lmc@denelcor.UUCP (Lyle McElhaney) (03/07/84)
Schooling the gifted has been on my mind a lot lately. I have
a son who is two years above his school class academically,
and we have priced ourselves out of the market.
Jon managed to skip two grades, and is now in fourth grade.
Academically, he is doing very well; all A's and B's, even in
arithmetic, which he dislikes. (Not forever, I hope.) He's
attending a small private school, since Colorado public
schools at their best aren't terribly good (particularly in
gifted work). However, The school will be combining 5th and
6th grade next year, and the principal thinks that he may
suffer from the social-maturity problems, since he still
*acts* like a second grader. Even if he did continue on, the
school teaches only up through 6th grade, at which point we
face the same problem.
The question is, what to do? Some other private schools in
the area, which excell in providing needed discipline, refuse
to take him as a fifth grader; he has to redo work that bored
him the first time around. Others, with enough staff to
individualize, cost too much (~$2500/yr and up). Public
schools, as mentioned above, don't *really* care (public
policy to the contrary notwithstanding). We could keep him
home for a year, perhaps.
Has this kind of Catch-22 situation happened to anyone else on
the net? Any imaginative solutions?
A mild warning, against skipping grades; I felt it was the
best way to allow Jon to not be bored in school, and it did
just that. But with current educational institutions being
what they are, you are going to get squeezed somewhere along
the line, unless you plan ahead.
--
Lyle McElhaney
(hao,brl-bmd,nbires,csu-cs,scgvaxd)!denelcor!lmcjulian@deepthot.UUCP (Julian Davies) (03/11/84)
I wonder if there is a Waldorf school within reach of you. Perhaps not, but I think you'd find that a Waldorf school gets a better balance between allowing your gifted child to develop his/her intellect and also growing in all other aspects of her/his human nature. Both my children go to the Waldorf School here in London Ont. (they are not especially gifted). Waldorf schools focus very much on developing the whole human being, as an individual, in artistic and spiritual dimensions as well as in intellectual ways. Yoyu can take this as a 'plug' for them, but the more I see of the Waldorf school here the better I like it. Julian Davies