Reply to anyone hear-- there's a GT forum for MoCo

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The schools are sort of stuck.  They have 5 kids that are quite ready for accelleration but the average class sive is 28..so they need to have 20+ kids in the accelerated class to make it work numbers wise.  My older child was way over accelerated based on on absolutely no data that said he should skip so many years.  My younger child is taking 4th grade math for the 3rd time because they stopped accleration entirely.  He had perfect test scores last year (gr 3) on 4 and 5 math and is still in 4+ this year because they will not accelerate anyone anymore.  Gotta love MCPS![/quote]

You are so correct. When my DS was in 5th grade there wer about 5 kids out of 30 in his math class who were ready for 7th grade in the 1st qtr itself, but could not be taught at that level since the school had no path after 6th grade Math avilable. [b]At the sametime, the same accelerated class had kids who did not understand franction/%/decimal by third quarter. The teacher had tough time teaching the class.[/b]

The real solution would be to test kids every year on each core subject (forget calling it GT, rather call it academic placement) and place them at the right class based on their preparedness rather than age![/quote]

Honestly, in our experience, the part of your quote that I bolded is a result of pretty crappy teaching of the %/decimal/fraction concepts and a failure to convey to the parent that your kid has to memorize these equivalents in addition to understanding the underlying theory.

Somehow my child got thru fractions without understanding that the fraction bar means divide and that a fraction is also a part/whole ratio and so can be used to solve ratio problems.  The reason was that the teacher never taught these concepts, she just taught the kids how to solve the particular problems by rote memorization of steps, not understanding the underlying math.

It's not an acceleration problem, it's a crappy teaching problem.  There are some kids who enter a grade already knowing this or being able to see it really quickly.  There are others, who have good test scores and other indicators which flag them as kids who should be able to learn with when exposed to proper teaching, but the proper teaching bit is the stumbling block .....(IMO)[/quote]

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