I’m not sure he prefers one over another. He sees all of it as pointless but especially hates work where he has to expand or show anything.
He was looking forward to being in these classes because he would no longer have to do iready (the online program). I guess he’s finding out the real world is even worse!
It is very on brand for a boy good at math to not want to show work. I remeber in grad school when a calc student more or less stared at the derivative test word problem and eventually wrote the answer as “t=6” w 0 work shown. Of course it was right but the work is what we cared about
I was just thinking that there’s a statewide public online school if that was something that he preferred to in person school.
Plusses and minuses, of course. My nephew did it for I think 7th and 9th grade IIRC. Still did sports and orchestra at the in person school, but everything else was online.
He’s currently on pace to finish a Bachelor’s + Master’s program at University of Cincinnati in 4 years. (Proud Aunt brag!)
Was there absolutely nothing on the page apart from “t=6”? Any sort of scribbling or scrap of an idea??
T=6 was all that was there.
He could tell you everything he thought about to get it. Kid was v smart. Just not a show your work guy
Neighbour’s grandson having a meltdown because Mommy wants to put sunscreen on his face!!! 
I was this kid back in AP calc. Was more proud of the fact that I could do it in my head than anything else. Was arrogant going into actual collegiate courses and got humbled real quick, which may or may not have been related to indifferent professors.
Game arrived. My kid made me promise to take over if she was caught. She apparently had tried it before at a friend’s house, and one terrifying death was enough. Guess she’ll never get her letters.
In fairness it is a bit terrifying
Also, I’m sure this is obvious, but holding someone back because they don’t show math work would be insane.
And imo, a zero for late work is a bad idea, basically for anyone ever.
Completely agree. This isn’t the norm for the school, but this particular class is one that is administered by an external party, a university that did research on this class and how to implement it, and this is the school’s first year of adopting it, so they have to do things exactly the way this university requires it. One of those requirements is no acceptance of late work. They can’t even submit grades for a student who is out sick, they have to find a workaround to keep their grades from counting (like removing the grade from the school’s grade system manually, but still reporting it to the university).
Another ridiculous requirement is that if a student gets lower than a C for ANY quarter, they are kicked out of the class and have to transfer to the mainstream gifted class instead. They could get a B in the class overall but a C- in one quarter and they wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the class. Ridiculous, right?
We had none of this information when we were told about the class and had him enrolled in it.
Things at my younger’s school have escalated. We had a meeting scheduled with his teacher team for tomorrow and it got converted to a 504 meeting with only the school counselor because his teacher team doesn’t want us to discuss anything with us in person.
So I just feel super discouraged and helpless. And we have another year after this, too. How am I supposed to communicate about my kid’s needs if I can’t access his teachers? When everyone else is allowed to? I hate feeling singled out.
WTF?!?!
I can maybe see bringing in the counselor in addition to the regular teacher, but not instead of. Unless the counselor has unilaterally decided to teach you kid 1-on-1 for the rest of the year you need to have access to your kid’s teacher.
I would probably get pushy and demand to speak with the principal about why you are not permitted to talk to his teacher.
ADA laws differ by state, but if your child is being denied equal access to education, there should be channels you can explore
Check your state laws because this doesn’t seem legal. My child had an IEP, not a 504, but this wouldn’t be OK for an IEP meeting in my state. At least 1 teacher must be in attendance.
In my state, the school is required to provide a handbook to all parents with kids who fall under IDEA and it contains all the rules. I’m not sure if that is a federal requirement or not. I would start researching.
Good news on my youngest. After months,looks like his job in alaska is getting close to being realized. Visa issues.
And hes going to work on his phd part time. Hes already seen his advisor and shes pretty happy about it too.
A few years of working in industry, plus his phd, and i figure he’ll have the world as his oyster.
My youngest son is so preoccupied by the idea of testing into gifted math, but he always falls just slightly short. I’ve talked with him about the difference between gifted and being bright, and how gifted doesn’t mean anything as far as the classes available for him to take in middle school or anything like that. But he wants it so badly!
We got his state test scores from last year back (not used in gifted identification) and he scored well into the advanced range. The max score is 818, and he got 811. I hope this shows him that he IS very good at math, but I fear he still wont be satisfied with it.
I have no idea why he tests extremely well on state tests but can’t seem to focus as well on the national diagnostic tools they use each year (which he gets 93rd or 94th percentile on, just not 95th+). I also wish I knew how to convince him that he’s so smart!
Gladwell and Freakonomics have done a bunch on the notion that the “gifted” classes are largely just sorting kids based on their age relative to the rest of the kids in their grade.
I don’t know specifically about these tests, but “gifted” and “smart” aren’t quite the same thing.
I know when I was getting tested for a gifted program in the 80s they were definitely looking for creativity. One of the things we had to do was take a sheet of paper that had a bunch of circles on it and make pictures with every circle.
Well I’m not artistic / don’t like to draw so I lazily took three of the circles on top of each other and made them into a traffic light. 
Knocked out three of the circles with that one! Well that blew the tester away. One of the things they were looking for was whether kids stayed in the lines or used the circles as part of a larger picture.
No clue what the current tests are specifically looking for.
They aren’t the same thing, and I’ve tried to tell my son that. I was labeled as gifted in school because I was smart, but I am not gifted, and most students who are labeled as gifted in school are not actually gifted.
The school identifies giftedness from test scores that are nationally calibrated (thus why state test scores do not qualify), primarily, but there are other ways to be identified. My kids are NOT gifted, they are simply very bright.
