[S/O of Early college-how do you decide when your DC is ready for higher classes]

We didn't really prepare our daughter to go to college early. In fact if you had asked me if I would do that I would have laughed.

 

Basically, traditional home school high school curriculum wasn't meeting her needs. She was always finished fast and and was always right. I was simply giving her more to do until one day she pointed out that "more stupid, too-easy work doesn't make it harder it just makes it more stupid, too-easy work". At that point I knew we needed another option.

 

I began looking into online AP classes. But I was really struck by the expense. While less than private school would have cost it was still very, very expensive on our budget. Dual-enrollment at the community college wouldn't have been an option for 2 more years and I did consider fighting the age limit but I felt like we were just trading water, not making progress.

 

Another big issue was independence and maturity. My daughter really was a 20 year old in a 14 year old's body. She began to do things like say I need a haircut, I checked the calendar and thursday at 4 was clear so I scheduled the appointment. If I was out of the house and it was late afternoon I would come home to find that she had planned and started dinner and was sweeping the entire first floor. All the good did come with some bad, I really felt that she was beginning to think of herself as an adult and was chafing at some of the restrictions placed on her by life.

 

We live about 3 hours from an early admission, residential college program. She knew it was there and approached me one day with the completed application and asked me to schedule a visit. At the time we humored her figuring that we would check it out but sure that she wouldn't get in and that we couldn't afford it if she did.

 

At our visit, I could see that this was what she needed. The conviction grew as our visit continued and one problem fell by the wayside after another. 2 weeks later we found that she had been accepted and that the scholarship she earned made it possible to allow her to go. I still felt like I was jumping off a cliff without a safety net, sending my 14 year old to live 3 hours away from me and expecting her to behave like an adult.

 

2 years late, I know that I could not have made a better choice for her. She is exceeding any expectations we ever had for her. She is an active part of campus life and in a leadership position. She has a 3.97 GPA (the top GPA in the class of 2015 for the whole school) and is taking 20 credit hours of solid math and science classes.

 

All of this only sideways answers your question. I knew that she was ready academically and I thought that she was ready maturity wise. I now know how important that maturity was. The girls really need to be functioning as 18-20 year olds in order to succeed. Her entry class of 26 13-16 year old young women is down to 12 and none of them left for academic issues.

 

Academically, If I had known that my daughter was heading this direction, I would have made sure that she had some high school science under her belt before she left. She truly skipped from 8th grade to college and never took any high school science. She has gotten all A's in her college sciences and she has taken 1 semester of Biology, 2 semester of chemistry and 2 semesters of physics. Obviously she could have handled high school science earlier at home, but as I said we never expected that she would go to college early.

[How can a child go to college early?]

My daughter skipped from 8th grade to college. She is currently a sophomore at Mary Baldwin College in the the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. She will graduate from college at 18.

 

PEG is women only program as MBC is a women's college. MIT has a similar co-ed program. There is a co-ed, non-residential program at one of the UC schools.

 

Early college was the best decision we could have made for my daughter. She is thriving academically and socially. She is the vice-chair of the Residence Hall Association, has the highest GPA in her graduation class, she was accepted to a research internship for the summer at another college in Indiana and is a math major with double minors in physics and piano.

 

To get into PEG she took the ACT and applied like any other college student. We did transcripts, got letters of recommendation and she wrote application essays.

 

I will say that your child needs to be emotionally mature to succeed. My daughter's incoming class has experienced 50% attrition and none of the girls left because they had poor grades. Students need to be able to operate as college students.

[Brag alert. Ds got into summer research.]

Congrats! Where will your son be? My daughter also got a summer research position for this summer. She will be in Indiana.

[Wondering what it is about chemistry...]

NM

[HS math track for an average student wanting to be an artist]

 

EKS's story is huge. I know so many who either wrote off or were written off in relation to math who later found what worked for them. An aside: I increasing think the reason we have so few people enter engineering is we send the message you must have an A+ demonstrated aptitude in math before you turn age 20 to ever be an engineer. We throw away those who may be sufficiently competent in math and incredibly creative too early in the game.

 

Agreed, my daughter, who is a freshman in college right now, was accepted to the top public art school in the nation. She entered the art program as a freshman this last fall with every intention of graduation with an art degree.

 

She hated the art program, she hated that she no longer loved to create art but that it was a chore, she hated that they didn't critique her art technique but rather the emotions behind it.

 

She dropped out of the art program and is now a mechanical engineering major. She chose the major after studying the schools departments and class lists. She loves it. She is happy again and has straight A's

 

People can surprise you.

[Raising non-readers?]

My children have always been voracious readers as well and I know that they will again some day, but for now, my college kids don't do much pleasure reading at all. No Time.

 

My oldest read 246 books in one year (and not little thin books at all) the year before she started high school. Now as a freshman in college she probably reads about 6 books a year for fun.

 

My son is a different story all together. We use Sonlight and he is in a book club so he does read a lot but I rarely saw him read a book in his free time just for fun...until he got a kindle. He will not stop reading on his kindle he often finishes a book every 2 days.