Challenging Materials/Experiences for high school Students Advanced in a Subject

[Joan in GE]

(CMSAS/CESAS) and their Precursors.....

 

I don't know whether this determination in the pursuit of understanding and identification is craziness or not but here I am again. :001_smile:....(Go ahead - tell me I am crazy)...

 

Thinking about the dialog between Stacy in NJ and 8FTH helped clarify some thoughts.

 

One person was talking about what materials were adequate as college prep and the other talking about what materials were challenging for advanced students....as 8FTH said, those are two different things (though of course what is challenging for an advanced child is probably going to be good college prep as well).

 

CAVEAT - this doesn't mean people need to use/do these CM/ESAS to get into college - I'm just trying to filter materials/experiences. I don't even know how useful this will prove to be but it came to me in the morning. If it is not helpful, it will surely get lost in the hubris, and it will die it's own death.:001_smile:

 

Then I was thinking about the "rigor" definition in the definition thread combined with Bloom's taxonomy...where it talks about 'analyzing, evaluating, and finally creating' etc. (see 8's posts in this thread).

 

And finally came to the conclusion that one aspect of what I had been trying to get at was to be able to identify these challenging materials and their precursors....AS WELL AS "experiences" that do the same - normally we can't get those off the shelf but have to glean ideas from posts by people willing to/ and who have the time to share how their children got to where they are now - Kathy in Richmond, FaithManor, 8FTH, Jane, Nan, Ester Maria (though I guess your children are still young), etc, etc (please forgive me for not naming all the others so people would know where to turn, due to a bad memory and not reading all the posts, but I know you are out there...).

 

I am keeping in mind what Sebastian was saying (I know other people said the same or similar things so I'm sorry not to quote you too, it is just that Sebastian's post was an easy one to remember without scrutinizing all the posts), she and others said, what is challenging for a child at one age is not at another, and what is challenging for one child is not for another...By the time kids get to high school, if they are advanced in some area, there are materials/experiences that will challenge them. Then there are the materials that brought them to that point, though maybe others would just use those as "end of high school" materials...

 

So taking MUS/AoPS as an example since it was recently used (I haven't used either so don't speak from personal experience)...you could say that MUS can be college prep and AoPS is CMSAS, as well as, college prep....(presuming the right levels are used of course).

 

So that's why I'm proposing these words (actually others have proposed them in different ways in the "acceptable word" thread - I'm just putting them into a separate thread to highlight them).

 

As a second point - I think that one thing that might have to be taken into account more is parental education/ or drive (I know there are very intelligent people who are self-educated as well) where they provide the "environment" where the student thrives, even if the text itself is not that "hard"...

 

Ok, now I'm thinking of FaithManor's thread as an example (sorry for overuse, it is handy because it is so recent)....if someone asked her the book her daughter used - it would be completely insufficient to know the book if she did not describe the family and environmental background as well as her dd's inner drive. It took Faith 3 pages to describe what she did. Sometimes we are probably not giving enough background when proposing certain materials and then the materials might not be as effective for another student. I know there are also "out of the family" ways of enriching our children's exposure - friends, groups, etc...

 

Eg...our family has a science bent...we've been buying experiment kits and discussing science almost since the children were born - though not nearly as much as Faith (not putting mine at the level of her dd). We are not very literary or philosophically developed. Those aspects of any suggestions I would make in literature vs science could change the outcome radically, though not automatically if I have made a huge effort to ameliorate the lack. Another example would be our language materials...which is why I generally don't discuss French materials...it would be too hard to tease out the environmental factor in any success.

 

Yours truly,

Joan

Edited June 28, 2011 by Joan in Geneva
deleted something that could have been misunderstood

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Well you might be a little crazy . . . :D I still think that it can be pretty tough to put a label on someone. My kids, for example, look very different in Hawaii (with abysmal schools) than on base in Japan (where there is only one high school, many kids are unmotivated, and the school bureaucracy leave a lot wanting) than in Northern Virginia (where all the kids are above average).

 

But I do like the idea of being more specific when you are explaining what you're looking for help with or how a particular product was used in your family.

 

I also get your point about educational experiences occuring within the context of a family. I think that applies to many situations. A kid with an interest in sports or scouts is likely to go farther if he has interested, supportive and involved parents than if his parents' involvement is limited to signing registration forms and checks. (I've certainly seen this over and over with scouting. Don't know if the kids are more successful because of parental involvement or if the parents are involved because the kids enjoy the activity or a little of both. But it is harder for a scout to draw as much from the experience if his parents aren't involved and plugged in.)

 

One interesting question that I have is how do we support a student who has passions that lay outside out own passions/experience/expertise. That is something that I'm trying to get a handle on as we slide inexorably closer to high school. With a couple of kids who have high potential in math and science, how do I make sure that I'm offering them the learning and exploration opportunities they deserve? How do I give them the right level of nudges? We can talk literature and history and international affairs at our house until dawn. That comes easily. And I feel competent at most moderate levels of science because of my own quirky educational background. (BS in English with more math and science and engineering courses than majors classes. Yeah, quirky.) But I'm not sure that I will recognize when they need more. Both more offered to them and more demanded of them.

 

I love analogies. Maybe the one I'd use here is that it is hard to get good answers to a question like "Is this enough?" unless we articulate what the goal is. "Is this enough to be competitive for a service academy?" or "Is this enough to be competitive for med school" is a very different question. As is "Is this too much for a rising freshman who struggled with pre-algebra program xx?"

 

And I think that it really helps to provide context on the main teacher too. For example, as a proficient non-native German speaker, I think that I can squeeze a lot of usefulness out of Rosetta Stone as a springboard for my elementary aged son to get comfortable with German. I saw its usefulness with my other kids as a "spoonful of sugar" style learning device that shoveled enough vocabulary at them that they felt comfortable attempting conversations in German. But I also realize that the goal isn't to ace the modules in RS; the goal is to watch German TV and read German books and talk to German friends and visit Germany. I also have to consider how much of RS's usefulness was because I could back it up with other experiences and my own German ability. (For example, we had a far different experience using it to learn Japanese, in which we were a dismal failure. Many of the reasons for failure were in our own lack of background and diligence. But RS was insufficient to bridge that gap.)

 

In a similar way, I find that when I'm reading math recommendations, I have to scan closely for not only what sort of student was sucessful with the program, but what sort of parent is recommending it. A parent who is intimidated by math or feels like they don't understand or can't explain what their kid is studying will want (and recommend) something different than a parent who just needs a little refresher to be able to explain errors (and then you've got the math professionals on the far end of the spectrum).

 

Maybe this just isn't the setting for one word adjectives to be enough description. Maybe I'm just verbose.

 

I've been really enjoying these discussions. Especially the detailed explanations of what education looks like at some houses. Incredibly inspiring, even if I realize that we can't possibly do all of those same things at the same time at our house.

[Michelle in AL]

Thanks for the definition of rigor: analyze, evaluate, create....

 

I'm getting my masters to be nurse practitioner now. I am taking a class I dreaded: Policy, Politics and Economics of Healthcare, but have found it very interesting and enlightening. Analyze, evaluate & create is what we've done through this class. 1st we analyzed and evaluated policy, then we need to describe our own role in a policy issue.

 

I can see how my oldest has done this somewhat on her own in the subjects she's interested in.

 

My youngest can certainly use this in her area of interest: journalism, which would be very easy to analyze, evaluate & create.

 

Now if I can just remember to include this as a basis for our education.

[Jane in NC]

Another consideration in these threads is the fact that all of us have geographic advantages and disadvantages. Some posters may have more opportunities to interact with native speakers in the foreign language(s) their students are studying. Some posters have access to incredible art museums, science museums, etc. I have a salt marsh at the end of the street. Some might look at it as muck, but I see a unique ecological system that has been our laboratory for study.

 

One might think, being coastal people, that my son would have wanted to study marine biology. But my son grew up living marine biology. So we never opted for a special course in it.

 

This may not be the place for the forthcoming thought, but this was on my mind yesterday after reading these recent threads, namely the suggestion that students who use text books are memorizing and regurgitating facts.

 

Consider a child (how about my son) at age seven, a great age to learn about phyla. This grammar age child is ready to learn and test out vocabulary. Words like Echinoderm, Arthropod, Mollusk, Cnidarian will flow off the tongue and the child will clearly observe the differences or similarities in symmetry between these animals, the commonality between a fiddler crab and a beetle, etc. (No text books here--just nature guides and library books.)

 

At the logic stage, the student now asks why is a Cephalopod a mollusk? In researching this question, the student starts thinking about squid propulsion and sees what he can build to duplicate the jet propulsion system of a squid. The question of why Cephalopods are mollusks is soon swept by the wayside. (Thank goodness for the library--and Google!)

 

Move on to high school. Now the student might ask how is it the squid eye is so like the human eye? Is this an example of convergent evolution? Now the student reads about fetal development of the eye in humans or, if the student really loves biology, reads about the proteins in a vertebrate eye compared to those in the Cephalopod eye. At this point, I am grateful to have the 1000+ page Campbell biology text on the shelf because I no longer have the answers.

 

Is that Campbell biology book for everyone? No. It is a college text, overwhelming in many respects. It provided a challenging course for a kid who grew up living and breathing the biology of a salt marsh. It was good for our circumstances.

 

By the way Joan--you may be crazy, but you are my kind of crazy. :D

 

Jane

[Sebastian (a lady)]

By the way Joan--you may be crazy, but you are my kind of crazy. :D

 

Jane

 

:iagree: Actually I could say that about a host of the posters here. When you're not scaring me silly, you can be quite the inspiration.

[Brigid in NC]

 

When you're not scaring me silly, you can be quite the inspiration.

:lol:

[wapiti]

And finally came to the conclusion that one aspect of what I had been trying to get at was to be able to identify these challenging materials and their precursors....AS WELL AS "experiences" that do the same - normally we can't get those off the shelf but have to glean ideas from posts by people willing to/ and who have the time to share how their children got to where they are now - Kathy in Richmond, FaithManor, 8FTH, Jane, Nan, Ester Maria (though I guess your children are still young), etc, etc (please forgive me for not naming all the others so people would know where to turn, due to a bad memory and not reading all the posts, but I know you are out there...).

 

Yes! This is why I like to read this board - we're in the precursor stage, and I want to see how some people laid the foundation in the middle years to get to various levels of challenge in high school. This goes to the heart of the reasons why we are hs-ing to begin with - academic reasons. I'm not even planning on hs-ing for high school, but there is so much useful experience to read about that I can't help myself.

 

But I do like the idea of being more specific when you are explaining what you're looking for help with or how a particular product was used in your family.

. . .

 

I love analogies. Maybe the one I'd use here is that it is hard to get good answers to a question like "Is this enough?" unless we articulate what the goal is. "Is this enough to be competitive for a service academy?" or "Is this enough to be competitive for med school" is a very different question. As is "Is this too much for a rising freshman who struggled with pre-algebra program xx?"

 

This.

 

I think even "college prep" is too broad a category. The best I can do is try to understand where a particular poster has come from and hopes to go, and with what sort of kid. Then I can put the wisdom gleaned from such posts into the applicable context. That's critical to its usefulness.

[Kathy in Richmond]

My dear friend Joan,:001_smile:

 

You are asking so many terrific questions lately! I truly wish that this wasn't my busy time of the year, 'cause I'd love to take a greater part in these discussions. Just catching up today & my thoughts are whirling in all directions over the threads on rigor (or do we want to re-name that?), personality types, outsourcing vs do-it-yourself homeschool, Oh Elizabeth's thread on alternative science education and how to make an undesirable subject "stick", Jackie and KarenAnne's descriptions of what works with kids who are wired differently (I have one of those VSL, ADD, dyslexic, capd, pg types myself), 8FilltheHeart's thoughts on whether kids with a deep passion are born that way, whole-to-parts vs parts-to-whole, and now what makes a curriculum or experience more than just college prep....my head is spinning!!:)

 

I'm going to have to try to organize my thoughts better when I get the time. But for now I want to comment that I think you've nailed the reason that I've always been sort of uncomfortable just passing out my curriculum list to others. I don't mind sharing, but it's really meaningless without that all-important context. Curricula is limiting; it's the experiences and attitudes and interests (or those of family friends & mentors) that we bring to the table as homeschool parents that make the biggest differences in our children's lives, not just the textbooks we purchase (though resources are definitely a piece of the puzzle).

[8filltheheart]

One interesting question that I have is how do we support a student who has passions that lay outside out own passions/experience/expertise. That is something that I'm trying to get a handle on as we slide inexorably closer to high school. With a couple of kids who have high potential in math and science, how do I make sure that I'm offering them the learning and exploration opportunities they deserve?

 

I can share what I have doing for my ds that loves physics. I have never really studied physics so I am way out of my league.

 

He and I both have spent hrs on college websites, opencourseware sites, Amazon reading book ratings, purchased a lot of TC physics/astronomy lectures, etc.

 

We have also searched for high school opportunities for kids that excel in math and science. For example, the Cogito website has a lot that kids can read to see some spectacular examples of what other students are achieving. Our local science museum has a Jr Academy of Science and he wants to join and enter a research proposal. NASA has a program which is online.

 

Even though I don't know anything that he is talking about, he has plenty to search through and learn from.

 

I will say that having a child that is passionate and driven and self-motivated makes it easier. ;)

 

And Joan, I like your assessment. I know that in our homeschool some courses meet the CM/ESAS and some that aren't anywhere that good of a course. I know that. Some things slide when others really crank up in intensity.

[Joan in GE]

You are asking so many terrific questions lately! I truly wish that this wasn't my busy time of the year, 'cause I'd love to take a greater part in these discussions. Just catching up today & my thoughts are whirling in all directions over the threads on rigor (or do we want to re-name that?), personality types, outsourcing vs do-it-yourself homeschool, Oh Elizabeth's thread on alternative science education and how to make an undesirable subject "stick", Jackie and KarenAnne's descriptions of what works with kids who are wired differently (I have one of those VSL, ADD, dyslexic, capd, pg types myself), 8FilltheHeart's thoughts on whether kids with a deep passion are born that way, whole-to-parts vs parts-to-whole, and now what makes a curriculum or experience more than just college prep....my head is spinning!!:)

 

I'm going to have to try to organize my thoughts better when I get the time. But for now I want to comment that I think you've nailed the reason that I've always been sort of uncomfortable just passing out my curriculum list to others. I don't mind sharing, but it's really meaningless without that all-important context. Curricula is limiting; it's the experiences and attitudes and interests (or those of family friends & mentors) that we bring to the table as homeschool parents that make the biggest differences in our children's lives, not just the textbooks we purchase (though resources are definitely a piece of the puzzle).

 

Looking forward to when you have time to post and time to share context if possible!!!

 

I put a tag "home context" - maybe there's a better tag?

 

Joan

[Colleen in NS]

:lurk5: