academic acceleration

One of my close friends runs an advisory for HS students applying to college. He wrote this guest post years ago: Moneyballing College Admissions.

He lives in the Bay Area and told me he’s seeing more parents complaining about the lack of acceleration options in the public school. He said outside CA it’s becoming far more common for high schoolers to take AP Calculus BC before senior year. My 8th graders’ goal is to take it by junior year, giving himself a chance to take Multivariate Calculus by senior year at a local college. This is already offered in some high schools across the nation, including some on the peninsula. Just this week, I talked to someone whose 9th grader was in Calc BC. That only sounds crazy if you haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been sharing about Math Academy students (my 8th grader says his 5th grade little bro is already doing the same stuff his “advanced” math class is doing.)

In our local school district, we are finally seeing the pendulum swing the other way on math instruction. A few years ago, they got rid of “tracking” in 6th grade, forcing all kids, regardless of their interest/aptitude, into the same class. Well, the seeds of change are obvious in this survey I just filled out, as I don’t think we could have even had this conversation 5 years ago:

That #7 offers choices besides “supportive” and “very supportive” tells me these 2 articles are as important as I think they are.

Smarter Than Yesterday (6 min read)

Pamela Hobart argues “the academic acceleration community needs a viable brand”. Co-sign. Terrific post. I’ve had many of the same thoughts, especially as my kid’s schoolwork will leave me wondering, as Pamela has, “what are we even doing here?”

Everyone Wants a Child Like Eileen Gu (10 min read)

”almost nobody today wants the childhood that produced her.”

Violet Gordeljevic spitting truth in this one. I’ll share a few excerpts that resonated with me. You should read it to see what lands or doesn’t for you.

On Discipline and Exceptionalism

• “So when people say she sounds and talks so disciplined, and that she knows her own mind—well, yes. That is what a decade of being asked to do your best looks like from the outside.”
• “Nobody arrives at exceptional by accident. It doesn’t turn up later as a nice surprise because the child was left alone and bored for long enough.”

On Passion and Competence

• “Passion doesn’t usually come first and then get supported. Usually exposure comes first, then competence (from actually having gone through practice), and passion tends to arrive somewhere after that, because human beings mostly love the things they are good at.”
• “What is important to understand is that she could not have fallen in love with skiing, or Mandarin, or Olympiad maths, if nobody had ever put her in front of these things…A child who is never introduced to numbers will not reveal unusual mathematical ability. A child who never sits at an instrument will not discover she has an ear.”

On Modern Parenting and “Full Schedules”

• “We didn’t lighten the load at all. We drive our children to more things than any generation in history. We just stopped asking them to become good at any of it.”
• “If we are honest, the schedule is full but the demand is zero. It’s honestly like we have swapped skill for entertainment.”
• “Underneath every version of this conversation sits the same line: I don’t need my child to be exceptional, I just want them to be happy. … But being the parent who stretches a child—who asks for one more go, who expects them to learn to write something properly or figure out that math equation, who holds the line at six when she wants to quit ballet—doing this is harder and considerably less pleasant than being her friend.”

On Warmth, Adversity, and Long-Term Value

• “Protecting a child from effort is not the same as protecting a child.”
• “What separates people with more demanding childhoods from those with easy, low demand ones, isn’t how much or even what was asked. It’s rather whether the asking sat inside enough warmth to be survivable.”
• “The choice was never between pressure and love. It was always meant to be both.”

And then my 2 favorite:

• “I have met a great many people who regret being allowed to quit”
• “The thing is, children are not good judges of what they will be glad to be good at at thirty.”