Reply to TJ admissions now verifying free and reduced price meal status for successful 2026 applicants

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "TJ admissions now verifying free and reduced price meal status for successful 2026 applicants "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]“And they took away teacher recommendations. If they cared about taking high achieving students they would not have done that…“

Bet that it was the teachers who did not want to write recommendations each year..TJ just respected their opinions..

they already have enough BS to deal with, including being outed to Youngkin for teaching so called CRT

Youngkin proposed something about transgender, pronouns etc last week? But, I would have rather preferred an announcement that they were planning to fund additional STEM academies in Virginia.. oh well.

[/quote]

Interesting because I’ve been reading in other threads that the best STEM schools other than TJ are the existing top neighborhood schools with lots of challenging math/science courses and that courses with STEM just stuck in their names often are poorly taught or nothing special. So just creating more “STEM academies” sounds more like PR than anything else. [/quote]

Being able to take calculus in 9th or 10th grade and continuing this progression without having to go to a community college or take classes online, is not PR.[/quote]

You don’t have to be a “STEM academy” to do this. You just need to offer challenging classes.  And why push calculus on 9th graders unless they are truly ready? [/quote]

The number who are truly ready is generally so low that schools can't offer their own higher level classes.  Having a larger group at TJ allows them to offer these classes.
The number of kids who are ready for this is higher than you think, particularly for calculus in 10th grade.[/quote]

After 126 pages this is the #1 point.

1.  TJ should only be for kids who are truly advanced in math not all this woke bs with folks taking Algebra 1 in 8th and somehow getting in.
2.  Most of the top tier AAP feeder high schools have a big enough cohort to have entire classes advanced at this level so TJ isn't needed.
3.  TJ should just be shut down at this point it's redundant.[/quote]

TLDR TJ should only be for rich kids and not serve the greater community [/quote]

DP.  The tl;dr should be that TJ is meant to match kids with the appropriate level of service and meet the needs of kids who cannot have their needs met at their base school.  Obviously, there will be kids at Langley who can have their needs met at their base school who are objectively stronger students than some kids at Annandale High school who can't have their needs met there.  It's not at all a problem to admit kids who are outliers at their base schools, even if the definition of an outlier varies by school.

But, FCPS does have a small cohort of kids who are taking Calculus in either 8th or 9th grade.  Those kids will not have an adequate peer group nor will they have adequate course offerings at their base school, since almost every FCPS base school only offers one year of DE post-calculus math.  TJ has a wealth of post calc math classes that they will no longer be able to offer if they lack sufficient cohort of kids who are that advanced.  It logistically makes the most sense to place the kids who are exceptionally advanced and who will quite literally run out of classes at the base school at a school like TJ, which has the appropriate classes.  It likewise makes little sense to place kids at TJ who are unlikely to need anything. beyond the standard AP Calc and AP Science classes offered at every FCPS high school.  [/quote]
It's not sufficient to be advanced by course (don't even think it's necessary). These days there are many "advanced" kids who have big mathematical gaps (can barely reason geometrically, may not even be fully comfortable with some algebraic manipulations, etc.). What's far more important (and harder to do) is for kids to develop strong problem solving skills, i.e be able to figure out and solve things that they don't initially know how to do right away. One good proxy for this skill is being good at math contests. In fact I don't even think "advanced" is necessary, only problem solving skills are, to be able to succeed at TJ. I'd take kids who do very well on the AMC 10 and above contests any day over kids who were accelerated in base school math classes with nothing else to show, and the reason is that there is no problem solving skills being taught in K12 math classes, even calculus.[/quote]

They aren't looking for advanced problem solvers either.  Each of the last two years, an 8th grade JMO qualifier got rejected from TJ.

I'm not even specifically stating that kids with high AMC 10 scores or kids taking Calculus in 8th or 9th grade ought to be guaranteed admissions.  I think that if a child is taking precalc in 8th, has straight As throughout, [b]and has qualified for AIME a couple times[/b], that kid is the real deal.  Kids like this should undoubtedly be accepted to TJ.  I would not be surprised if the majority of kids that FCPS has accelerated to Algebra in 5th or earlier would fit this profile.  [/quote]
Agreed, these days it's not that easy to pass the AMC 10, they've gotten quite difficult in recent years and kids who can do it would definitely thrive in math/science classes at TJ. They should do admit them, but they obviously can't advertise or give out any information as that would just spark an even worse parent arms race of acceleration than what we currently have. [/quote]

I had to pay for all kinds of outside enrichment and badger the principal at my child's ES to ensure they could take calculus in 8th. I mean if I hadn't done all that god forbid they'd be back in honors geometry like their peers, but it was worth the $20k in prep to guarantee them a spot at TJ.[/quote]

I know! It's gotten so expensive to get your kid into TJ these days and the board of education is to blame![/quote]

My kid took AP Calculus BC at TJ at 13 and that didn't cost anything. [/quote]

Same but I only had to spend $15k on outside enrichment to make that possible![/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