with physical abilities- we don’t ask children to slow their natural running speed or swimming, the same applies to intellectual abilities.</p>

<p>Personalities also play a role. Wish I had known more about introversion and how it differs from my extroversion (the incompatibilities in style cause(d) many clashes). Fast fact- 75% of the general population is extroverted whereas 75% of the highly gifted are introverted (and remember it is a continuum, not an all or none phenomenon). No wonder most teachers don’t understand the most gifted- they operate differently and have different needs. For example- my son would take forever to answer a question in a group discussion, but the answer would be worth waiting for (extroverts tend to think and talk at the same time while introverts do their thinking, then- finally- respond) when he was a first grader in the third grade reading group.</p>

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<p>PS- it would take a book to thoroughly explain my above references. I hit upon some highlights. I ran past my edit time- therefore new post.</p>

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<p>the jhu cty program is great and check out the davidson website as well. also i like a blog unwrapping the gifted which is interesting…</p>

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<p>I was just going to suggest the Davidson Institute website. I have a D who has attended THINK, and adores it. She ages out after this coming summer, which makes her sad. She is also a Davidson Young Scholar; they provide a lot of good information and support related to accelerating if you get into the program. Also, if you haven’t found Hoagies, just Google “hoagies gifted” to find it. It is a great resource on topics like acceleration.</p>

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<p>It sounds like you are homeschooling. In your shoes I wouldn’t be paying much attention to grade levels, but just letting your kid pursue his interests at a pace that is comfortable to him. My older son was slowed down a bit by being in school, but he used his free time to teach himself computer programming and to read a huge amount - which ended up leading to perfect verbal scores even though he was really a math guy. Lots of good resources at [Hoagies</a>’ Gifted Education Page](<a href=“http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/]Hoagies”>http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/) My son had similar scores to yours (SAT not ACT) and when I looked at the bell curves it was clear to me why he had never found friends with similar interests and why school was never that good a fit. He never wanted to be homeschooled - I considered it often enough! - but those scores did make it easier to get the schools to listen to me when advocating for more acceleration.</p>

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<p>Another vote for “let him fly”. You’re homeschooling, so it’s easy. YOu don’t have to meet the school curriculum; you can meet your son’s. </p>

<p>

I hope this is true, but your son may just think he’s odd. This can help explain his oddness in a positive way.

I’m not surprised - some kids learn by osmosis, by photosynthesis. Not really - he picked it up from references people made, from the “interest-based” science and reading, and preview comments in his pre-algebra book. Maybe even learned some of it DURING the ACT test.

It was and I did. He started taking classes at the community college at age 12, and his ACT score was 30 at age fifteen. He was about 40% community college, 40 % unschooling, and 20% online classes and Teaching Company videos. For the unschooling part, he did a lot of computer programming and a lot of independent reading. I’d recommend that you find your son’s level (easy in math - see below) and his interests, and set the curriculum appropriately.</p>

<p>Now a lot of it, as others have said, depends on the child’s needs and temperament. Mine is very academically-minded (though not necessarily interested in what others think he should be interested in).

[quote]
It is very possible to meet academic needs and still provide a good unpressured childhood. Some children thrive on intellectual stimulation- they prefer that to be constantly bored.

[quote]
Absolutely. And if your child is one who does thrive on it, you need to provide it. OTOH, if he’s happy with a low-key “instructional” component from you, maybe it’s best that you keep things as they are.</p>

<p>I agree with previous posters’ suggestions that you look at Hoagies (while there, also search for Highly Gifted and Profoundly Gifted), Davidson, and Duke’s suggestions. Since he’s so advanced in and good at math, I’d recommend Aleks.com, which is an online program which gives assessments of what your child knows and is ready to learn. Even if you don’t want to change math instructional programs, you can do a free assessment so you can get more support and detail for the ACT results. It got my son through most of his “school math”. </p>

<p>Wis75 said “Gifted education is my passion.” Same here. If you would like to talk more, I would be happy to email, PM, or even talk on the phone. I think it’s critical, yes, CRITICAL, to your son’s happiness and future that you get him the education that’s best for him, whatever that is.</p>

<p>Good luck.</p>

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<p>WOW! Thanks so much for all the input.</p>

<p>Reading it carefully and will follow up on the suggestions—greatly appreciated!!!</p>

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<p>Congrats! Homeschooling means he’s in the perfect position to take advantage of this.</p>

<p>If your son enjoys math, then the classes at (or at least the books from) The Art of Problem Solving might be a good place. He could find other kids who like and do well at math and get access to some hard problems and a community that enjoys them.</p>

<p>There are a several ways to approach this, which are not mutually exclusive. </p>

<ul>
<li><p>He’s obviously ahead. So, he could take things relatively academically easy, which would leave him time to focus on an area of interest (which could be academic, but might not be). </p></li>
<li><p>He could also push ahead through the standard curriculum and finish early.</p></li>
<li><p>He could push ahead through the standard curriculum and get many of his high school credits via dual enrollment, thus starting college with advanced placement or a lot of credit.</p></li>
<li><p>He could also expand the standard curriculum to expand sidebars into full courses. For example, in addition world history, he might take an East Asian History course. In addition to the standard math progression, he could take Number Theory or Counting/Probability. He could study multiple foreign languages. He could spend a year working on a novel or writing articles and trying to get published in magazines.</p></li>
<li><p>He could prepare and aim for the Olympiad level competitions. There’s USA Biology Olympiad, USA Chemistry Olympiad, USA Mathematics Olympiad, USA Physics Olympiad, USA Computing Olympiad, and the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. Many students compete in several different areas.</p></li>
</ul>

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<p>My 9th grader tested like yours when he was in middle school. If your son isn’t 13 yet, you might see if he can hit a 700 SAT verbal score before age 13. [The</a> Study of Exceptional Talent (SET)](<a href=“http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html]The”>http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html) If he does, he can join SET, which would be another resource and opportunity to meet other gifted students, at least online. It’s tough to qualify for Davidson Young Scholars as a teenager because its difficult to find an IQ test with a high enough ceiling to show that your child hits 99.9 %ile. It’s also expensive to get testing done. We tried when my son was 14 but we just couldn’t prove 99.9% even though his test scores would have qualified even if he was two years further along in school. You are fortunate to be home schooling because you can give him opportunities to read higher level material and not waste time in middle school courses. Our son was in public school so after a very high 6th grade ACT we asked for him to be able to take high school social studies and science courses online the next year. He was already in 7th grade algebra and high school foreign language. We didn’t do online English because it wouldn’t have been honors level. He started high school with 4 science credits, 6 math credits (took algebra 2 online), 2 social studies credits, 6 Spanish credits (tested out of 3rd year) plus 3 health and gym credits taken online or replaced by sports team participation. And we asked for him to take the 10th grade honors English class. With a 34 ACT English and Reading, they said okay. This frees up his time to take AP courses early and to do a foreign exchange year during high school. I don’t know if you plan to home school for high school but if not, you might want to seek opportunities for your child to earn high school credits early to give him more options in high school. Our son will be able to take all the science, English, math and social studies APs and still study abroad and become fluent in another language. We offered him the opportunity to start college early but he has no interest.</p>

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<p>Ceiling effect does come into play with many IQ tests and, I imagine, it becomes harder to max out the score as one gets older – a lone “wrong answer” could affect the score. I put “wrong answer” in quotes because often these exceptional children see nuances within a question that surely never were considered by the test designers.</p>

<p>One reason for the ceiling limitations is due to the fact that test designers throw out questions that less than 1 in 1000 students can answer correctly – it’s simply too expensive to validate such a question statistically because of the huge sample size needed to do so.</p>

<p>Most people don’t know this, but it’s impossible for someone to score higher than 4 standard deviations above the mean (160 where sd=15). The brag scores – 180+ – are all done via the Stanford-Benet LM, an 80-year-old test that uses ratio-IQs rather than statistical deviation IQs. That test is best given to a very young child (a 4-year-old who is as knowledgeable as a typical 8-year-old is easier to achieve than an 8-year-old with the knowledge of a 16-year-old). That test is also heavily biased toward vocabulary (“where does turpentine come from?”) rather than math or pattern matching.</p>

<p>My older son was tested privately at about 5.5; he was supposed to be in kindergarten, but was in 3rd grade at the time, mostly bored with the pace of the work. He tested at 156, 99.99%tile, although some scores may have been slightly limited by eye-hand coordination, which is a factor in younger children. We ended up pulling our son from school at the end of that year, because the alternative would have been to skip him every other year. We placed him in high school at age 9, largely based on his private test score administered by a specialist in highly gifted children; there was some extensive interviewing also done with him to see if he was outgoing enough to handle being in a classroom setting with students 4 or more years older than him.</p>

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<p>At least for last summer, students who completed THINK with good grades were automatically accepted into the Davidson Young Scholar program. I don’t think they really advertise this, though. To be fair, it would have been a MUCH bigger help to us when D was younger (she is almost 16 now). We seem to have found a good balance in her schooling and outside activities that make her happy, so haven’t really needed their support. But there sure were times earlier when it would have been useful.</p>

<p>Agree on the Olympiad programs as a good activity. D is self studying for the Biology Olympiad (that is one of the “outside activities” that is allowing her to turn on her academic jets). She took the first level test about a week ago, and her bio teacher said he thought he would have difficulty with it. It is very challenging… which is what she wants.</p>

<p>I agree with the poster about shooting for SET if your son isn’t 13 yet. D had a qualifing score (by 40 points), but she was just a few weeks too old when she took the test).</p>

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<p>And, most importantly, don’t forget that this child is the exact same child he was before you had this SAT score. :-)</p>

<p>If you needed permission to let him soar, then take this score as that.</p>

<p>If things were going swimmingly, then take the score as affirmation of the wonderful job you’re doing (even if he’s accomplishing things via benign neglect). </p>

<p>Don’t think you need to make any immediate changes just because you have some magical score.</p>

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</p>

<p>This is, of course, true. We always knew our first son was in the 99th percentile. It was when we found out about the extra decimal points (first 99.9, then 99.99) that we stopped to reconsider if we were subtly limiting him. </p>

<p>Discuss your son’s accomplishments with most of the parents of his age peers and they will scream, “You’re PUSHING him!” Nonsense, these kids push themselves, driven by the need to KNOW. The problem is that one is easily lured by these conversations into PULLING HIM BACK. Your goal is to try an achieve a zen-like neutrality. “Want to try this? OK! Let’s do a trial run. Don’t be afraid to back out or quit for now if it’s too much, we can try again in a year or two if you want.”</p>

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<p>By the way if your kid is interested in reading about topics in math (especially ones that aren’t part of the standard curriculum) but are generally understandable to a high schooler here’s a thread with lots of great suggestions: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/545469-good-reads-about-math.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/545469-good-reads-about-math.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Also make sure he gets a well rounded education. This may mean taking time for other subjects at the expense of zooming in math. If home schooled you should look at the material covered by grade in the public schools and be sure you also cover it. This includes music, art and physical education. Joining age level activities such as YMCA or other basketball and soccer programs help children be with others of their physical development and social skills, although your son may be too old for this- it works best for younger kids. I coached summer soccer and the abilities are all over the map.</p>

<p>I could never have homeschooled- the surest way for clashes in personalities to negate any learning. So many skills learned in the schools one can’t replicate at home as well.</p>

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<p>wis75 –</p>

<p>Just because one homeschools doesn’t mean that all learning occurs at home. Many homeschoolers participate in co-ops and online classes (both synchronous and asynchronous), volunteer, and are active in their communities in many ways.</p>

<p>Most homeschoolers I know are more conscientious about music, art, and PE than our local public schools (it’s not on the test, so it must not be important AND budgets are tight, so “extras” are the first things to go).</p>

<p>We homeschooled our daughter in 7th and 8th grades and she had very little direct instruction from us. She took classes in a variety of settings and did some self-directed learning that we monitored weekly. We helped her over bumps then much like we did when she was in school. So, personality clashes don’t have to be a problem.</p>