Posts by Drew Johnson2

If a lion is a lion and an elephant is an elephant, then why on earth can't a horse be a horses... honestly, it just doesn't work that way, does it? It simply isn't possible 😁

Carl Bishop2 said:I’m honestly not sure what advice I could give you, Garf. My little one started school with an IQ of 77, and for our family, holding off was absolutely the right call—nobody even questioned it at the time. Even the kid himself mentioned he didn't feel ready for the classroom environment. I did have one friend ask how I was feeling about the delay; I figured she might find the idea of postponing school harder to swallow than I did, but looking back after all those years of therapy sessions, I’m just so relieved he can attend a mainstream school now. A year later, the timing of it all didn't even seem to matter anymore.
That same friend has a child with undiagnosed Asperger who is also quite a little genius. He started school at age 6.5 and is currently in third grade, but he’s still struggling with emotional maturity—specifically, he tends to lash out in anger whenever he hits a wall or loses at something (like during a game of chess). In his case, I don't think delaying school would have made much difference; maybe some specialized therapy would help, but right now, his parents are just doing their best to manage those outbursts themselves.
My son actually faced much tougher challenges with language and speech because we waited to start school. To this day, he still trips up on grammar—using masculine pronouns when he means a girl, for example—and there was a period where he struggled with basic verb conjugations, though he's improved there. It’s fascinating how kids with different diagnoses process language; they create their own words and patterns (which makes sense, given how we learn roots and suffixes). The real struggle, though, is navigating the complexities of the English language. 🤣

Which is exactly why English is the absolute king; you don't have to deal with all those endless cases and genders.
👎

That is precisely what I am banking on... Granted, the inevitable headaches and complications aren't going away—they’ll always be there to some degree, regardless of what we do—but at least he might actually learn how to manage them with a bit more grace

Sarah Hall53 said:My two cents: ask for the delay. That extra year could mean everything for his emotional and psychological well-being—it'll make it much easier for him to deal with the fact that some things come harder to him than to others.
If you ask me, it feels like the preschool is just eager to clear a spot in their enrollment. ☕

I probably will... if this were my first child, I might hesitate, but I’ve seen how quickly the American school system can swallow you whole once the grind truly begins...

Admittedly, this whole tendency toward hesitation—that reluctance to engage with strangers or the refusal to offer an answer unless I am absolutely, positively certain—is simply part of his core makeup, much like my own... traits that, if I recall correctly, followed me well into my late teens. Even back in high school, I found myself swallowing tears over a mediocre grade; though, of course, I wasn't about to let anyone actually see me weep out of sheer embarrassment, and even during my years at the university, the mere thought of approaching someone felt like an insurmountable hurdle. I suppose I never once dared to provide an answer during an exam unless I was 101% sure of its validity.

It is only when these tendencies collide with specific life struggles that things become truly complicated. Here in the States, we place such a heavy emphasis on building up one's self-confidence, but I have learned that it is rarely as simple as just deciding to be bold...

Carl Bishop2 said:How does his emotional immaturity actually manifest in his day-to-day behavior? And what’s he really like when it comes to socializing with others?

He really struggles to ask for help—even from me... I’ve been working with a speech therapist for months just trying to get him to the point where he can say, "I don't know how to do this," instead of just freezing up and letting the tears well up in his eyes. At preschool, he's in a mixed-age group, and he tends to gravitate toward the younger kids or the little girls his age because his teacher mentions he has a hard time keeping up with the boys... they tend to pick on him for being a bit more sensitive or "babyish," and then he just retreats into himself.
If he hits a snag with something—and let's be honest, things go wrong quite often—he won't give up, he's incredibly stubborn about that, but everything is inevitably accompanied by a lot of crying.
We must have played about 5,000 rounds of Uno at home just trying to teach him how to lose without a complete meltdown...

On the other hand, he's quite independent in some ways; he goes to the corner store by himself, strikes up conversations with the cashier, handles the recycling, and walks to the trash bin without any trouble since it's right there on our street. He's perfectly fine staying home alone while I run errands. However, he won't just approach a group of kids he doesn't know to start playing; he's much more passive, waiting for someone else to invite him in.
Following a recommendation from his psychologist, he recently started an individual combat sports program, and I can see the coach making a real effort to praise him... he comes home from practice looking so happy, almost as if he's finally starting to find a bit of self-confidence.

Here’s a perfect illustration of the struggle... We were playing that "Guess Who?" game the other day, and he asks me, "Does your character wear glasses?" So I tell him, "No." Then there's this long, agonizing pause while his brain tries to process the logic—since the character doesn't have glasses, he realizes he has to eliminate everyone on the board wearing them. And don't even get me started on prepositions; we spent an eternity wrestling with whether something was "in," "on," or "beside" something else because the nuances just aren't clicking yet...
Then, he'll trip up on pronouns because the way they link back to subjects just doesn't make any sense to him yet.
I can outrun you. But why can't he say "I am faster than you" instead of some broken version of it?
From what I can gather by skimming through his notes, it seems like he’s finally starting to grasp how cases work, mostly because he can actually recognize a sentence like "the cat is in the basket" and leave it at that... otherwise, he’d be saying "the cat is into the basket" or some other nonsense.

mellowskipper said:It seems to me—if I may be so bold—that you might actually have a gifted child on your hands

Yes, yes, it’s all been addressed, though there is still the matter of him struggling with things like running or similar physical hurdles. 😁
He certainly faces some challenges, and if it weren't for those difficulties, I suppose he wouldn't even be undergoing the specialized treatment he is currently receiving... He is making progress, naturally, and I assume more work will be required, but what truly keeps me up at night is whether or not he’ll actually need to hold back a year from school. He’ll likely settle everything during his evaluations, especially since he’s been working intensely with a speech therapist this whole time, yet it is that emotional component—that internal struggle—that weighs on my mind far more than the physical aspects. The obstacles he deals with will probably remain part of his life in the long run, so it’s really a question of how we proceed... do we throw him into the deep end right now and just hope for the best, or do we allow him that one extra year in order to perhaps mitigate some of these issues down the road? I simply don't know...

I’m facing a bit of a dilemma this year regarding my son’s school enrollment, and frankly, I am at a complete loss as to what the right move is... He’s been in speech therapy for three years now, dealing with a developmental language disorder diagnosis. For a long time, it really showed in how he struggled with grammar—we finally managed to get a handle on gendered nouns, but he still trips over his cases quite frequently. His sentences tend to be rather clipped, and his ability to retell stories is a major struggle; we are still wrestling with concepts like yesterday, today, and tomorrow... If today is Friday, he can easily tell you Tuesday is four days away, but if I ask him what he did yesterday, he’ll just tell me what he did this morning...
His focus is actually quite remarkable; his therapist mentioned she rarely sees a child with these specific challenges who possesses such an intense level of concentration... He has mastered analysis and synthesis, can read simpler sentences, and handles addition and subtraction up to 100, as well as multiplication, without much trouble.
On top of that, he is quite emotionally immature for his age, so we are working through that with a child psychologist, and he’s started some sports to help build up his self-confidence...

Now, here is where the conflict lies: his private speech therapist is strongly advocating for him to delay starting kindergarten. She believes that having one more year will make a massive difference, particularly regarding his emotional maturity...
However, the therapist at his preschool—who doesn't see him nearly as often since he's already in their specialized program and spends most of his time with other kids—is against delaying him. Her argument is that he’ll need Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) eventually anyway, so one extra year won't change much of the long-term trajectory... but it feels to me like she’s mostly focusing on his chronological age, repeatedly reminding me that if we wait, he’ll be entering first grade as a full eight-year-old...
I find myself leaning heavily toward the opinion of our private therapist, who works with him twice a week and seems to have a far more realistic grasp of his actual capabilities, yet I feel this immense pressure from the preschool staff to align with the institutional view... They keep bringing up his age as if it were the only metric that matters...
I truly don't know... I can't help but feel it might be less damaging to let him start school at eight than to push him in now only to have him feel completely overwhelmed and crushed by the workload right out of the gate...
I suppose we will all go through the standard testing process soon, and then the school district will weigh in with their own assessment, but I would dearly love to have my own stance firmly established by then... though, honestly, I haven't the slightest clue what the smartest path forward actually is...

Having studied mathematics myself, I found that those of us coming from general or liberal arts high schools faced a massive uphill battle when it came to Calculus I compared to the students arriving straight from specialized math academies... We simply lacked the foundational groundwork required for such rigorous material. It wasn't an impossible gap to bridge, of course, but I personally had to seek out extra tutoring sessions with a professor from UCLA just to patch up all those missing pieces.

Back when I was enrolling, the whole process was incredibly straightforward... we essentially had two tracks: academic prep or vocational training. If you were the type to hit the books, you went into the college preparatory track, and if not, you headed straight into hospitality school. Every year, maybe three or four top students from our graduating class would end up heading off to San Francisco.

In my case, I had applied for two different majors, and I had to sit through an entrance exam that didn't even award points—it was strictly a pass-or-fail situation... and even then, quite a few people failed, including some who actually had incredibly high scores on their initial applications.

silentmason4 said:Do you know what his GPA was?

Well, it really all hinges on which major he actually applied for... because for the one he ultimately enrolled in, his score was 72. His highest single score for any one subject was 75, if you were wondering...

My dad ended up selecting a bunch of subjects for him—everything from chemistry and biology to physics, geography, and technical studies...
It was basically designed so there wouldn't be a single moment where he could just sit back, shrug his shoulders, and claim he didn't care because it wouldn't affect his enrollment status.
But, as luck would have it, he actually qualified for every single one of them. He even threw in a prep school as a sixth choice, even though it wasn't technically an option for him, just to see how much weight his application might carry...

Back in eighth grade, my entire class was convinced they were all going to become chemical technicians, yet when applications actually opened up, he completely changed his mind and relegated that path to just a fourth choice... I don't think even in sixth grade had the slightest inkling that high schools even offered specialized vocational tracks like that. 😁

My kid’s entrance exam was structured differently; it wasn't about accumulating points, but rather a simple pass/fail hurdle... Once that was cleared, they would compile a list based on their elementary school GPA, though quite a few students who had stellar academic records ended up getting cut because they tripped up on the entrance test, which actually gave those with slightly lower scores a fighting chance.

So, how are things looking according to the latest updates... I was wondering about you. A girl in my son’s class is currently waiting on her test results; she’s been dealing with these symptoms since early afternoon, though she was actually at school this past Wednesday. If the call comes through, how can one best reach you until we get everything sorted out?

We weren’t actually there to collect any specific information, though we did attend a parent meeting regarding high school enrollment at the local school... We were all gathered in the courtyard, sitting in those spaced-out chairs while wearing our masks

Robert Hernandez11 said:Where does it actually say this is a high school?🤔

Look—if we’re going to go down this rabbit hole, let's actually finish it.

@ nimbleranger17 - this isn't about your lecture or anyone else's ego—it's about the plain old fact that with current health protocols in schools, outsiders can barely set foot on campus unless there's an extreme exception....

(And it's definitely not about "resisting innovation" or someone being "lazy and careless," if you want to be so condescending about it...)

...but here we are, where a teacher is supposed to bring a whole group of people in to give kids some "super engaging interactive presentation"... in the middle of all this? It just doesn't add up.🤔

☕

It is a high school, plain and simple. And even if it weren't, I can't imagine which grade in elementary school they'd cover ordinal numbers like this, nor how anyone with at least a high school diploma—let alone a college degree—could possibly memorize something such as this on the fly...

So, I was just thinking about how some staff member over at a local high school is actually out there handling the curriculum for both the juniors and the seniors... 😛