<p>Yes, it is good to hear from students who, like many of our kids, WANTED more challenge and were not overwhelmed by the work.</p>
<p>It’s bad enough that there is no tracking in elementary school. The better students are generally very happy when they get to HS school where they can be in classes that actually begin to move at a comparatively decent pace and where the other students are interested in actually learning something. My S was bored out of his mind in MS by enforced group projects with kids who were mostly interested in talking about their social lives, especially when it was something like a science project that was loaded up with a significant arts and crafts component, clearly intended to appeal to girls with no interest in science. (The boys with no interest in science tended not to be interested in the arts and crafts, either. 
Stereotypical, but true.)</p>
<p>Our HS had a year long Humanities class that was taught for years by the heads of the English and History departments, working as a team. A number of years ago, before S’s time, kids from the honors/AP path, to whom the seniors-only class was originally directed, actually got up a petition to complain that the class was being watered down because of the pressure to open it up to everyone. It remained a great and unique class in many ways, but S was mightily disappointed in the level of classroom discussion when they read philosophy and the like. (Admittedly, he was probably comparing it to CTY. ) If this course were an AP class, a certain level of rigor would have been enforced.</p>
<p>The CC here does not offer calculus, much less anything more advanced, and the student body is almost exclusively kids who could barely get through HS, much less hack an AP class, plus a contingent interested in their vocational programs. The nearest university mostly caters to the bottom third or so of students from local HSs, and arranging to take a class there is in any case virtually impossible unless the kid is homeschooled or takes an entire semester away from HS. It is not always possible for kids who need more challenge to find it outside of their HS. That population needs to be served by HSs just as much as the special needs population, and I find it enormously frustrating that the feel-good lobby continues to try to eliminate everything that even begins to serve them, from kindergarten on.</p>