Reply to Middle school honors v middle school advanced academics

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "Middle school honors v middle school advanced academics"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In our district, middle school honors is the equivalent of one grade level ahead at max. Example: 7th grade honors math is pre alg equivalent, 8th grade honors is Alg I

The AA program is significantly more rigorous.  It teaches 2-3 grade levels ahead at a twice the pace.  Example: 7th grade AAP math is Alg I first semester, Alg II second semester.  8th grade AAP math is geo first semester, precalc second semester.  [/quote]
Which district is this? I'm doubtful there's any district in VA where thr standard AAP pathway leads to 
calculus in 9th grade.[/quote]

This happens nowhere in the USA, except for maybe some tiny private school.

You'd be hard pressed to find a county that could fill a classroom. [/quote]

Not in DC, but yes this is absolutely happening and offered for free through our public schools. 6th graders take the SAT to qualify (for starting in 7th) and it is county wide, not school or district specific.  All the qualified kids from the county that want to participate are then pooled together for form classes. [/quote]

I have no doubt that many students are capable of this and do it privately with AoPS etc.

But as described, you have kids in regular 6th grade I school either in prealgebra or already found their way on to the very exceptional track (hello WPES!) And taking  Algebra 1 in 6th.

Then they do (maybe catch-up Algebra 1), Geom, Algebra 2, and Precalc all in 7th + 8th?
Do they do 2 hrs/day of math class?

The only school I've heard of that goes near this is (private) Proof School in San Francisco, who does over 2hrs/day of math class and has less 20 kids per grade. 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_School

I wouldn't trust a public school to do this, because the only way to do it is to skip all the enrichment (combinatorics, number theoriy, logic, problem solving) that brilliant kids should do. [/quote]

One place I know does this is Broward County. They buy the Elements of Mathematics / IMACS curriculum and let the kids self study  on the computer instead of having a math class with a teacher. (IMACS has online classes if you want to pay for them’

https://www.browardschools.com/Page/43787

https://www.elementsofmathematics.com/

It’s a special curriculum that focuses on 1970s-style “New Math”, a college/professional pure math approach to the K-12 curriculum, and skips a lot of the easy/obvious/applied material and the material that K-12 teaches that isn’t needed for college and grad school, and skips the hard problems that AMC/AIME;AOPS do. Then they tack on a quick supplement to cover the Common Core standards in a few days at the end of the year.

It starts with “prealgebra” in summer after 5th grade and finishes “precalculus” end of 8th grade, feeding into 9th grade calculus. But the real value prop is that the students are already speaking the language of upper level undergrad pure math, and covers topics like number theory.

It achieves that extreme acceleration by starting early, and focusing on the formal theory and intuition, in a kid-friendly presentation format ,and doing sophisticated topics at an easier level of problem complexity than something like AOPS does. AOPS does  less formal math but much harder problems, for competition-prep (but a lot of AOPS students don’t actuall do the hard problems in AOPS class.). Doing both of these styles of enrichment would be quite intense but immensely rewarded for an interested student, and probably would be worth spreading out over more years.

If you want to replicate this at home or in  a special independent study at school, you can buy the $900 4.25 year subscription to the online curriculum. (You can’t buy just the upper half if your kid is already skilled in Prealgebra, algebra, geometry basics. And there are no paper books).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics