I am a musician myself—considering studying it in college but decided against it. Still, my experiences in music were very important to my teenage years, because of the sense of belonging I got from accompanying the choir on the piano and playing in orchestras and such. I play piano (my main instrument) and viola (sort of). My personal demons are that I had a terror that I would push my kids into doing something that was good for me but not for them, so I resisted suggesting that they start musical instruments as anything but an idle playtime for way too long. I also had fears, once we started seeking out lessons, that I would choose the "wrong" teacher, which complicated the situation even further. (I did choose wrong teachers, as it turned out, but eventually that worked out too—and in most cases the wrong teacher was better than no teacher.) Child #1: By the time she was four or so I helped her out and got her started on the piano. At age five or so my mom gave her a penny whistle, which she spent hours playing. We covered a lot of music theory, which she loved because she's always enjoyed composition and arranging. Eventually her uncle gave her his old flute. I bought her a beginning flute book and she taught herself for a year or so—until she happened upon a flute instructor who gave her some lessons (some of them free!), and encouraged me that she had a lot of talent and that I needed to buy her a better flute. Still, my own demons kept me from getting her real lessons. We got her a better flute but didn't really get her proper lessons until she was 15 or 16. By then it became clear to me that this interest was serious and that I had probably made a BIG mistake by putting off lessons. Unfortunately the first "real" teacher I selected wasn't that good, and she was 17 or so before I switched her to a serious instructor. That seems to have been early enough in her case, however, because next spring she graduates with a degree in flute performance from a good music school. Her piano playing experience did get her out of two full semesters of piano at the university, even without formal lessons. She also plays a harp that she built from a kit, and plays around with every instrument she can get her hands on. AND—she's now a professional penny whistle player. :) I didn't see that one coming! #2: Again, my demons kept me from getting lessons for her early, but I did also help her learn the basics and got her a few piano lessons. She wanted to play the violin, though, and we got her a violin when she was about 11. We did start lessons for her at that point, but we went through a couple of teachers before we found one that really satisfied us. She graduates from high school this week; music hasn't been as important for her as it was for her sister but it has still provided her with lots of connections. We are fortunate to live in a place with a great youth orchestra, which she and her older sister both participated in. Her most important instrument, though, has been voice. The kids joined a choir when she was about 15 and that has been the best thing for her, musically and socially. She has also taken voice lessons for the last couple of years. She'll never be a soloist, but she's been a strong member of the choir and hopes to continue that in college. With this daughter, practicing has been an interesting issue. She really doesn't practice. Because of emotional issues that haunted her for quite some time, we chose to let her keep taking lessons even though she wasn't practicing. (I haven't yet figured out how she got as skillful as she has while pretty much only playing violin during lessons and orchestra rehearsals). I don't know that this was the best decision for her—in fact, I'm pretty sure it wasn't—but my husband and I could never agree together on how to require the practicing in a way that would best build her up. #3: He was younger when I started getting kids music lessons, so he started studying with an outstanding piano teacher when he was about 8. But although he really loved to play the piano before he took lessons, lessons pretty much killed his interest in the piano, and he's never really returned to it. We let him quit after a while. He then returned for a few months, then left again. I find this very sad, because I loved to hear his music. I hope that some day he will choose to return to it. He is in the choir, though, and loves to sing with that group. I love hearing him sing in parts with his friends! I have also thought that he seems like he'd be a good percussionist, since he's constantly banging out rhythms. Recently he's been learning to play the guitar on Rock Band (!!), which actually is translating to some degree into an ability to play the real guitar—and I think that would be a good instrument for him to know. I will add that we are fortunate to live in an area with abundant excellent musical opportunities for kids. They've done chamber music, choir, lessons, orchestras—weekly things, and also summer camps.

A couple of minor points: The English infinitive doesn't always have to in front of it. I would leave if I could. I would like to leave. In this case, both leave and to leave are infinitives, one with to and one without. But in both cases, you're discussing the concept of leaving without saying that anyone is actually doing it. That's the purpose of an infinitive. A past participle doesn't have number, does it? Broken, read, decided, understood—they have tense (the action is completed), but not number. If you use the past participle to form the past perfect, then the auxiliary has number (or at least it can). We have broken the glasses. She has read that book. I do love grammar. :-)

I've used the Singapore books since about 2000. You're right, the easy models don't help for someone who already gets it. My kids range in math ability from good at math to extraordinarily good at math, and I never required them to draw a bar model. Having said that, the bar models seemed to make a huge difference in their understanding. They did draw them when it helped. Yes, they could have waited until algebra to learn to solve those problems. But the fact that they could solve them early did seem to make a diference. All three of them can solve problems in their heads that most people need paper and pencil for, and I think the bar models are one of the reasons for that. In fact, my oldest had a hard time being convinced of the value of algebra at all, because she could solve ALL the problems mentally for quite some time. In order to get her to learn algebraic methods, I had to take out all the numbers and use only variables—so instead of finding x, she was solving for x in a big equation like a = by + cx + d. This annoyed her hugely but did get the job done! The most important thing that we got out of the books from Singapore Math, though, was that when you don't know how to solve a problem, you dive in and try things. Does it work to do this? No, that doesn't seem to be helping us, so let's try something else. This looks promising, but no, I can't see how to proceed from here. What about this approach? Because the problems were rich and complex enough to stump me too (at least some of the time), the kids learned a flexible and curious approach. I don't meet a lot of kids with this approach to math, and I think it's extremely valuable. I can't speak to the specific books you mention, because they weren't available when I was buying from them. My kids have moved on to other things (though I still use the books I have with students I tutor). Our favorite resources for brain-stretching were the Intensive Practice books, which aren't for everyone but were wonderful for us.

Ancient Egyptian, too. And Russian. There's no end to the languages he encounters. He's limited to working in translation, because language learning is a weakness for him. It is in fact a disadvantage, though, when you're taking five sophomore-level courses, and you have two weeks to write three papers, and everyone else is using the textbook, lectures, and two or three other sources, and you're busy finding and printing out five-inch-thick stacks of original correspondence between 18th-century diplomats. And he's a very slow, very careful reader. But he's simply not capable of working in a different way. It will be a great advantage at higher levels, of course, but first he has to reach those higher levels, without losing his scholarship. His professors have been extraordinarily understanding of him, but they can only modify things to a certain degree. Yes, he's highly capable of defining abstract nouns—that's what he does. You're right, OhElizabeth, he's not paying me anything. Or my husband, who's tutored him in math (from basic algebra through calculus) and logic. I'll look for that book. He really doesn't expect me to read psychology research—he does that himself! But I might read it anyway.

Yes, and this part (the integration) is what he excels at. Once a bit of information is connected in his head to other information, he is amazing at being able to restructure in his head. The problem is—oh, I don't know! This is confusing to me. Yes, jigsaw puzzles could be helpful, although I don't know if he'd see them as "the slow way." I recall the game, too, where you name two things or actions, and state how they're similar. I wonder if that would be helpful.

He's functional, with issues. He's been self-employed for many years, and very successful, but in a field he despises. He currently lives with a friend. He cooks very well (but in an unusual sort of way), he pays bills (his business got much better when he hired someone to help him with this, though). The field he is pursuing requires a master's-level degree, and it's very well suited to his thought processes. I think he'd thrive there—I don't know whether he'd make a lot of money but he could certainly support himself and contribute nicely to society, which is is goal. He just needs to make it through his undergraduate work, plus he's learned that he's missing a new way of looking at the world, and he'd rather develop his capacity. (We've been trying to help him see that for a long time, but it finally sunk in recently.) Yes, he can perform his own searches. In many ways, he's one of the least sensitive people I've ever met. I've certainly never met anyone who's come as far from his origins as he has. He didn't much approve of my going to a place like this for advice. :) Not that he minded my telling his story anonymously here—just that he figures that you'd better go straight to the horse's mouth, and read original studies. (Neuropsychology is one of his many interests—he's way ahead of me.) But I figured that others might be able to enlighten us as we search for the vocabulary to describe the issues, if nothing else. (That's one of his disadvantages in his schooling, actually—he doesn't deal with secondary sources. If he's writing an essay he wants to be back at primary sources, always. This makes for a wonderful amount of learning, and he'll be well set up to write a thesis of some sort, but it doesn't fit in well when he's taking a full course load and has a deadline.)

There's no such thing as obliqueness with him! I can just suggest, and he'll tell me why he thinks it isn't efficient—or he'll tell me why it is, even though he thought it wouldn't be. (Occasionally I do surprise him with something he hasn't thought of.) I long gave up the idea that I could have emotions that he wouldn't detect (the sort of thing that would lead to obliqueness). It was quite unnerving for a while—I am used to thinking that a lot of my emotions need to be concealed, and I assumed that they would offend him. But he keeps coming around, so it must be okay. It finally occurred to me that when he sees everyone that way, my own emotions aren't going to be that much of a surprise to him. He kept asking us about puzzles and such and what age we thought we were when the various sorts appealed to us. We discussed the various types of pattern-finding that are involved in each. I suggested that if he thought they would help, I have a full box of puzzle books of varying difficulties that he could use. But he wasn't interested, saying that was the slow way, though he had little doubt that it would help. But if anyone has any specific recommendations, it wouldn't hurt to hear them! At this point I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching, myself, since he'll probably ignore it anyway. And I have my own family to attend to. :) And yes, he's an interesting person! I could go on and on.

Not willing to take (additional) meds. Probably, on the Asperger's. (And yes, very, very blunt—that has diminished recently, but only through serious effort on his part.) No testing was done at his university, which he's sad about because it would have been extensive, but it didn't work out. I had a fascinating discussion with him today. He says he's not interested in the standard psychological/educational approach to this problem—he calls that the slow way. He believes that if he can pinpoint what he's missing well enough, he'll be able to quickly achieve what he needs. His specific question to me was about set recognition and when that develops. I told him that my husband had pointed out the Sesame Street "one of these things is not like the others" game aimed at preschoolers. That got him going quite nicely. ("I never was any good at that," he said.) He started talking about shape sorters and pattern matching and the increased level of abstraction in the find-the-hidden-picture games and such, and then the additional level of abstraction which exists in the real world, where you have to notice patterns when neither half of the pattern is pointed out to you. (For example, it's one thing to know you're looking for a banana in this picture, and another to look at two pictures and look for common elements.) He came up with a tentative time frame for the developmental stage when, he surmised, the thing he's missing probably comes into play (I don't remember whether he said the beginning of middle school or the beginning of high school). So he's going to work with that and see what he can come up with. I have no idea where he takes it from here—but I have seen this before, and it usually leads him someplace good. He's highly self-aware—or, at least, he's highly willing to be self-aware, and truly welcomes the opportunity to see new truths about himself or about anything. That doesn't mean that he is capable of taking in the feedback, of course; it needs to be presented in a way that he can absorb. I'm quite curious to see where all this leads us. So my question to you is: do any of you want updates on this—would it be of interest to you, especially to those of you with similar kids?—or should I just forget this thread, since he's not looking for the educational/psychological approach here? (edited mostly to add an important NOT that I omitted)

Boy, that didn't take long! I just looked up "executive functioning" and here are the things that strike me as relevant: difficulty keeping track of time difficulty finishing work on time difficulty multitasking Those things pretty much define my friend. He probably does have dyslexia, too. Okay, this is good.

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone! I have read quickly over the replies but some of these obviously need more than a quick read-through to digest. I'll try to do that this afternoon. A few quick notes: I not really seeking advice on what sort of teaching he needs—we've figured that out well enough, for one thing, but in any case I'm not his teacher. I'm just trying to help him stay above water in some of his courses. What we're after is a way to help him develop so that he can make better use of his classes as is. He's more and more aware that other students are learning things that he's missing in these classes. There's no available money, there was no early testing, nothing like that. He did do some amount of testing a year or two ago at his university; I will ask him just what they did. We've discussed the possibility of Asperger's in the past; that's certainly a possibility but I've always wondered about that because I've never met anyone as tuned in to other people's emotions as he is. He often knows how I'm feeling before I do. He developed that skill because of his personal situation, but would a person with Asperger's be capable of doing that on their own, even if it were hugely to their advantage? I don't know. I do think that an evaluation would be helpful here, I think that is correct. I wonder how we could get this done. It occurs to me that a friend of mine is a educational psychologist—she doesn't test adults, but perhaps she could point me in a good direction here. I will read your responses more carefully soon! Thanks again.

A friend, age 40, is in college. He's having real difficulty with his classes and I'm trying to help him figure out what's going on. (I hope this isn't inappropriate to post here.) In some ways he's the most brilliant person I've ever met. For example, he can see the implications of a new concept extremely quickly. He can—and does—rearrange his whole understanding of the world almost instantly. He thinks in abstractions. Last year I helped him study grammar. Giving him examples taught him nothing, but frustrated him completely. He wanted definitions of the concepts, which he would study—and if the definition was correct, then he could generally apply the definition to examples just fine. I spent hours trying to figure out how to properly define a "participle" and a "phrase" and a "participial phrase." (Have you ever thought about how to officially define a phrase? It made my head hurt.) A definition that would make everything crystal clear for him, would be confusing to anyone else. For example: "A participle is a verb form which merely assumes the act, being, or state." For most of the people I teach, these sentences would only make sense if I first gave ten examples. For him, the examples didn't make sense until he'd learned the abstraction. The best example that I was seeing a serious problem, though, came when he was studying verb forms. He railed about the fact that the book called the forms -s, -ed, and -ing forms. And he went through the list of verbs: has, had, had, having. Plays, played, playing, and so forth. 45 minutes into this exercise, he suddenly said, "OH! The -s forms end in s! And the -ing forms end in ing!" It had never have occurred to me that this needed to be pointed out. It's not surprising to me that he's having difficulty in school, since schools are simply not set up to give abstractions in this way. (He loves textbooks that are pre-1920 or so, since they use more abstractions.) I think this is related although I can't quite say how: He has trouble figuring out what to include and what to leave out when he researches or writes. He ends each semester with several incompletes, because he tries to write dissertation-quality papers in his sophomore-level courses. His professors are quite understanding with him, but he's beginning to realize that there is a problem, if the less knowledgeable person beside him writes a two-page final and gets a higher grade on a test than he does with his ten-page final. If you ask him a question, you must be prepared to listen to a very carefully worded treatise. He has the mind of a lawyer—he must make statements that are completely true and watertight. But this isn't a mere preference, because when others make non-watertight (but totally normal) sentences, he often misunderstands them. He simply doesn't know how to select the appropriate details to illustrate his broader points, or how to fill in the gaps of what someone meant to say. But boy, does he understand the broader points! I've never met anyone with such a grasp of the broader points of history, philosophy, sociology—even before he started college. (He never finished high school). His current question is how to begin to develop this skill, without even having an idea of what the skill is. He realizes that other people are able to make value judgements of how useful a particular idea is, and he can't. He also sees that other people can (for example) look at two different (but unfamiliar) writing systems and see that they're different—but he can't. He's asked me to try to figure out when that make-a-set skill (the distinguishing diferent writing systems skill) first develops in humans, as a first step for him to try to figure out what he's missing. I haven't been able to figure that one out, though I figure it's a form of pattern recognition. But does anyone have any insight for me? Any advice on what's going on, or how he could begin to develop these skills? He'd be willing to do almost anything to improve, I think.

Thank you SO MUCH to Jenny in Florida and to Silver Brook—I had not realized that I could organize transcripts by subject and not by year. I wish I had known that with my two olders. For reasons that I don't quite understand, this is absolutely transforming my expectations for my third, who's finishing eighth grade. Suddenly I feel free to think, "What exactly do I want him to have accomplished by the time he finishes high school? How can we be working on that now?" instead of, "What courses should he be doing this year?" So, instead of thinking, "What should we do for literature in the fall?" I've been thinking things like, "Hey, it seems like we could read a Shakespeare play together as a family a couple of times a year. And he could do X, Y, and Z with poetry. And we'll need to choose some good books for him to read and talk about." And instead of thinking, "What period of history should he study in the fall?" I'm thinking, "What stack of books can I propose for him, that he can choose from next? And how long should it take him to read it? What should I do to be sure that he's learning? I feel that somehow I'm freed to see learning as a more organic part of our family life, at the same time that I feel freed to let him have more input into his learning. Since this is a very important point to him, I'm simply thrilled. I'm not quite sure why this concept has freed me so much, but I've just felt tied to the transcript for some years now—especially since filling out my oldest daughter's National Merit application, which was so structured—but even though #3 will probably need a NM application filled out as well, I'm not going to worry about that now. There will be an honest way to fit what we're doing into that structure, even if what we're doing is atypical, as long as it's a serious program of study. (I've just looked at that application again—what a pain! But still, we can do it.) Thanks again!

You know, I have an additional concern here. This sounds like a very poorly designed test. You've described more than one situation where there are a number of questions, and missing the first part of a question results in missing the questions following. If in part B of the "month" series she used the wrong equation (which she incorrectly generated in part A), but used it correctly, she should have been given credit for part B.

Interesting, PitterPatter, that it was so hard to use. (I assume you're talking about Risas y Sonrisas.) I guess it's my Spanish-teacher background that makes it seem simple to me.... Unfortunately I don't know just how they could make it easier to use. I've never used it with the young ones but I've used elements of it with highschoolers, and I like it.

Consider these: http://spanishforkids.com/ (Risas y Sonrisas) ¡Cuéntame! student reader and textbook http://tprstorytelling.com Both of these are easier to use if you speak some Spanish yourself. For Cuéntame, I wouldn't buy the teacher's materials. Unfortunately they don't seem to have the samples up any more, which is too bad because they're a bit unusual and you need to know whether you want to work this way. I have both of these and can answer questions.