Reply to Instead of AAP, Honors classes starting in 3rd grade

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honors is open to all - it is in middle school. No math testing is needed in middle school, and it should be the same in elementary school.

VA should be more like NY. Regents and non-regents. One is harder material for those going to college. The other is more business focused for house going into technical training or non-college related fields of work.

GE is basically a wash for any high-achieving child. Any parent who has a hard-working child with smarts is going to push for AAP. 
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I had one child in AAP.  Our second child is very bright and hard-working, but wasn't in-pool.  We didn't push for AAP for this child because the whole system seems completely blown out of proportion [b]- too many pushy parents, kids who think they're superior just because they got into AAP, and a whole lot of busy work.[/b]  It would be great if Gen Ed was a more challenging curriculum, but after having one child go through AAP, we realized the AAP curriculum isn't what we had in mind (project after project isn't our idea of an "advanced curriculum").  We just decided to do a lot of supplementing at home and it's been working out great.  In fact, I'd say this child has gotten a better, more focused education than the one who was in AAP.

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My kid just finished with AAP, third through eighth grades. Maybe it was because he qualified for the program seven years back, but at that time there was no discussion among parents of who was or wasn't in the pool, no agonizing over GBRS or all these other alphabet soup tests, no attempts (that I ever heard from any parent) to re-test kids or appeal and appeal to get them into the pool, etc. I never heard of all that stuff until I looked on DCUM a few years ago; we were just told that our kid had qualified based on testing. Maybe it was because our base school was pretty remedial due to a lot of kids who needed help, but teachers basically encouraged kids who learned faster to get out and go to the AAP center if possible, period. Once our kid was at the elementary center, in four years I only encountered one set of parents I would really call "pushy" about their kid's academics, and yeah, they were a pain, but they weren't the norm. And I spent time in the school with some extracurriculars that were done mostly by the AAP students, and volunteering in classrooms, and I can recall maybe one kid over the years who had any attitude of superiority about being in AAP.

I wonder if, in the past six years or so, there has been a lot more focus on the qualifying testing, and parents have gotten more aggressive about getting kids into AAP come hell or high water or even moving house? ....We and other families we know well just didn't experience or hear about the whole hand-wringing DCUM stuff of "Where else can I get my kid tested" and "Is this score good enough" and "Should we move to get into this or that AAP center eventually" like I feel I see here all the time. It just wasn't our experience at all, so I wonder if it's a more recent thing among some parents to be pushy and encourage their kids to feel superior. My kid had six years of excellent teachers (I can only think of maybe one who was "checked out" and not trying; the rest were creative and took things beyond what I know general ed and even MS honors were doing) and peers who were overall nice kids. I guess it's down to the individual schools a child attends, and ours were ones where the teachers seemed engaged and our kid came home talking about some very creative things going on in the classrooms.

I don't disagree with PP that there surely are pushy parents and snotty kids in AAP, but it's not everyone, everywhere. [/quote]

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