Dermot's First Grade

Dermot started first grade with 150 sight words, and he was able to read pretty basic children's books. As far as his math, he had been doing weird advanced math worksheets on top of the regular stuff at the end of kindergarten (after much cajoling on my part). So I set up a meeting with Dermot's new teacher for about the second week of class. I was so excited by Dermot's teacher. She was young and her master's degree was in reading. She listened to me about Dermot and gave me suggestions and tried things out for Dermot in the classroom. She was also willing to communicate with me by email instead of by notes in Dermot's folders, which I hated when his kindergarten teacher insisted on that.

So, first grade started off really great for Dermot. He was excited, and he had several of his kindergarten friends with him in the new class. We had the library problem that I spoke about earlier that was pretty much it at the beginning. Dermot's reading blossomed. I hate to say this, but playing Pokemon really helped Dermot read. He saw the point of reading, and the language is simple, but useful. He no longer needed to ask us what everything said in his video games and that made him feel good about himself. We also dug around trying to find books for him, and that was hard. His reading ability was noticeably below his interests. So now that he could read, he could only read books about stories that he thought were silly or too watered down. It took us months to wait out the discrepancy. Finally, Dermot found the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books and they were perfect for him. He's already read all five of them multiple times.

Once Dermot was reading the Diary books, I knew that he was way beyond the simple reading in his classroom. I finally had had enough and I emailed his teacher asking for her to send home more difficult books. She did, and he fell in love with the Magic Tree House Series. He's still reading those from the library. He has a growing interest in history, and these books are really fulfilling that need for him. The problem with first grade, however, is that they use the DRA system for testing reading ability. Dermot doesn't test very high on the test because it focuses on comprehension. Dermot doesn't pay attention to the stories he is reading for the test because they are way too simple for him. When he is asked to repeat back what happened, he doesn't know what is important because it's all stupid to him. I brought this up to the teacher and she didn't seem to get it. I am not that worried about it, because as long as he is reading appropriate stuff at home, I don't really care. I make him read every night before bed, and he enjoys that.

A new subject in first grade was spelling. Oh, the monotony of spelling homework. My poor boy really suffered through that, and that's not even close to being over. Monday they had to write out the seven words five times each. Tuesday they had to write sentences with five of the words. Wednesday they had to do something else (I don't remember). Thursday they had to "study". As if first graders know what that means. Dermot refused to study because he insisted that he already knew the words. He was right. He got one hundred percents on all of his spelling tests. At our end of the year meeting with the principal, I brought up the fact that Dermot was obviously not being challenged in spelling. The funny thing, which wasn't funny to poor Dermot, was that he missed one extra credit word - Illinois. He put an "e" on the end. He, of course, is still pissed off at himself for missing that word even though it was a surprise word and he had never really looked at it in class before. I was horrified since I'm from Illinois, especially since he knows how to correctly pronounce Illinois.

Math, of course, was still a huge problem. I think that a lot of early grade school teachers are not very good at math and they don't know how to teach math that is more advanced than they are used to teaching. My mom says that her teachers were like that when she was a principal. At the beginning of first grade, we had a meeting with the teacher about Dermot's math ability. She said that she would challenge him. She created a challenge folder for his desk with work for him to do when he finished what the other kids were still working on. She also sent home copies of worksheets from the third grade textbook. Dermot liked those, but they were still a little too easy. Eventually, we hit a point where we were frustrated that no one was "teaching" Dermot math. They were sending home worksheets and expecting him to pick things up. He did, but Ethan and I are not math teachers. We were worried that Dermot might be missing small pieces of math that we no longer did because we get to use shortcuts as adults. Math, more than any other subject, really builds on the previous material. If you don't learn everything that you need and learn it correctly, you fall apart once you start algebra. I didn't want that to happen to Dermot, especially not with his perfectionism. I wrote to the teacher and for some reason the principal got involved. They decided that Dermot needed to work more on word problems. I think that they thought that Ethan and I were forcing Dermot to do basic, rote math. As if he were just doing sheets and sheets of problems at home. That was never the case. Dermot has seriously figured most of math out by himself. Anyway, they started sending home second grade worksheets that were much more wordy. Dermot was irritated because it was obviously a step backward, and he didn't have trouble with word problems. Dermot has always understood math within real life applications, so word problems are how he views math. Because of this, I got really fed up. I started freaking out about how was I going to help this boy with his math. I knew that he needed guidance that the school wasn't able to give him. I spent a whole day checking out Sylvan, Kumon, Huntington, etc. That's when I found Mathnasium. It does tutoring for older kids, but it also does enrichment for younger kids. The owners have three mathematically talented children themselves. They have been a great source of information for me. They have a son who is two years older than Dermot who is starting algebra. Dermot is in awe of that child:) Mathnasium gives pre-tests of material and then a child does worksheets while guided by a teacher only covering the material that they did not know. Dermot scored a 75% on the second grade test at the end of his first grade. He just took the post-test for third grade yesterday and he got a 96%. He, of course, was enraged that he missed two items. The scary part is that he knew all of third grade math except for three concepts. He finished all of that material in seven 1.5 hour sessions. Next week he will take the fourth grade pre-test, I guess. Dermot is now doing long division with remainders. Seriously. He understands modes and medians. Seriously. You show him, he gets it. He just needs to be shown.

Near the end of the school year our public school district had a family math night. Awesome, we thought. I couldn't go because I was teaching, but Ethan and Dermot went. I had emailed the organizer to make sure that it was still going on and that a little kid would be okay. The organizer wrote me back and said that she had worked with Dermot and that he seemed really advanced in math. I noticed that this organizer was a new hire who was in charge of the entire math and science curriculum for our K-12 system. She also has an ED.D. I immediately wrote her back and told her my concerns about Dermot. I told her that I am going to pay for Dermot to be enriched as long as he likes it. That means that he will be advanced in math. I wanted to plan for the future now. He very well may be doing algebra when he's in fourth grade, and there's no way his fourth grade teacher will be able to teach that and the other kids. I had to do seventh grade math twice (sixth grade and then again in seventh grade - horrible experience), and I told them that there's no way I'm going to let that happen to Dermot. So this led to a big powwow at the end of the year to start to plan for Dermot's future.

This final meeting consisted of Dermot's first grade teacher, the principal, the math coordinator, and the gifted program instructor. I should start off by saying that we had previously had a meeting with the gifted teacher, and I'm not a big fan of hers. I kept begging the school to test Dermot and they won't. All she did in her meeting was tell me how the gifted program works and who gets to participate. It's way too little and it's already not challenging to Dermot. The one nice thing she did, though, was she gave Dermot access to an online math game that's for the second grade and higher math team in the gifted program. He got to spend a lot of time on that while the other kids were doing first grade math.

This last meeting consisted of me explaining the Mathnasium program and giving them lots of information. Then we talked about Dermot's social development (whatever, I'm so sick of that being a topic of discussion when I know it's related to his giftedness and they don't understand that). They told me that in second grade, they will prepare his new teacher for him, but they only focused on math. They have told us that Dermot will do pretests of the second grade math material. If he passes, he won't have to work on that material. If he does not pass a topic, he will need to work with the rest of the class. When he does pass a topic, he will have a special project to work on. What that means needs to be fleshed out. Personally, I would like it to involve writing since that's his least liked subject, which means that's the most difficult subject for him.

The big point I ended up making at the end of that meeting was that Dermot isn't just gifted in math. He seems to be light years ahead in math, but he's also bored out of his mind in other subjects. He never missed a spelling word, and he's reading books and understanding them at the 9-12 year old range. I think he could read older books, but the content isn't of interest to him, and I don't need him rushing into adult topics before he can handle them. He also finds grade school science silly because he understands the scientific method and the point of experiments. He doesn't understand how learning the types of clouds counts as science. He also learned solid, liquid, gas, and plasma through They Might Be Giants songs and through a great demonstration at our local science museum when he was 4. Doing that in class at 7 seemed really silly to him.

The overall picture, though, is that Dermot loved his first grade teacher. She was really good for him. She tried to learn who he was. He cried when he got home after the last day of school because he said he was really going to miss her. It made me cry too. What a sweet child he can be. His friendships deepened and that meant the world to him. The teacher even commented that when he was getting in trouble in school it seemed that it was because he was trying to find his place in the class' social world. She said his shyness really lessened over the school year. Dermot insists that he still likes school (Thank goodness!). I'm trying to have a positive view of all of this. It's hard to know what to do with gifted kids. It's also hard to know how gifted they are. Even worse, most gifted kids are at different levels in each subject, so you can't just assume that they are at a certain level for all material. The principal has been very open with us. Hopefully the next teacher will be willing to work with us too. We just had Dermot tested and we'll have more information for the school soon. We get his results back tomorrow. My biggest problem is that the school thinks that by giving him slightly more advanced homework in a few subjects they are meeting his needs. I think that he is way more advanced than the school either wants to admit or than the school thinks a child can be at his age. I don't think Dermot is one of these geniuses who could handle college at 13, but I am pretty sure that he's at least two grades above in all subjects except for writing and grammar. This kid even finds the technology class boring because we've let him do so much on the computer. Again, the good news is that I have a kid who enjoys school. The bad news is that I see the future unfolding and I know that things only get worse. He's lucky enough to just live for today.