HGC crowd is downright frightening!

[Anonymous]

I think you need both - appropriate programs in the schools for bright kids. AND you need the centers for the off the charts kids and the ones with no peers at home school.

I'm with you PP. I have a child similar to your daughter. Always been a curious kid who loves to learn, play games and read. He stinks at sports. Why is OK to have special soccer teams but no OK to have special classes or a magnet program?

And I think we don't have GT classes here anymore because that emphasizes the "gap" between the high and low performing kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Would you say these terrible things to the parent of an ASD child, learning disabled, ADHD??

Unusual brain wiring can be difficult to manage, and it's stigmatized to be weird or a nerd or whatever, and whenever we say anything we get these "cry me a river" sorts of responses.

+1 million
And some of these kids are both gifted and LD - 2e.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

That's a rare occurrence. Most of the kids at HGCs are just normal, bright kids. Or, they are socially awkward and eager to leave their home school.

It's a shame that mcps can't function like private schools and simply stimulate and challenge all kids.

Private schools may (or may not) stimulate and challenge all of the kids they admit, but they only admit a select few. (And sometimes they expel, whoops, "counsel out", some of the kids they did admit.) So no, private schools don't stimulate and challenge all kids.

Not catholic schools.

I attended some of the best catholic schools in the area. They know how to raise the bar and demand excellence.

Oh stop it, this isn't about you. Go play some lax.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How silly. I was a gifted kid in a school system with effectively no program. Yes, school was a little boring (up to and including my top college). Yes, I did a lot of independent reading. Which, incidentally, is great training for being a grown up. No one needs some personally-tailored super challenging middle school experience.

No one NEEDS it, but it might nonetheless be nice to have it.

The real problem is this: public elementary school doesn't provide an adequate foundation for success.

Private schools introduce foreign language in K.

Private schools teach vocabulary and grammar. (I was diagramming sentences in 4th grade.)

Private schools foster structure and discipline, and students are well equipped for HS and college thanks to the traditional approach to education.

I could go on and on.

Yes. Today's privates are more similar to my public schooling than today's public schools. I wish I had paid more attention to the education policy debates years ago. It's sad how we've diminished a once great educational system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How silly. I was a gifted kid in a school system with effectively no program. Yes, school was a little boring (up to and including my top college). Yes, I did a lot of independent reading. Which, incidentally, is great training for being a grown up. No one needs some personally-tailored super challenging middle school experience.

No one NEEDS it, but it might nonetheless be nice to have it.

The real problem is this: public elementary school doesn't provide an adequate foundation for success.

Private schools introduce foreign language in K.

Private schools teach vocabulary and grammar. (I was diagramming sentences in 4th grade.)

Private schools foster structure and discipline, and students are well equipped for HS and college thanks to the traditional approach to education.

I could go on and on.

Absolutely. Why do you think universities are accepting so many foreign students? They raise the standards. In the privates, it is very, very hard to get an A - it still means something.

WTF are you talking about?

-Surrounded by successful public school grads

Are they 2.0 guinea pigs?

Didn't think so.

80% of sixth graders at our school made honor roll--with most earning straight As.

That's 2.0.

These guinea pigs are going to struggle in HS and college. Just watch.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How silly. I was a gifted kid in a school system with effectively no program. Yes, school was a little boring (up to and including my top college). Yes, I did a lot of independent reading. Which, incidentally, is great training for being a grown up. No one needs some personally-tailored super challenging middle school experience.

No one NEEDS it, but it might nonetheless be nice to have it.

The real problem is this: public elementary school doesn't provide an adequate foundation for success.

Private schools introduce foreign language in K.

Private schools teach vocabulary and grammar. (I was diagramming sentences in 4th grade.)

Private schools foster structure and discipline, and students are well equipped for HS and college thanks to the traditional approach to education.

I could go on and on.

They do a great job of diagramming at the Catholic schools.

Well, that's cool that you were diagramming sentences in 4th grade. I was, too, in public school in the 1970s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think you need both - appropriate programs in the schools for bright kids. AND you need the centers for the off the charts kids and the ones with no peers at home school.

I'm with you PP. I have a child similar to your daughter. Always been a curious kid who loves to learn, play games and read. He stinks at sports. Why is OK to have special soccer teams but no OK to have special classes or a magnet program?

And I think we don't have GT classes here anymore because that emphasizes the "gap" between the high and low performing kids.

I agree. Everybody gets to talk about their kid playing travel and select soccer or whatever sport but if your kid gets in the ES magnet, all of a sudden that's too much pressure. I think the acceleration/enrichment should have been more available at the home school but it wasn't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I agree. Everybody gets to talk about their kid playing travel and select soccer or whatever sport but if your kid gets in the ES magnet, all of a sudden that's too much pressure. I think the acceleration/enrichment should have been more available at the home school but it wasn't.

And everybody also says that travel/select soccer or whatever is too much pressure. At least on DCUM, that is. In real life, at least in my experience, nobody talks about this for either soccer or magnet programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I honestly can't remember if I diagrammed sentences or not. Graduated from HS in the mid-aughts. What's this like super important sentence diagramming skill used for? Being smart and having access to information is really all a driven kid needs. With a parent to help guide them a bit, they'll get on fine. And they'll also figure out the parts of speech one way or another.

Not much. It's something two Americans invented 150 years ago, and it's mostly an end in itself. Certainly people who study language, aka linguists, don't use it.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4568

[Anonymous]

Do people really remember what they were doing in 4th grade. I have almost zero memory of what we did then. Maybe I'm older (45).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly can't remember if I diagrammed sentences or not. Graduated from HS in the mid-aughts. What's this like super important sentence diagramming skill used for? Being smart and having access to information is really all a driven kid needs. With a parent to help guide them a bit, they'll get on fine. And they'll also figure out the parts of speech one way or another.

Not much. It's something two Americans invented 150 years ago, and it's mostly an end in itself. Certainly people who study language, aka linguists, don't use it.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4568

I learned the parts of speech, very well, while studying foreign language, not in an immersion program, and not in elementary school, and not from diagramming.

But anyway plenty of students who trudged through diagramming exercises never really mastered the parts of speech so the people who were going to learn, probably did one way or another, and some people just never were.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do people really remember what they were doing in 4th grade. I have almost zero memory of what we did then. Maybe I'm older (45).

I do: page after page after page after page of long division (with remainders). Also, watching kids have fights on the playground.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do people really remember what they were doing in 4th grade. I have almost zero memory of what we did then. Maybe I'm older (45).

I'm a year older than you. I remember doing sentence diagrams because it made language arts more like math (Subject-noun, verb, adjective/adverb modifying words, prepositional phrases as modifiers) more like a formula-driven math approach. I was much more interested in math than language arts. I was very good at sentence diagrams. My friends were bamboozled by them.

But, honestly, did diagramming sentences add some sort of benefit to my life? No, not to my knowledge. Do they benefit anyone? I really don't think so. Probably why schools do not do this anymore.

[Anonymous]

IMO, one of the best way to learn grammar is by reading quality books. I don't think they teach grammar as a separate subject matter, but I think it's interspersed with LA curriculum through creative writing and such. Diagramming sentences and such is akin to endless math worksheets. Kids start to hate learning it. I don't think we need to continue with the "this is how I learned it and I turned out fine" way of teaching. If we know better, then we ought to do better for our kids.

This article discusses this very thing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-wrong-way-to-teach-grammar/284014/

"A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons—those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech—don’t help and may even hinder students’ efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work.

This finding—confirmed in 1984, 2007, and 2012 through reviews of over 250 studies—is consistent among students of all ages, from elementary school through college. For example, one well-regarded study followed three groups of students from 9th to 11th grade where one group had traditional rule-bound lessons, a second received an alternative approach to grammar instruction, and a third received no grammar lessons at all, just more literature and creative writing. The result: No significant differences among the three groups—except that both grammar groups emerged with a strong antipathy to English. "

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do people really remember what they were doing in 4th grade. I have almost zero memory of what we did then. Maybe I'm older (45).

I'm a year older than you. I remember doing sentence diagrams because it made language arts more like math (Subject-noun, verb, adjective/adverb modifying words, prepositional phrases as modifiers) more like a formula-driven math approach. I was much more interested in math than language arts. I was very good at sentence diagrams. My friends were bamboozled by them.

But, honestly, did diagramming sentences add some sort of benefit to my life? No, not to my knowledge. Do they benefit anyone? I really don't think so. Probably why schools do not do this anymore.

This poster again. And obviously I do not proof read very well given my change in sentence structure.