Middle School Education In The Us

Responding to a PM here..
There is a ton of information in this thread and really wish I had something like this when I was navigating the MS system few years ago .

Skipping math levels /advanced etc is good if ur child is able to handle it..to a point.
Unfortunately some parents and children do not know when to stop. Tread with caution is my sincere advice.
Math is exciting and sexy upto Calc BC and multivariable calculus.
After that its very dry ..and not for everybody. Things like abstract math and real analysis requires not just the technical ability/skill but a certain maturity to understand and appreciate. I know of kids who are done with Calc BC by 9th or 10 th .They needed do take advanced courses in college which looks fantastic on ur resume to an Ivy..but there is a price u pay for pushing too hard too quickly. The child more often than not loses the passion for math. Its a marathon ...not a sprint. Keeping the passion and spirit alive for a subject and pursuit of education in general is more imp.

 

This is pretty much the essence of the whole thread. Trying to find that line for ur child is one of the hardest things u will ever do as parent. For those of us with +1 its so tempting to not "do it again" and reuse the line . Dont make that mistake..each child is diff...even when they all come home with the same grades.

 

This is why I don't have kids. I might be tempted to experiment on them!

Jokes apart, let's consider in this context, what a good teacher or parent can do for a child. Someone mentioned Latin above (I'm too lazy to go looking right now!), so let's take that.

Latin is not just about acquiring a facility for memorizing medical terminology (or legal). It can be far more than that. Here's something you might not know: Analysis of classical texts and word frequency corpora show that 95% of texts in classical Latin can be understood with a vocabulary of 1425 words! Now, if you add another 100 words to that, you're in control of medieval Latin as well! Guess how many of these are first declension masculine nouns? Four! So in one day, you could master (or at least learn to recognize) 95% of the first declension masculine nouns. With just 1525 words, you have a millennium of western history and heritage at your feet! Take that Plautus and Terence! Ovid? Virgil? Catullus? Totally doable. How cool is that?!

Now, this is not something a kid can figure out on his own, even with the interwebs. Slogging through Wheelock is fine 'n all, but here is a measurable and achievable goal that might appeal to all our young geography bee, spelling bee Pinkys and Babloos.

This is what I mean by a map and directions for navigation. It is critical to not only teach a subject but also to structure both the teaching and the learning process systematically so that its impact is lasting and trancends a particular subject!

 

sokanansanah, everyone at some stage as a parent identifies the need to structure the learning process but the question is how? How to accomplish that? I liked a point you mentioned earlier. Parents are the only ones who have the time and inclination to mold a kid while the rest of the world only takes a passing interest (sorry, I have to paraphrase your statement not knowing where to look for that particular post in ES, MS, and HS threads).

Do parents know how to structure? Who should they look up to if they are clueless? How to accomplish this without citing sonorous Piaget or Papert theories in the discussion.

 

Well, the Latin word-frequency approach was intended as an example of how!
It would be different for each subject, wouldn't it? Some general observations are possible. More later.

 

First declension masculine noun, Plautus and Terence were your best shot?

This is what I was referring to earlier as well. Your post inlined as "why", why you should do it where you listed the benefits of doing it, not just mastering legal or medical terminology but read classics in original. Does it really cover "how" to think beyond quotidian benefits.

How are you supposed to scale the thinking from straitlaced or populist deal to an enjoyable lark.

 

Atta! Rihana, the information shared in these school threads is very useful even for a casual reader.

Is there any way these concepts, links and references can be extracted and translated into a lookup-friendly format? Some form of an index? And squeeze in that sokanasanah's Latin fancy also somewhere in that map and index.

 

Yes, the home-schooling community in the United States has a lot of useful resources! The one you linked to above is used extensively by home-schoolers.