Thoughts on Harvard

The other month on Wandering Scientist’s blog, an anonymous poster told me that I would regret it when the dean at Harvard calls to tell me that my child has flamed out, if ze gets in.  (Why did said anon do that?  I think because six year old DC1 does workbooks on weekends, and therefore must not be enjoying childhood?)

I responded that Harvard is a cakewalk for kids who get in and my kids most likely wouldn’t have any trouble there.  And I wouldn’t encourage them to apply there because I’d hope they would go someplace where they’d get a better education.

Seriously, Harvard has really high grade inflation (yes, there “have been studies”).  They have large lectures taught by graduate students with little practice, both their own and graduate students from other schools who they hire for peanuts.  (What they offer to adjuncts in my field is a joke.)  Many flagship state schools give better undergraduate educations, and, depending on your parents’ income and the state you’re from, at a considerably lower price.

Harvard is great for graduate school.  But undergrad, it’s an easy A.  Very difficult to flunk out or even to get more than a few Bs.  You have to work at not getting As.  I suspect the grade inflation is to keep parents happy given that so many classes are large lectures taught by people who are not yet famous professors.  (They argue it isn’t really inflation, just the student body quality, but outside metrics disagree.)  [Exception:  One of the colleges doesn't have the same grade inflation that the others do-- it curves to a B rather than to an A- or A.  I always feel sorry for those students.  They can actually show up to class and do the work and still get the occasional C!]

Now students at Harvard do run themselves ragged, but not with schoolwork.  Harvard tends to accept students who did a million extracurriculars as high school students and who try to do the same as college students.  Many of them fail at that and do mediocre jobs at several things rather than focusing on doing well at a small number.

That’s not to say that Harvard isn’t a good school or there aren’t reasons to go to Harvard.  Certainly the student body is elite and a kid can make great connections that will last a lifetime.  There’s also the imprimatur on the resume.  Exceptionally good students can get research assistant work.  But all in all, I would put it up there with Michigan or Berkeley (both great State schools with the same problems at the undergrad level, though perhaps not so much killing with extracurriculars) in terms of the educational experience.

Personally, I prefer the SLAC model, and I know that ‘tech schools are far more challenging.  If my kids want to go into a field that isn’t offered at a high quality SLAC, we’d be looking for schools with strong supportive programs in their area of interest.  I can’t really see a good reason for recommending Harvard to my children.  As a parent, I have concerns about the big ‘tech schools too, but if they really want to go, we’d have to talk about it.  DC1 would definitely have to be able to emotionally manage that perfectionist streak that shows up from time to time.

Now, for a kid whose parents make under 75K [update:  see comments for actual numbers], I think is the current number, Harvard is free.  That would push it above the state flagship.  There’s also some evidence suggesting that having an ivy on a resume helps out children with low SES although it has no effect on those from high SES backgrounds.  (Our kids are high SES, even if their parents were not.)

As for whether or not my kids could get into Harvard, I know as well as anybody that at those levels it’s a crap shoot.*  One of our friends from high school had straight As, perfect SATs and was the state math champion.  He didn’t get into Harvard.  After all, there are 50 state math champions.  So he went to Stanford.  (And did very well.)

Parents with gifted kids generally aren’t about competition.  We’re more concerned about helping our kids fulfill their potential, something that can be a precarious business when the K-12 system isn’t set up to work with you.  (Also, we’re too exhausted!)  And no, a Harvard education isn’t a holy grail for us.  We know better.

*Legacies, apparently, have a much higher chance of getting into Harvard.  So there’s that.

Ideas for volunteering at DC1′s school?

DC2 will be in daycare next year and DC1 will be in third grade.  DH will be working on starting a consulting business.  I have tenure.  We think we may have more time to get involved with DC1′s school this coming year.

DC1′s school is still hurting from the disastrous financial management last year.  It’s down to 50-odd students.  The management is much better now, but it takes years to recover from bad publicity.  We’re hoping to help out some, but aren’t sure what best fits their needs and our desires and abilities.

We’re currently on the financial committee.  Their large-grants committee is in terrible shape, but their version of the PTA seems to be doing ok.  We don’t want to go on the fundraising committee, though it is insane how much that particular committee has dropped the ball and bungled things this year.  We also did a stint on recruitment last year and find that to be pretty thankless.

They also have parents doing regular helping out in class.  They have room-parents.  There’s a lovely woman doing a gardening program with the students.

My graduate degree is in social science, and really isn’t something I can teach at the K-12 level.  I do, however, have a wide range of experience in math education, both teaching and tutoring.  I even spent a year doing gifted pull-out math once a week for fourth graders in an inner city school.  (Though I would have to recreate my box o’materials– even if it still exists it is in my parents’ basement back in the midwest.)

DH has degrees in engineering and computer science.  He will probably be the adviser of the robot team next year.  He wanted to do that the first year, but for one reason or another the students didn’t field a team.  This year they did, but we had a brand new baby so that was off the table for us.

Any suggestions for what we should suggest to them, if anything?

Ask the grumpies: When is a school good/awesome enough?

CG asks:

How do you know if your kid’s school is “good enough”? Should good enough even be the goal, or should you be shooting for awesome? Assume cost is not really an object.

Femmefrugality adds:

Along the same lines, does how good a kid’s school is play a relevant role after a certain point?  Where does parent involvement take over in the equation?

Gosh, the answer to this question is going to be so different for different people.  All we (#1′s family) know is our kid, and hir unique needs.  Not only are the kids’ needs important, but family preferences could also be important.  Some families, for reasons we cannot comprehend are really interested in making sure their kids have the best competitive sports opportunities.  Some want to make sure they get training in the fine arts.

Some folks have the ability to supplement sub-par school environments at home.  Some kids have a better ability to weather or entirely avoid things like bullying.  In these cases, the school environment may be less important than for other kids.  Other kids may be more sensitive or “too different” or really want to be “followers” and a bad school environment can have a more permanent negative effect.  Here bad schools can lead to dropping out, under-age pregnancy, drug-use, emotional scarring, and so on.

Awesome teachers have had profound effects on kids from all walks of life.  In an ideal world, we’d easily be able to shoot for “awesome”.  Sadly that’s not so easy, and we may have to go for satisficing at a reasonably low level, or even making-do and supplementing.

Our kid is highly gifted and incredibly sensitive.  We really want to avoid hir having the K-8 experiences that we, ourselves, had.  In addition, ze tends to get into trouble when bored.  So we had to look outside the norm.  In some ways we’re satisficing– we’d certainly love for DC’s school not to be undergoing financial difficulties and we’d really love our time and money back.  But, for us it is worth it.

Awesome is really hard to find.  In the small town in which I grew up, there were a few awesome teachers, but there were no awesome schools.  There was the public school, there was the Catholic school, and there were a small number of scary fundamentalist Christian schools.  My parents bought in the second best school district (which had some of the first best teachers) and supplemented with tons of outside enrichment activities.  Getting through the school day was AWFUL most years.  I still bear scars from middle school.  (so does #2)  We don’t want that for our children.  And it’s hard to predict if the schools will be “good enough” in any place that we move to.  In our current situation we have a couple of private school options at least until 6th grade (assuming no big changes), but who knows what the future will hold.

How do we know our school is “good enough”?  I don’t know how we well would tell a priori.  But we tried.  With our specific needs in mind, we visited and observed different private schools.  DC1 needs mental stimulation and possibly differentiation.  Ze needs to not be bullied.  So we watched for signs of the kids being bored.  The kids misbehaving because they were bored.  How the kids interacted with each other.  We asked the teachers what they would do about DC1′s specific needs.  We crossed off our list the school that said they’d work on hir cutting skills all year because that was the only part of the K curriculum that ze hadn’t already mastered.  (Oddly, DC1 got high praise for hir above-average cutting skills in K the following year, even though we didn’t hothouse those.)

How we know now:  1.  DC1 loves to go to school.  Ze does not come home crying.  2.  Ze is not bouncing off the walls after school (most days anyway– we can always tell when there’s been a sub).  3.  Ze neither receives 100%s nor low scores on hir classwork.  Steady grades mostly in the 90s and the occasional in the 80s on classwork seem to indicate it’s at a good level for hir.  4.  Ze isn’t socially isolated– ze talks about hir friends and recess and after school.  Hir best friend cracks us up.  For extra bonus points, DC1 doesn’t seem to have learned that only girls or only boys do X, and the only comments we’ve heard about race and ethnicity seem to be things ze’s gotten from lessons on black history month or in Spanish class or Religious studies.  (And the school does have a diverse student body.)  5.  Ze tells us all about the super cool stuff ze is learning.  And it’s super cool!

In exchange for all this, we pay thousands of dollars each year, donate a bunch, and spend a ton of time with the school trying to help them with their financial situation.  We do think it’s worth it, but at some point it may no longer be.  Or we may move and we won’t be able to afford the much higher private tuition in cities or the private and public schools may both be anti-acceleration.  We’ll have to figure something new out then.  But CG said to assume cost isn’t an object and I’m getting off topic with my own concerns.

Ok, onto Femmefrugality.  The answer to this question is:  We don’t know!  We know that preschool interventions seem to give more bang for their buck than later interventions.  But later interventions still matter.  We know that high quality schools do a lot more for low SES kids than they do for high SES kids, and that high SES kids are less harmed by low quality schools than low SES kids are.  We know that peer groups at school are important, but we’re not really sure how important they are (it seems to depend on a lot of stuff).  We know that schooling is important for many special needs kids, including gifted kids, and that they will be at a higher risk of dropout in an environment that does not suit their needs.  But we have no idea what the line is where schooling starts being more important than parenting (including the parent’s abilities to supplement, not just the parent’s desires) or vice versa.  Ginormous open research question with a lot of papers but no bottom line yet.

Update on FemmeFrugality’s question:  Just went to a talk on how a teacher’s value added affects testscores, college attendance, teen pregnancy, and income.  Good teachers matter!

Grumpy nation, how important is it to you that schooling be awesome or good enough?  How do you know what awesome or good enough is?  Do you have additional feedback for CG and Femmefrugality?

Does forcing kids to be bored teach them useful skills?: A deliberately controversial post

Related: does forcing kids to be with sucky people teach them important life skills?

We argue: no

Boredom leads to trouble and increased drop-out rates.   It would have to be an important skill to make up for the negatives.  But it isn’t.

As an adult, you have more control over your environment, so learning these skills (such as they are) may not be as applicable as we’d wish.

Better: give kids skills to manipulate their environment, so they know they can change it.

If they do have to be occasionally bored or to deal with sucky people, why not learn that on the job as adults? It’s an easier lesson to learn when you’re making the choice to deal with it because you’re getting a higher paycheck or other perks to your job.

And nobody should have to put up with a sucky work environment as an adult. That’s why we work so hard so we have options and freedom to change things, even if our parents sacrificed in their own work environments for us.

This post was brought to you by our childhood selves, who were bored as crap in school and got nothing useful out of grades 1 – 8.  [#2 says, except 4th grade with Mrs. A.  She was AWESOME.]

Should parents pay for their childrens’ college?: A deliberately controversial post

A common discussion on PF blogs is whether or not parents should pay for a kid’s college education.  The discussants generally fall into two camps:  Yes, we are trying to save for it now (though often they don’t go into why) and here’s how, and No, we think kids should pay for their own education mainly to help build their character.

We at Grumpy Rumblings will flesh out some of these reasons, and discuss why we think some of the reasons may be more or less valid.

Yes:  Graduating without student loans is a great gift and can provide kids with a head start in life once they graduate.  They will also be better able to concentrate on their studies if they’re not forced to work all the time or go into massive debt.

No:  Kids whose parents pay may not take college seriously.  They may be more likely to goof off or drink or skip class etc.  College is expensive and parents should take care of their own wants and needs– kids can work or take out loans.  Learning how to pay off college loans isn’t a bad lesson.

Yes or No depending on your perspective:  Some of the differences in beliefs about paying for college seem to be in part class based.  One potential effect of parents paying for college is that students can follow what they’re interested in in terms of majors without having to think about how profitable that major is.  If you come from a privileged background, then being able to major in anything, even a *gasp* humanities major, is a benefit.  If you come from a less-privileged background, this may be considered to be a waste.  Similarly being allowed to experiment with different majors can be seen as a plus or a minus depending on the parent’s viewpoint.  Is college a coming of age experience vs. career preparation?  Is the goal to make the most money or to leave the world a better place?  One’s view of college depends greatly on one’s background.

What we think:

We do not believe that the best way to get kids to care about the value of an education is to make them pay for it.  The value of education in general can be instilled at home from an early age.  And if it doesn’t take, then we doubt that forcing the kid to work 40 hour weeks is going to make hir any more likely to attend class.  In fact, we think it’s going to make hir more likely to sleep through class if ze attends at all.  If that’s the case, then perhaps ze should be doing something else besides going to school.  #1′s parents paid 100% for her college education.  #2′s parents left her with a reasonable loan load.  They both took college very seriously, seriously enough to get into good graduate schools.

One thing that really bothers us is when wealthy parents refuse to pay at all for college.  The ones who value fancy cars and exotic vacations over paying for some of the kid’s tuition.  The problem is that when your parents are poor, you are pretty likely to get financial aid at some portion of the schools to which you’re accepted.  However, if you’re rich, that’s much less likely to happen unless you luck into some pretty amazing merit or sports scholarships.  That means a poor kid may be on the hook for 10K in subsidized loans after graduation, but a rich kid 40+K unsubsidized from a state school or upwards of 200K from a private school.  Even if the rich kid has had more opportunities K-12, it still seems to be an unfair burden to be on the hook for full-tuition with four years of unsubsidized loans.  Less wealthy parents should obviously secure their retirements first and their kids are likely to not come out with as horrific loan burdens precisely because of financial aid.

No matter what you decide, it’s a good idea to let kids know early on what to expect.  I felt so bad for my friends who applied and got in awesome places but then had to do 2 years at community college because their parents figured Hawaii and/or a new car was a better deal that year than paying some of the tuition at Dartmouth or Notre Dame.  On the other hand, knowing that I could go anywhere because my parents had been saving their whole lives opened up a world that would eventually propel me into a higher economic class.  If I hadn’t known I could go anywhere (and given how little money we had growing up, I wouldn’t have assumed I could), I might not have aimed as high.

Update:  Cherish the Scientist asks about her situation.

Do you think these reasons are valid?  Where do you stand on the paying for kid’s college education question?

Good vs. bad research

Just because some research says X is good and some says X is bad, doesn’t mean we don’t know if X is good or bad.

Research quality is also important.

Correlation is easy to measure.  When X and Y are related, there are many methods we can use to figure out how much they’re related, how much they covary.  Causation is not so easy.   Is it X causing Y, Y causing X or some third factor Z that causes both?

The gold standard of getting at causation is the randomized controlled experiment.  When done well, randomized controlled experiments are internally valid.  In the setting tested, we can say that X causes Y if when X is varied, Y varies as well.

Randomized controlled experiments may not be externally valid.  The subject pool may not act the same as all people who aren’t undergraduate psychology majors.  The general equilibrium effects may be different if adding money for one intervention takes away money from another intervention, rather than leaving everything else the same.  Additionally, an intervention may work great on a small set of people but may flounder with a much larger set (ex.  training out of work people to be welders– great when it’s a small number or people, not so good when every unemployed person can now weld).

We can’t always do a randomized controlled experiment.  Sometimes the interventions would be illegal, unethical, inappropriate for a lab, or just too expensive.  Social scientists have a number of ways to get at causality when that’s the case.  Notably, economists use “natural experiments” — exogenous shocks to the treatment that, with some fancy math, can be used to isolate the causal mechanism from what is correlational but not causal.  Popular methods include something called “differences-in-differences” which is a way to subtract out bias by using two (or more) imperfect treatments (changing state laws over time are popular), and “instrumental variables” in which you use a Z variable that is related to your X variable but is only related to your Y variable through X, so you know that the Z part of X is causally affecting Y.  There are other techniques that can be used such as regression discontinuity design or propensity score matching that have various positives and drawbacks.

It doesn’t matter if 20 published education papers find that X and Y are related and then make the claim that X causes Y.  That doesn’t mean that X causes Y.  Standards of publication for causal claims are different in different fields.  But if the same claim is published in a high quality psychology journal, then you can be pretty sure that they did a randomized controlled experiment to figure out causation, and they probably got it right, at least from an internal validity standpoint.

If the same claim is published in a high quality economics journal, then they may not have done a randomized controlled experiment, but they probably did the best that can be done with a high quality quasi-experiment or natural experiment.  (Ignoring the subset of theory papers that can prove anything and are still published in high quality journals…)  These economics findings may be more likely to be externally valid than the psychology findings, but it will depend on what kind of natural experiment the authors exploited.  If they only studied teen moms, then the findings may not be relevant to single men over the age of 50.

So just because research is mixed on a topic doesn’t mean we don’t actually know the answer.  If some of the research is crap, and some of it is good, then you can ignore the crap part and just focus on what is good.  How can you tell what is good?  Well, that’s a bit harder, but keeping in mind that correlation is not causation and looking hard for what the authors are actually measuring is a good first step.

Do you get frustrated when reporters report on research without having any idea about the quality of the research?  How do you winnow out the wheat from the chaff?

Thoughts on K-12 awards ceremonies

Personally, as a kid I hated these.  As an adult, they’re just as bad. Really I hate sitting still while people drone on about meaningless things in general.  (I could be reading a novel with this time!  Or doing work…)

Anyhow, recently sat through a 2 hour ordeal for K-6.  It started with a 2nd and 3rd grade combined recorder performance.  The program claims they were playing When the Saints Go Marching.  I will take its word for it.  Fortunately the rest of the music wasn’t quite so painful, but I wouldn’t say it was good and man there sure was a lot of it.

In terms of awards, there seem to be two types of philosophies.  There’s the philosophy that some of the older and more behind-the-times folks grew up with, in which there are a small number of awards that generally actually mean something.  Like you won a spelling bee, you get a spelling award, you had perfect attendance, you get an attendance award etc.  A small number of athletic and academic awards based on demonstrated quantifiable performance.  These kinds of awards lost favor sometime in the late 80s with the self-esteem movement– the idea is that the kids who don’t get awards feel bad.

The self-esteem movement ushered in the idea that every kid gets a trophy.  Everybody gets awards so that nobody feels left out.  Ceremonies are long and annoying and meaningless.  But hey, everyone gets a trophy.  (These would account for my small collection of “most improved” softball trophies.  What a waste.)

The K-6 ceremony I sat through seemed to combine the worst of both worlds.  Each teacher got to nominate 4 kids for every subject plus a few extras, 2 nominations for “excellence” and two for “improvement”.  So, the K teacher, got to nominate something like 32 awards to be shared across her 9 students.  The same for all other teachers and their classes.  On top of that there were tons of other awards for various forms of citizenship and extramurals etc. (including a “Best Boy” and “Best Girl” just like in Harry Potter).  You can see how this might be interminable for the parents.

DC somehow only ended up with one award… “improvement in handwriting.”  I figured with hir almost unbroken record of green dots for behavior that ze would at least get “excellence in listening skills” or something.  Apparently not.  Fortunately DC is still too young to realize that ze was the only kindergartener who didn’t get at least 3 awards, and seemed proud enough to have the certificate of completion.  Whew.

Part of it is ze falling through the cracks– with the subjects ze excels at, neither the K teacher nor the 1st grade teacher nominated hir.  And unlike the other kid doing the half-day split, DC apparently did not impress the language teachers or the arts teacher or the music teacher.

But seriously, if you’re gonna do the “zillions of awards” thing in which the awards are meaningless, shouldn’t you notice when a kid has significantly fewer awards than everybody else?

If there are only a few awards, then the people not getting them are in the majority.  The awards mean something, but not getting one doesn’t mean you’ve been left out.  When there are a lot of awards, not getting any means you’re in the minority and maybe there’s something wrong with you.

But maybe it’s a good lesson to learn that unless there’s money or prestige attached, these awards ceremonies are pretty meaningless, and external validation isn’t as important as actually doing a good job.  Luckily not a lesson that has to be learned this year.

Ironically, DC got hir second lowest grade of hir career in handwriting in the last grading period.

What’s your view on end of the year awards and awards ceremonies for K-12?

Ask the grumpies: Tracking

Leah asks:

I assume you prefer tracking students based on ability in K-12 or at least 6-12/7-12. maybe yes? Have you seen any good evidence for that, or is there better evidence for having lumped classes where assignments/projects are differentiated to ability?

We’re not really up on the tracking literature for non-gifted kids.  Our impression is that once you cut off the tails of the distribution, mainstreaming has better outcomes than tracking.  There is good evidence that mainstreaming gifted kids has worse outcomes both for the gifted kids and for the middle of the distribution in cooperative learning environments.  The literature on mainstreaming for learning disabled kids is mixed, but I suspect that mainstreaming is good for kids who are misdiagnosed (generally because they are poor or minority) and for those with specific learning disabilities, and bad for kids who need more than just pull-out programming for their individual kind of disability.  It would be awesome if they could, say, track math classes for kids who have dyscalculia, because math can be taught to kids with dyscalculia, but it has to be taught in a different way than mainstream math is taught.  But it’s hard to do that kind of thing except in a major urban center.

As a teacher, it is much easier to teach to a tracked class, but that’s just personal anecdote.  There’s a lot more work to go into differentiation, and God bless the teachers who are willing and able to put in that effort.  We salute you and wish you smaller class sizes!

Differentiation, when done well, has good outcomes across all ability levels.  Ability clustering within a class (allowing clusters to change as abilities change) also has good outcomes for everybody.  Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom has an excellent literature review of the differentiation and ability clustering literature for all kids, not just gifted kids.

Do any of our grumpy readers have more knowledge about tracking to share with Leah?  Any experiences to share?

Ask the grumpies: Preschool play vs academics

Mom2boy asks:

Why can’t I find a montessori school that has a lot of playground time during the day? In the alternative, will spending the summer at the preschool with a lot of playground time but no counting chains (or any counting really) stunt my addition obsessed child’s development?

Perhaps it’s what the parents demand in your area– they want their preschool time to be academic… that’s pretty common with preschools with part-time options. The playing part is extra on top of the academic, before or after regular preschool hours. Our Montessori was only full-time, so had playground and nap-time built in, but the other two in town are more geared towards SAHM and part-time moms who want the academic prep before K, so the playtime is before part-time dropoff and after part-time pick-up.  Presumably those moms don’t want to pay for something they provide themselves.

In terms of academics, unless your child is coming from a deprived background, which seems unlikely, no, not only will a non-academic preschool not stunt your child’s development, but no preschool work at all would not stunt development.  There’s still a lot of stuff to be learned across many spectrums ages 0-5 even without standard academics.  And your child may pick up academics (colors, numbers, letters, etc.) without any formal learning just from being around.

However, your child may be happier (and in our case, better behaved) with some academics.  A lot of mommy forums have people who say that teaching academics (before, say, age 7) is horrible and will destroy your Rousseau dream-child.  That’s not true either.  Academics won’t do any harm and they’re FUN for almost all kids until around 5th grade, give or take.  (And some no-pressure exposure before they’re needed may help with stress later on for many kids.)  By all means, indulge that love of numbers– love of math is worth encouraging!  It may be a matter of if you’d rather do the academics at home or go to the playground at home, if there aren’t schools that offer both.

Btw, what can you do with preschool math?  We loved playing with manipulables.  The ones we had initially were stackable generic game pieces that DH picked up at a craft store when one of his hobbies was creating board games.  Later we replaced them with pixel blocks.  These are great because you can just explore putting groups of numbers together, to get a real feel for how counting and addition are related.  You can do either guided exploration or just let DC play.  (3 red pieces + 2 blue pieces = 5 pieces.)  Fingers are great when you’re out and about, but prepare for nasty looks from other folks who think you’re pushing or showing off (not realizing they’d be giving nasty looks of a different kind if you weren’t keeping your child occupied).

Grumpy Nation, any explanations or suggestions for Mom2boy?

Schooling update: Spring Semester

I was looking through blog posts I wrote last year about DC’s schooling dilemma.  It’s crazy to think how much has changed since then.

At the time, DC was in preschool, all hir friends were heading to kindergarten (almost), and hir (quite excellent) preschool had run out of things for hir to do.  They suggested that DC become a teacher’s helper the next year as hir main activity.  At home ze had whizzed through all the magic treehouse books and done increasingly more math.

We were worried about DC’s increasing perfectionism.  DC slept very little (~7 hrs/night, no nap) and was bouncing off the walls while awake.  Ze was even starting to have little behavior problems of the type that a child trying to entertain hirself often gets into.  I read approximately a zillion books on giftedness for solutions to these problems, and they were pretty unanimous that starting K early would be the answer for our situation.

So we looked into schools in the area and decided on the one that called hir in for a second round of testing after ze passed the first kindergarten entrance exam.  They suggested, based on the testing, that DC start K a year early and spend half the day in first grade for math and reading.

Several readers had concern about the acceleration.  Were we destroying DC’s childhood?  What about when ze got to middle school or high school or college.  Etc. Etc. Etc.  And you know, there was that one kid who was accelerated and ze was WEIRD, so obviously acceleration (and being weird) is a horrible thing.  [Note to people:  Correlation is not causation.  That kid would have been weird ANYWAY, and probably would have been perfectly normal surrounded by kids who were more accepting of differences instead of by assholes.  Oops, were we projecting again?]

DC has flourished this year.

The perfectionism is gone.  The first grade teacher is a miracle worker.  DC is no longer afraid to try things ze doesn’t know right away.  Ze comes home with the occasional 80% exam and grins and tells us what the right answers should have been, and ze knows that now.  Ze tells us ze will get things.

Ze is learning things and excited and tells us all sorts of interesting science and history and theological and mathematical ideas.  We discuss lines of symmetry and ze stumped me on a parallelogram (they don’t have a line of symmetry!)  Ze love love loves school and learning.

At school DC has practiced the things ze didn’t want to practice at home.  Hir printing looks a lot nicer than mine did as a second-grader.  Double-digit addition is no problem.  It’s nice being able to pick and choose to only do fun stuff at home without being limited by what DC can write or compute.

DC now sleeps 9 hours per night on weekdays.  (Still less than that on weekends, but what can you do?)  That extra grown-up time is wonderful.  At home ze is so much calmer (again, not so much on weekends unless we get that hour of exercise and hour of thinking in).  We don’t have to do homeworkbooks on weekdays because DC doesn’t need extra thinking to help hir settle down, just on weekends.  (So we’ve greatly slowed the pace we’re getting through Singapore Math, and I am fine with that.)  We don’t think this is just getting older– when the 1st grade teacher was gone for two weeks, DC started reverting to previous behaviors.

All reports tell us that DC is an angel at school.  So far ze has gotten two “yellows” all year (every other day is “green”).  One for rolling off hir mat during naptime (during the horrible 2 weeks that the first grade teacher was out with a family emergency), and once for leaving the room without permission (“I didn’t know what that meant”) to go to first grade early.

All the kids are pretty well-behaved and DC is something of a pet among the older grades.  They love to ruffle hir hair.

Socially, DC isn’t even the youngest in hir class.  Though, as always, ze prefers spending time with the older children.  Hir best friend is a 6 year old who moved here mid-year and goes with hir to first-grade for half the day.  DC likes to use the word “noodle” in place of everything and hir best friend has played along and decided to be a meatball.  The V-day card was adorable– to Noodle (picture of noodle) From Meatball (picture of meatball).

Of course, all has not been smooth sailing.  The school has sucked hours upon hours of our time and thousands of our dollars in donations.  The headmaster is afraid of numbers but also can’t let go of control… and most recently has quit (long-term a good thing, short-term a bad thing).  The board is weak and also not so good with numbers.  In fall, the school came out with press announcements that it was going out of business unless they raised 500K (the actual number needed turned out to be closer to 400K, and would have been less had they been capable of cutting anything that the finance committee suggested cutting).  Because of poor management going forward, we opted not to give them the second installment of the large donation my father had offered.  We’re still not sure if the school is going to be around next year.  The finance committee told the headmaster she needed to come up with a bare bones budget that ensured the school would be around next year without assuming an increase in students.  Instead, her budget assumes an enrollment increase of 20 students.  That isn’t going to happen.  And it isn’t going to happen because current students cannot recommend the school to their friends if they don’t believe the school is going to stick around next year, which they could believe if the head had listened to the finance committee.  This is why not being afraid of numbers is so important.

The first grade teacher will not be returning next year.  She wants to get paid more than 23K and to have job security.  We’re bummed about this.  The replacement teacher, the current 2nd grade teacher, has a good reputation and DC would have been spending half the day with her anyway.

So we filled out the form next year, and would have put down the deposit had it not been waived.

We’ve looked into a local preK-6 Montessori and we think this will be a good option if the school does go under, assuming we can get on the list quickly enough.  (And as members of the finance committee, we may get insider information in that respect.)  They’re on board with DC starting in the elementary room as a nominal first grader next year (rather than K with the 3-6 room), and they are completely self-directed and have materials up through standard 8th grade.  I love their New Math curriculum (combined with more traditional Singapore math workbooks).  You should have seen me drool over their units on math with different bases. The main problem with them this year was that they closed at 2:30, but for the first time ever next year they’re adding an after school program until 5pm.  Which is still cutting it close, but since the Montessori turns to be very close to my work it should be ok so long as I do pick-up.  (Sadly, it is far from our daycare Montessori for #2!)

Starting in public school kindergarten next year cannot happen.  That much is pretty obvious right now.  Going back to a year of learning letters and numbers and colors after this would be frustrating for everyone, especially in a large class with a lot more kids with very different needs from DC’s.  Heck, it would have been frustrating for this year!

Did we make the best decision (or at least a good enough decision) based on our options?  Unequivocally yes.  All the things people warned us about with acceleration would probably have happened had we not accelerated.  Instead DC fits in well, is challenged, behaves well, has friends, and loves school.  This year has been a good one for hir, and by extension for us.  The sacrifices we’ve made have been worth it, though we wish we would not have had to make them.  We hope the school is still around next year, but all we can do is one year at a time, one month at a time, one challenge at a time.