APS is failing my gifted child

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My 3rd grader at an AAP canter school in FFX county is definitely spelling much more difficult words. Her test last week had illicit, immobile, and exercise on it.

My FCPS AAP kids never had a spelling test out side of the beginning-of-the-year DSA until we switched to private this year.

OP I would not be certain AAP will persist like it is. They have quite possibly changed elementary school advanced math to significantly water it down this year (https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/30/1226968.page#28326731). There's a general trend towards a cluster model similar to what APS does. Plus the boogeyman of the boundary study everyone on the FCPS forum is freaking out over.

Supplementation always works and privates are still there. If you move to McLean to be in one of their AAP centers you may find you're still supplementing, but so will many other people around you. Or you go private.

Those Caesars English tests were spelling tests, fyi. With the new state mandated ELA curriculum, it's not clear what will happen with Caesars English, which is currently paused. But I would be surprised if it does not come back.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My 3rd grade gifted kid is just being failed by this school system. No differentiation, no peers in their class that I can see, ridiculous low level instruction. Think 2-letter spelling tests. There are tears every night about how terrible school is and how they aren’t learning anything.

Please, any advice? What’s a viable option? Move to Fairfax? I hear AAP is no great thing. Are there any privates that are more challenging? Thanks for any advice or lessons learned.

Please move to another county. I look forward to your post in another forum 6 months later about how your child is being failed there too. 🙂‍↔️

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s not a coincidence that each of Langley and McLean has more National Merit Semifinalists this year than all four of the high schools in APS combined. If you want a more challenging pyramid (and many in APS don’t), that is where you should go.

Yeah, this definitely has nothing to do with the average household income of McLean vs Arlington/SES/demographics.🙄 I’m not saying that accounts for all of the difference, but it’s not insignificant.

Yorktown is very high SES but it has only a handful of NMSF semifinalists. If your hypothesis is right it should be like Mclean

Not a direct comparison because of APS's option program. The top kids transfer to WL for IB

No. Not even close. A lot of top students don't transfer. Someone here keeps pushing this lie.

I'm very familiar with YHS, thanks. You are correct that a lot of top students do not leave YHS. But also, some do go to IB at WL. A few more go to HB. This is different from the FCPS system, so I don't think you can just make the direct comparison that you so desperately want to make. And for what it's worth, I do agree with you that FCPS is stronger for high achieving students. Just pointing out the flaw in your "methodology."

Wait, some "top" students go to H-B? There aren't enough of those kinds of kids enrolled there anymore for your numbers to add up given that there are two other high schools in the county they pull from.

I disagree. There are 30+ kids zoned to YHS in every HB class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sigh.

This post every year. North Arlington parents, who went to HLS or Georgetown or UVA, believe their snowflake is gifted. Smarter than the other stupid children from, say, dumb Va Tech that they are stuck in school with. I mean, your poor child’s cohort must be filled with absolute idiots. I sympathize

Then the whole they aren’t learning anything all day from the really terrible teachers in APS. I feel your pain. I mean, you should definitely get them into a CHALLENGING elementary school. Look at Sidwell or Beauvoir or GDS or Potomac, where those kids are being taught some hard core stuff. Oh wait. Have you actually looked at what the top elementary programs consist of?

You need some perspective. In 3rd grade, your kid needs mostly to learn some social skills. And to learn how to get along with other nice smart kids, which is who actually attends your kids elementary school. And then read a bunch. That’s it. Maybe discover love of, I dunno, skateboarding. Your kid is going to be way better off if you let them enjoy their childhood. But whatever you push. And see what it gets you. My take is this is your first kid/first rodeo, you have no perspective, and you are one of those overly competitive people who actually have difficultly in the real world.

This philosophy, in a nutshell, is why APS doesn't fare well in comparisons with either the privates or the top schools in FCPS and MCPS. There are lots of moderately well educated parents in Arlington who cannot handle the idea of someone else's kid perhaps being more academically advanced, and ready for greater challenges, than their own, so they insist on a system that masks any such differences well into high school. And then they make excuses based on demographics and income levels when the APS high schools have fewer high-achieving kids, even though North Arlington is among the most expensive suburbs in the region.

No it’s that plenty of us in NA realize being “the top” or “the best” or whatever metric you care about doesn’t really matter. My kid is naturally smart, athletic, has lots of friends, and comes from enough family resources to help him with a good start in life. The most successful people are not necessarily the ones constantly striving to get the best grade. Nobody cares about your transcript or where you went to school 5 years after graduation.

I’d rather my kid have time for a travel sport and get to enjoy living in a nice walkable neighborhood and not have anxious parents fretting over testing into an AAP or keeping up with some metric that no one outside of the people competing for that metric care about.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sigh.

This post every year. North Arlington parents, who went to HLS or Georgetown or UVA, believe their snowflake is gifted. Smarter than the other stupid children from, say, dumb Va Tech that they are stuck in school with. I mean, your poor child’s cohort must be filled with absolute idiots. I sympathize

Then the whole they aren’t learning anything all day from the really terrible teachers in APS. I feel your pain. I mean, you should definitely get them into a CHALLENGING elementary school. Look at Sidwell or Beauvoir or GDS or Potomac, where those kids are being taught some hard core stuff. Oh wait. Have you actually looked at what the top elementary programs consist of?

You need some perspective. In 3rd grade, your kid needs mostly to learn some social skills. And to learn how to get along with other nice smart kids, which is who actually attends your kids elementary school. And then read a bunch. That’s it. Maybe discover love of, I dunno, skateboarding. Your kid is going to be way better off if you let them enjoy their childhood. But whatever you push. And see what it gets you. My take is this is your first kid/first rodeo, you have no perspective, and you are one of those overly competitive people who actually have difficultly in the real world.

This philosophy, in a nutshell, is why APS doesn't fare well in comparisons with either the privates or the top schools in FCPS and MCPS. There are lots of moderately well educated parents in Arlington who cannot handle the idea of someone else's kid perhaps being more academically advanced, and ready for greater challenges, than their own, so they insist on a system that masks any such differences well into high school. And then they make excuses based on demographics and income levels when the APS high schools have fewer high-achieving kids, even though North Arlington is among the most expensive suburbs in the region.

No it’s that plenty of us in NA realize being “the top” or “the best” or whatever metric you care about doesn’t really matter. My kid is naturally smart, athletic, has lots of friends, and comes from enough family resources to help him with a good start in life. The most successful people are not necessarily the ones constantly striving to get the best grade. Nobody cares about your transcript or where you went to school 5 years after graduation.

I’d rather my kid have time for a travel sport and get to enjoy living in a nice walkable neighborhood and not have anxious parents fretting over testing into an AAP or keeping up with some metric that no one outside of the people competing for that metric care about.

We all can’t be sales bros.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sigh.

This post every year. North Arlington parents, who went to HLS or Georgetown or UVA, believe their snowflake is gifted. Smarter than the other stupid children from, say, dumb Va Tech that they are stuck in school with. I mean, your poor child’s cohort must be filled with absolute idiots. I sympathize

Then the whole they aren’t learning anything all day from the really terrible teachers in APS. I feel your pain. I mean, you should definitely get them into a CHALLENGING elementary school. Look at Sidwell or Beauvoir or GDS or Potomac, where those kids are being taught some hard core stuff. Oh wait. Have you actually looked at what the top elementary programs consist of?

You need some perspective. In 3rd grade, your kid needs mostly to learn some social skills. And to learn how to get along with other nice smart kids, which is who actually attends your kids elementary school. And then read a bunch. That’s it. Maybe discover love of, I dunno, skateboarding. Your kid is going to be way better off if you let them enjoy their childhood. But whatever you push. And see what it gets you. My take is this is your first kid/first rodeo, you have no perspective, and you are one of those overly competitive people who actually have difficultly in the real world.

This philosophy, in a nutshell, is why APS doesn't fare well in comparisons with either the privates or the top schools in FCPS and MCPS. There are lots of moderately well educated parents in Arlington who cannot handle the idea of someone else's kid perhaps being more academically advanced, and ready for greater challenges, than their own, so they insist on a system that masks any such differences well into high school. And then they make excuses based on demographics and income levels when the APS high schools have fewer high-achieving kids, even though North Arlington is among the most expensive suburbs in the region.

No it’s that plenty of us in NA realize being “the top” or “the best” or whatever metric you care about doesn’t really matter. My kid is naturally smart, athletic, has lots of friends, and comes from enough family resources to help him with a good start in life. The most successful people are not necessarily the ones constantly striving to get the best grade. Nobody cares about your transcript or where you went to school 5 years after graduation.

I’d rather my kid have time for a travel sport and get to enjoy living in a nice walkable neighborhood and not have anxious parents fretting over testing into an AAP or keeping up with some metric that no one outside of the people competing for that metric care about.

We all can’t be sales bros.

All those strivers will end up at places like Deloitte with the rest of the commoners, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:APS is the worst. So overrated.

No, it's really not. It's never been at the top in the area, and this is widely known.

[Anonymous]

OP if your kid put the energy they put into sobbing at home about how it's not a good enough school into making friends with the proles they are surrounded by, they might enjoy school more. Or have they already indicated their superiority and eat lunch alone and don't get asked to play at recess?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP if your kid put the energy they put into sobbing at home about how it's not a good enough school into making friends with the proles they are surrounded by, they might enjoy school more. Or have they already indicated their superiority and eat lunch alone and don't get asked to play at recess?

Damn, dude. Kid is a 3rd grader. Chill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sigh.

This post every year. North Arlington parents, who went to HLS or Georgetown or UVA, believe their snowflake is gifted. Smarter than the other stupid children from, say, dumb Va Tech that they are stuck in school with. I mean, your poor child’s cohort must be filled with absolute idiots. I sympathize

Then the whole they aren’t learning anything all day from the really terrible teachers in APS. I feel your pain. I mean, you should definitely get them into a CHALLENGING elementary school. Look at Sidwell or Beauvoir or GDS or Potomac, where those kids are being taught some hard core stuff. Oh wait. Have you actually looked at what the top elementary programs consist of?

You need some perspective. In 3rd grade, your kid needs mostly to learn some social skills. And to learn how to get along with other nice smart kids, which is who actually attends your kids elementary school. And then read a bunch. That’s it. Maybe discover love of, I dunno, skateboarding. Your kid is going to be way better off if you let them enjoy their childhood. But whatever you push. And see what it gets you. My take is this is your first kid/first rodeo, you have no perspective, and you are one of those overly competitive people who actually have difficultly in the real world.

This philosophy, in a nutshell, is why APS doesn't fare well in comparisons with either the privates or the top schools in FCPS and MCPS. There are lots of moderately well educated parents in Arlington who cannot handle the idea of someone else's kid perhaps being more academically advanced, and ready for greater challenges, than their own, so they insist on a system that masks any such differences well into high school. And then they make excuses based on demographics and income levels when the APS high schools have fewer high-achieving kids, even though North Arlington is among the most expensive suburbs in the region.

No it’s that plenty of us in NA realize being “the top” or “the best” or whatever metric you care about doesn’t really matter. My kid is naturally smart, athletic, has lots of friends, and comes from enough family resources to help him with a good start in life. The most successful people are not necessarily the ones constantly striving to get the best grade. Nobody cares about your transcript or where you went to school 5 years after graduation.

I’d rather my kid have time for a travel sport and get to enjoy living in a nice walkable neighborhood and not have anxious parents fretting over testing into an AAP or keeping up with some metric that no one outside of the people competing for that metric care about.

We all can’t be sales bros.

All those strivers will end up at places like Deloitte with the rest of the commoners, though.

I don’t think you understand where strivers are coming from. They don’t have “family resources”, so ending up at Deloitte is not the insult you think it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meeting your profoundly gifted child is more than just challenging them in spelling or math. It's also socializing them, giving them the opportunity to find solutions to being bored, teaching them to exist with others who may be different from them. It's about PE, and recess, and music, and art class. Not just math and reading. It's all the things.

All those are dumbed down as well in elementary school. At least in our APS experience.

PE is about silly things such as coordination or stretching (juggling with silks anyone?) and not about competition games and improving skills: not to say that kids shouldn't learn those things but gym class is not for that, maybe some kind of physical therapy or something.

Most playgrounds in schools don't have actual playground equipment anymore (no swings, no tall slides, etc.) and just have that giant plastic behemoth that's mostly useless. Plus there's limited time to do anything meaningful.

Music is literally not taught at any level that would be considered enriching (except maybe at ATS??). Even the junior honors band level is not that great overall.

And art class is a complete joke that teaches no actual art technique except gluing and coloring.

They don't want to push the gifted and talented kids, or even the gen ed kids, because the county has a perverse mission to not exclude anyone in their one size fits all classrooms. Can't hurt anyone's feelings I guess.

These statements about PE, music, and art are so false that I wonder if you have a child in an APS school at all? If so, which one?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meeting your profoundly gifted child is more than just challenging them in spelling or math. It's also socializing them, giving them the opportunity to find solutions to being bored, teaching them to exist with others who may be different from them. It's about PE, and recess, and music, and art class. Not just math and reading. It's all the things.

All those are dumbed down as well in elementary school. At least in our APS experience.

PE is about silly things such as coordination or stretching (juggling with silks anyone?) and not about competition games and improving skills: not to say that kids shouldn't learn those things but gym class is not for that, maybe some kind of physical therapy or something.

Most playgrounds in schools don't have actual playground equipment anymore (no swings, no tall slides, etc.) and just have that giant plastic behemoth that's mostly useless. Plus there's limited time to do anything meaningful.

Music is literally not taught at any level that would be considered enriching (except maybe at ATS??). Even the junior honors band level is not that great overall.

And art class is a complete joke that teaches no actual art technique except gluing and coloring.

They don't want to push the gifted and talented kids, or even the gen ed kids, because the county has a perverse mission to not exclude anyone in their one size fits all classrooms. Can't hurt anyone's feelings I guess.

These statements about PE, music, and art are so false that I wonder if you have a child in an APS school at all? If so, which one?

You're kidding, right? Our kids have been pretty successful in travel sports (all over the country), jr/ms bands, Reflections, etc. I guess your standards are really low, are just ignorant, or listen to what your kids say and believe them. We know kids from counties all over the DMV and beyond because of ECs. It's pretty evident that APS is terrible in supporting the arts and music. I mean just look at district band where I think fewer than a dozen kids make it from the entire county every year. It's a shame because I can honestly say the great majority of our kids' better teachers were K-5 art and music teachers who were not allowed to teach properly because of some or most of the kids in the class for various reasons of inclusion. The jr/ms honors band teachers were great, too, but they also had to deal with a handful of kids who shouldn't have been selected. And PE class well into ms is a joke.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meeting your profoundly gifted child is more than just challenging them in spelling or math. It's also socializing them, giving them the opportunity to find solutions to being bored, teaching them to exist with others who may be different from them. It's about PE, and recess, and music, and art class. Not just math and reading. It's all the things.

All those are dumbed down as well in elementary school. At least in our APS experience.

PE is about silly things such as coordination or stretching (juggling with silks anyone?) and not about competition games and improving skills: not to say that kids shouldn't learn those things but gym class is not for that, maybe some kind of physical therapy or something.

Most playgrounds in schools don't have actual playground equipment anymore (no swings, no tall slides, etc.) and just have that giant plastic behemoth that's mostly useless. Plus there's limited time to do anything meaningful.

Music is literally not taught at any level that would be considered enriching (except maybe at ATS??). Even the junior honors band level is not that great overall.

And art class is a complete joke that teaches no actual art technique except gluing and coloring.

They don't want to push the gifted and talented kids, or even the gen ed kids, because the county has a perverse mission to not exclude anyone in their one size fits all classrooms. Can't hurt anyone's feelings I guess.

These statements about PE, music, and art are so false that I wonder if you have a child in an APS school at all? If so, which one?

You're kidding, right? Our kids have been pretty successful in travel sports (all over the country), jr/ms bands, Reflections, etc. I guess your standards are really low, are just ignorant, or listen to what your kids say and believe them. We know kids from counties all over the DMV and beyond because of ECs. It's pretty evident that APS is terrible in supporting the arts and music. I mean just look at district band where I think fewer than a dozen kids make it from the entire county every year. It's a shame because I can honestly say the great majority of our kids' better teachers were K-5 art and music teachers who were not allowed to teach properly because of some or most of the kids in the class for various reasons of inclusion. The jr/ms honors band teachers were great, too, but they also had to deal with a handful of kids who shouldn't have been selected. And PE class well into ms is a joke.

My kid makes beautiful art at Campbell.

[Anonymous]

I have a friend whose complaints about APS sound a lot like yours, OP. I guess it’s possible you are my friend! She has been certain since kindergarten that her son is learning nothing at school, she says that in front of him, and she even allows him to miss class for frivolous reasons, because her belief is that most of class is for the other kids, not for her gifted child. The thing she doesn’t see is that her child has A LOT of learning he needs to do about how to get along with other kids — not that he’s a behavioral problem AT ALL, but he’s annoying, and other kids don’t tend to like him that much. She also complains that he doesn’t have good friends. All of that is a huge part of what the kids are supposed to be learning in elementary school. But she’s completely poisoned his thinking about school such that he now complains about how slow the curriculum is and how he’s too advanced for it.

I went to Yale. I got a perfect score on my SATs way back in the day. I went to crappy elementary schools in North Carolina, and I wasn’t bored because I could use the school library and check out books on any topic and read them, plus I had an imagination.

I think most of the talk about gifted kids being bored in school is coming from their parents, not actually from the kids. Stopping telling your child that he’s bored. See what happens.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meeting your profoundly gifted child is more than just challenging them in spelling or math. It's also socializing them, giving them the opportunity to find solutions to being bored, teaching them to exist with others who may be different from them. It's about PE, and recess, and music, and art class. Not just math and reading. It's all the things.

All those are dumbed down as well in elementary school. At least in our APS experience.

PE is about silly things such as coordination or stretching (juggling with silks anyone?) and not about competition games and improving skills: not to say that kids shouldn't learn those things but gym class is not for that, maybe some kind of physical therapy or something.

Most playgrounds in schools don't have actual playground equipment anymore (no swings, no tall slides, etc.) and just have that giant plastic behemoth that's mostly useless. Plus there's limited time to do anything meaningful.

Music is literally not taught at any level that would be considered enriching (except maybe at ATS??). Even the junior honors band level is not that great overall.

And art class is a complete joke that teaches no actual art technique except gluing and coloring.

They don't want to push the gifted and talented kids, or even the gen ed kids, because the county has a perverse mission to not exclude anyone in their one size fits all classrooms. Can't hurt anyone's feelings I guess.

These statements about PE, music, and art are so false that I wonder if you have a child in an APS school at all? If so, which one?

+1. My kids learn & play real sports, with teams, in PE. In art, they do things like make pottery that is glazed & fired. They learn songs & play songs on xylophones, drums, etc in music class.

The HS bands perform well at their assessments.