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Has anyone ever done a learning contract to help with boredom?


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After a conference with the school principal about math pacing, we've been given the option to let DS accelerate his class math work next year to earn time to work on whatever we send from home. We were planning to use Beast Academy 3 next year, so we're thinking we can send that with him, and he likes the idea. He'll have to do it without help and save his questions for home, but I like making it independent learning for him - he needs the challenge. Has anyone tried this type of "learning contract" arrangement where you get to send in different work to be done once they finish the school's work with agreed-upon acceptable accuracy?

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What you suggest is possible and we tried it and it did not work for us.

We had an agreement with my son's K teacher to send in a weekly work packet from home and he would do it at school and I would check his work if the teacher did not get around to it. DS refused to do the work sent from home because all the kids crowded around him and said that it was "not fair" that he got interesting work from home (he said so when I asked why the work packet was untouched) -  2 parents emailed me to ask what "special treatment" my son was getting, there was a lot of jealousy. DS did not want to stand out, desperately wanted to blend in and look like the others, was a lonely child in K and wanted to be less lonely and hence made a choice to not accelerate himself at school time. He got anxiety issues when I told him to pull out his work packet and work on it when he finished his school work - he decided on his own to work with the pattern blocks and legos in his classroom when he finished early. So, the decision was taken out of my hands. We ended up moving schools because of the lack of challenge.

 

So, I suggest that you talk about it with your son and make sure that this is what he would prefer to do before you send BA to school.

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I did this for my son's second grade year (we are now homeschooling) and had no problem with it.  The school (in CA) was pretty open to moms, and I got permission to go in every Tuesday and Thursday to do math with him, and then he did homework at home which she just stamped the next day with everyone else's.  There was already a table with the advanced math kids doing Aleks in place of the regular math curriculum, but I was the only one who asked for permission to also do separate math at home. (We did Singapore Math then, now on Aops).  

 

I will say that our school had a very low incidence of bullying, fighting, etc.  The area was relatively high income and many of the students had parents who were extremely invested in their education. (most of their friends had no tv allowed during the week, most went to Saturday school for languages).  My son was respected by his peers for his higher abilities and was sought out for help regularly.  I miss that school! 

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After a conference with the school principal about math pacing, we've been given the option to let DS accelerate his class math work next year to earn time to work on whatever we send from home. We were planning to use Beast Academy 3 next year, so we're thinking we can send that with him, and he likes the idea. He'll have to do it without help and save his questions for home, but I like making it independent learning for him - he needs the challenge. Has anyone tried this type of "learning contract" arrangement where you get to send in different work to be done once they finish the school's work with agreed-upon acceptable accuracy?

 

My youngest worked on AOPS during math class and some of his free periods in middle and junior high school. We had no formal agreement with the school and no requirements. Ds would do the problems and bring them home for dh to check and discuss with him. It worked well. We were lucky because the teachers realized he needed something more challenging so they let him do his own thing at his own pace.

 

The high school was also really helpful without our asking and made suggestions as to what he might like to study that was not offered by the high school. MVCalc/Linear Algebra was the end of the line math-wise at this school. Some kids finished the math courses that a university junior math major would have finished. Most take classes at Northwestern U which is not far. The school excuses them to go take daytime classes.

 

I say give it a try.

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  • 2 months later...

As a follow up, here's what the teacher is doing. She gives a pretest for each chapter before they start it. For any child who shows mastery on the pretest, they get to go do challenge math with another teacher twice a week instead of regular math class. It's not perfect, but it motivates DS to perform on the pretests, acknowledges that kids may have mastered some topics but not others, and DS seems to be happy so far.

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