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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
On the flip side, how would his life meaningfully change if he didn’t take AP Calculus until 12th grade? 
[/quote]

I don't know.  How would a kid's life meaningfully change if the kid was reading chapter books in K, but then got stuck doing BOB books for the next two years?  The powers that be never want to force kids into language arts programs that are remedial for them, but they're certainly eager to do so with math.  [/quote]

I was another one of these kids. I took AP Calc class in 12th grade, but only because in elementary school/middle school, I'd estimate I had approximately 4 years of math where we didn't learn anything new, we just repeated stuff from the previous grade. Here's how this affected me:

-I would come home crying, because I wanted [i]so badly[/i] to learn, and I loved math, but the years where we didn't learn new content was rough. My mom took pity on me and would sometimes teach me things like change of base math, imaginary numbers, etc. in elem. Just so I'd get to throw some new concepts into my head. I didn't lose my love of math, but, in hindsight, I can see how high the risk of that was.

-I resented a lot of the kids in my classes. I saw them as dumb; they couldn't get all this stuff that was super intuitive. They needed years of repetition. I needed to be shown one single time. And after that, all the repetition was boring as hell, and it made me angry that we had to go over it again and again and again. To be brutally honest, I still have a short amount of patience with people I view as dumb, and it causes me high levels of stress to have to deal with those people. I might be a nicer, kinder, less judgemental person without years of this treatment during formative years.

-When I finally was able to take honors in 8th grade math for the first time ever, it was a godsend. We finally moved at an appropriate pace, and while I still didn't need all the review for all of the topics, it was orders of magnitude better. I wasn't stressed and angry all the time about not learning anything.

-When I was in elem, I was in fcps' GT program. (My parents opted not to send me to the center, so I got 1 hour a week pullouts.) Again, this time was a godsend - we didn't learn 'accelerated' content, we just learned different topics (ie, curriclum on the brain, or engineering, or the stock market, that just wasn't covered in the normal curriculum.) But that one hour a week, where I got to learn ANYTHING new, and wasn't put through mind-numbing repetition for the 100th time on a topic, was absolutely crucial to my mental survival.

-In HS, when I opted to take classes that weren't for the highest learners, the kids would pester me to find out what 'magic' studying I would do (none), or resent me for blowing the curve, or just in general for knowing the material that had been presented to us. And yeah, I'd do the entire group project for all those classes, because the other kids wouldn't do anything, or would submit something that was obviously not going to get a passing grade- so it was up to me to do all the work, because I was the only one who could (or would) do it well. This situation seems to have fostered mutual resentment. I was lucky in that, I didn't care that much about popularity or what other people thought of me - but lots of teenagers do, and you can see where, in this situation, peer pressure would easily be enough to get some smart students to stop performing so well, just so they'd be better liked.

So yeah - the kids may survive the curriculum in whatever form. Shouldn't we want them to thrive though? Shouldn't we want to unlock every student's potential? Reduce their mental stress and anxiety that are fostered by dragging them along at a snail's pace?[/quote]

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