Middle School Pre AP Classes and ADHD

I would not eliminate the pre AP classes. Instead, perhaps you could ask for some accomodations, such as extended time on tests, or doing only every other homework problem. As the parent of a gifted child with ADHD (and LD to boot), I’ve learned that boredom is the very worst thing of all. If you take your child out of classes in which he is interested and by which he is challenged, and stick him in an unchallenging setting, he may give up. I know with my child, a middle schooler taking all gifted classes in a mainstream setting, it is the challenging work that motivates him to try. He does have a lot of homework, but has learned to do break up the work into little chunks. He does some at lunch, some after school and some after dinner. He has told me that he thinks the homework is worth it because he gets to be in classes that are interesting and where he doesn’t already know everything that is being taught. Emphasizing the gifts rather than the disabilities and looking for challenges has been really important for us.

When my 1st grader was overwhelmed with homework (tough teacher) we took her off the school bus in the afternoon. Picking her up from school added an hour onto her day and she wasn’t “all hyped up” from the out-of-control kids on the bus. We still pick her up. We have bonding/talking time in the car and she eats a snack. When we get home she’s already in the mood to get her homework done and she is very efficient. She is also a bright (A-student) but probably not gifted. I would definately avoid the classes that have the “behavioral problems”. All kids learn from their peers and these are lessons that you don’t want your son participating in. Try to find some way to make this work before opting out. My husband is a 9th grade teacher who works in a school district that has the same problem with the behavioral problems being more prevalent in the less-challenging classes. It’s like these “problem kids” are written-off by parents and school and they just torment their classmates and their teachers. In 9th grade some of these kids have criminal records and the RIGHT to be mainstreamed with normal kids. I’m sure that it comes down to money. I would put my child in private school or home-school her before putting her in one of my husband’s classes!!! I’m praying that she can follow your son’s path but I can see that it isn’t going to be easy.
Terry

As a teacher and a parent, I think AP classes are a bit of a racket and I regret that they’re spreading to middle school curriculum. If students can really do college level work which is what AP classes are supposed to be - why aren’t they in college?

They’re not in college because we don’t believe them ready for college but somehow someway we believe them ready for college level work? That’s just never made sense to me.

If a student is really ready for college level work, then graduate them from high school and let them take college classes at a local college. Why ‘play’ at going to college? The answer is - there’s money to be made - and AP is a collusion between high schools, colleges and the people in Princeton who write and sell the tests you will have to pay to have your son take to get credit for his AP classes.

It makes even less sense to me to have AP in middle school. AP classes don’t seem more complex to me nor do they seem to have more learning in them- they just seem to have more work. AP just seems another way to weed students out until the one last standing gets to go to Harvard.

And they make the transition to college even harder as having taken AP, a freshman must now take sophomore classes. Yet nobody seems to graduate early even though they have many credits of AP going into college… With all the AP classes many students now take in 11th and 12, one might think students would be graduating in 3 years rather than 4 or now the 5 years that more and more students need to graduate.

But that’s another racket altogether.

Good luck.

If you child enjoys the challenge of these classes keep him there and get the work modified as the other poster stated.

The worst thing for my child was giving him easier (busy) work. He needed to be stimulated but not stressed.

Boy, do I agree with all of the above! I found that Patrick really liked taking the AP classes because he liked the challenge, but the workload was OVERWHELMING. And NOT just because he has organizational skill deficits - the total amount of work would have been overwhelming for anyone. How many of us take home 4 hours of work every night? And so much of it was just MORE work rather than a different quality, as Sara correctly identifies. Patrick was able to complete two years of math in about 7 months when he was in 8th grade, but only when we prevailed upon the teacher to understand that he could GET the work with half the homework assigned, and didn’t need extra VOLUME. He needed a higher PACE. I think the idea of asking for accomodations is great, and I would try to figure out where there is busy work that is not contributing to learning and ask to have it ELIMINATED. Bright children learn faster with less reinforcement. Why make them grind through so much stuff, when we can take advantage of their skills at quick learning and focus on delving deeper into their interests, rather than overwhelming them with unreasonable production demands. Schools aren’t a factory - the product is not paper, it’s learning!

When my son was in 6th grade he was in all TAG classes (the equivalent here in Georgia.) It was awful. From September through April he had a minimum of 3 projects to work on every weekend in addition to the regular homework, and because he went off-team for his TAG classes, there was no coordination to ensure he didn’t have an inordinant amount of work on any given evening. He’s also a pretty talented year-round swimmer, and it was getting to the point that we were trying to figure out if he would be able to continue swimming and manage the coursework.

We had him drop out of TAG language arts for 7th grade, and he was bored to tears in the advanced class. Interestingly enough, the workload in his other classes was MUCH lighter in 7th grade than in 6th (much fewer stupid, time-consuming, expensive projects)….and he was doing high school algebra for math!

He returned to all TAG classes for 8th grade, and had no trouble keeping up with everything, but again, the number of projects was more limited.

Before you drop your child out of challenging classes, talk to other parents. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of your son’s classmates are also drowning. It’s very disappointing that some teachers don’t realized the difference between more work and work at a higher level. I have no problem with the latter, but more work is not always better.

Karyn

The trend I have seen is that more and more parents are demanding high level classes for their children. There was a time when kids had to test into these classes by achievement or IQ. I think many parents have taken schools to task over this as if it were discriminatory against their child

I believe the schools have responded by doing two things

1-making the majority of the classes AP or advanced so that average, high average, and gifted kids end up together in the same level class
2-making it more a workload issue than an ability issue. The reasoning here would be if a child is willing to do the work, he deserves to be in the class regardless of his natural ability

My older two(now 15,18) tested as gifted and were in a program that targeted the top 5% in elementary. They found this challenging. Upon entering middle school, the emphasis changed to what I outlined above and advanced classes were now the top 20-30%. My boys found it to be a huge difference. My middle son spent more time isolated in the hall for talking than he spent in math class and still received a high A without cracking a book. The teacher TRIED to put together one smaller class of the highest kids. He wanted to challenge that small group AND also open some slots for kids who were in ‘average’ and needed to be moved up. The administration wouldnt touch his proposal!

My third son in NOT gifted and has LD/ADD. WE have moved to another state and Im not 100% sure how schools here do things. And I chose to homeschool my LD/ADD son anyway.

I honestly dont know what I would do in your situation. I would dread, with a capital D, all that extra work. Yet I would have to think long and hard about what the non-AP classes consist of student wise. It sounds as if they are almost a minority and then you have those behavior concerns swirling around as well

I THINK I would go for a compromise of some sort. I would keep him in APmath for sure, and Language Arts probably, but worry less about anything else. He isnt going to get into Princeton on his social studies scores!

The whole concept of a pre-AP class is completely new to me, and I live in a community where the competition to get into the Ivies is fierce. How do these classes differ from traditional Honors classes? Unfortunately, so many kids are taking AP classes in high school now, that the colleges expect to see them on the transcript or assume the child is averse to challenge. My son is a freshman in a relatively prestigious college (non-Ivy), and from what he tells me, all these kids are so burned out from AP classes and extra-curriculars in high school that they rarely attend class and spend most of their time in drunken stupors. I can’t even guess what will happen to kids who are taking “pre-AP” classes in middle school when they eventually get to college. It’s all pretty absurd, isn’t it?

By contrast to the prior “guest,” my kids attend a private school for the gifted that has one of the highest rates of AP coursework in the country. The kids who graduate from this school are routinely accepted into the very best colleges and typically find college to be less challenging than highschool. Many enter college with a large number of coursework credits, making their education quicker and less expensive. My kids LOVE this place, despite the hard work, because they find it exciting and challenging. They are energized by the environment rather than burnt out. That is how most of the kids who attend feel. For those students who are academically gifted, AP classes can be greatly enjoyable and rewarding. Even for kids that are bright but perhaps not gifted in the academic sense but who are hardworkers and like to challenge themselves, these are good choices. Having LDs doesn’t mean you can’t be a part of these classes. My kids have LD and ADHD (as well as being identified as academically gifted) and they are top students. They are successful and happy because they are in a supportive and challenging environment that rewards their cognitive curiousity rather than stifling it in mountains of repetition and piles of simplified material. Its not just a question of being able to handle the more difficult material. They actually NEED this level of instruction to be happy rather than bored and tuned out.

Last guest, I’m certainly glad your kids are fortunate enough to be in a school that is able to accommodate their disabilities while responding to their superior skills—though it remains to be seen how burned out they will be when they hit college, and believe me, you won’t hear about the binge drinking and partying unless they want you to! Nonetheless, public school AP classes are jammed with kids who have little desire or ability for AP work, but who believe (or their parents believe) that they must take these courses to get into the “right” colleges. These are the same kids who are stuffing their resumes with community service projects, music lessons, clubs and every other “extra” under the sun, whether they’re interested or not, again to get into the”right” college. As if that will have anything to do with their eventual success and, more important, happiness! My son’s AP credits allowed him to skip a couple of large freshman introductory courses, which was nice I suppose, but not critical. But the AP classes themselves were a mixed bag, because so many of the students taking them were not really qualified for them or were only there because of parental pressure, and the teachers were the usual range of fair to middling. Yet the course that captured his imagination the most was a non-Honors Physics class (he is definitely a non-math, non-science person) with a young, inspiring, dedicated teacher, and that “A” is the one he will always treasure. Every child is different and every school is different, but AP classes should be considered carefully, with regard to the child’s true abilities and desires and without the belief that getting into the right college is the be-all and end-all of your child’s existence. A student who doesn’t care or is tired of being pushed by his parents will be able to waste 4 years quite easily in any college, and the student who is pursuing his own path, not his parents’ dream, will find success and happiness regardless of what institution he attends or the number of AP credits he accumulated.

I agree about the packed AP classes filled with kids who may not really want to be there or who may not be academically ready for them. My kids go to a very small school (40 kids per grade) and most classes have fewer than 15 kids in them. All of the kids who are there are academically gifted, so that makes a difference as well. I also agree about the over-scheduled kids. Getting into the “right” college is far less important than learning and being well-educated. My kids are only involved in activities that they choose and we limit them to two extra-curriculars in any event. I do think that we need to be more inclusive about who takes AP courses, but not every kid needs these course or will benefit from them and sometimes the kids that would benefit don’t because the classes are overcrowded or poorly taught.