Although my 8-year-old son likes his teacher, he is frequently bored at school. He attends a high quality suburban public school in the United States. He has a lot of traits in common with LessWrong readers, and we would like advice for what he can do to counter his boredom. Many of you must have found grade school more or less tedious. What were your coping strategies?
Do what Harry's dad in HPMOR does: hire local grad students to be homeschool tutors. I do this for my 6 year old and 9 year old, and it is awesome. We parents do very high-level curriculum, taking about half an hour each week, and the tutors and kids do the rest. Teach at the kids' pace, choose material and progressions that make sense to you (or make sense to him), and have constant contact with teachers. I've found $20/hour is an attractive wage for most PhD students, and their expertise means that the barrage of "why?" questions the kids ask can actually be answered, often with current research findings. We've found we can cover 2 to 4 times the material in public school curriculum, and school is from 9 to 2. Also, you can do reasonable things like teach radians before degrees, graphing and functions along with each operation, foreign languages with native speakers, and Greek and Roman roots starting in kindergarten.
If you wouldn't mind, please share either your curricula or the method used to design it - whichever is most generally applicable.
We make it up as we go along :)
Basically my wife and I ask ourselves "What is the next thing to learn, or what do the kids need to review?" Our very broad curriculum for math is operations in order, from addition to exponents and logarithms, with learning and graphing functions that use that operation at the same time. So, when they learn addition they learn linear functions and line graphing, curves when they learn exponents, etc. Then fractions and decimals, because you need to understand fractions to understand the unit circle, which is the basis for angles and therefore geometry and trig. Reading is easiest: make them read and discuss harder books than they read last week. Writing is similarly straightforward, though there we reach rhetorical techniques when we do persuasive writing, meter when we write poetry, etc. History we are doing linearly, and trying emphasize the history of technological progression and cultural progression over dates and names. For example, kids should know what the difference between neolithic and paleolithic societies is, or what the limitations of bronze tooling are. We also do a lot of timelines, so the kids know about the different sta...
On the subject of gifted children, don't praise kids for being smart. Praise them for working hard or for participating in activities that will make them smarter, but not for being, intrinsically, smart.
Broadly, don't praise people for things that they couldn't have done differently. All it'll do is increase the importance that they assign to a trait that is out of their control. That makes them weaker, not stronger.
This applies to physical appearance as well, for instance.
It's possible to make a mistake in both ways. I wish someone told me in my childhood: "Viliam, some things you are interested in are simply too complex for an average person to understand and care about. To discuss them with someone, you must first find sufficiently intelligent people."
My parents never gave me information of this kind, probably believing that it would be morally bad for me to have it. So I spent many years believing that I am too weird and no one can understand me; that my only way to interact with people is to meet them at their turf, never going to mine. (And that social skills consist mostly of pretending to be like other people, and denying what is unique about me.) I did not have a good explanation for this asymetry.
And then (a dramatic exaggeration) I found LessWrong, and I realized there are other people like me on this planet. Then I went to a CFAR seminar and met them in person, so now I also feel on the emotional level they are real.
Sometimes working hard is not an answer, for example when you are a hard-working member in a team of idiots, and it's a job you can't manage all alone. The only solution is to find another team; but to do that you have to believe that different teams are possible, that not all people are the same.
So to simplify - explaining the state of the world is fine, but there's a difference between that and praising someone for it.
Teach him to use Anki. If I would have had started to learn via anki when I was 8-year-old I would have so much knowledge in my head.
I pulled the erasers out of my pencils, drew faces on them, sometimes made very tiny costumes, built sets out of pipecleaners, and staged small, mythology-influenced plays in my desk. (in 3rd grade, we had the kind that were open on the side).
Um, also reading.
I read books during school. Looking back, this seems like it was a strongly suboptimal use of my time, because most of the books I read were fiction.
I think that homeschooling or tutoring are the strongest options, followed by private school. Around 12ish I went to CTY, which teaches classes at college speed, and felt that was almost as fast as I would have liked, which was worlds better than normal. They appear to have online classes now.
He's interested in computers and games- it might be worthwhile to focus 4 or so hours of his day into programming. Minecraft is moddable; there are similar games that focus on creating systems of things that do things. (Perhaps he would enjoy Spacechem? Not as "mess with the code" as I would like, but may at least be fun to think about.) (Someone to consider for inspiration: L Peter Deutsch.)
I strongly recommend against putting a gifted child in a school where they aren't within a level of the median student. The losses involved from going too slow are just too huge, and basically everything that school can do can be gotten more cheaply elsewhere. (The primary argument that everyone trots out- 'socializing' children- seems like it has a...
Is it that unproductive to read a lot of fiction? I read extremely quickly and still retain a lot of what I read, and this seems to be quite a useful skill, and I've always assumed that one of the reasons I have this skill is because I read so much as a child. Admittedly, natural talent probably also plays a role, but surely the tremendous amount of practice helped a lot. And most of what I read as a child was fiction. Perhaps it would have been even more productive to read more non-fiction, but I'm not certain of that, and even if that were the case I'd have thought calling it "strongly" suboptimal was a little, well, strong.
I have the same skill and have found it's a bit of a mixed blessing -- because when reading tough technical stuff my brain still wants to process it at the same very high speed, which needs I constantly need to pay attention and keep my reading rate down because otherwise my eyes fly across the page and I take nothing in. Since a large fraction of what adult-me wants to read is tough technical stuff, superfast novel-reading isn't necessarily a great trade for this.
Jeez just saw you are an econ prof at Smith. Home school or get him in a better private school. You can be assigning your own reading to him and discussing it with him. You can do a little studying of home schooling and write econ papers about it. You can have a graduate seminar in which you bring in your 8 year old and each graduate student has to do something clever to advance his education as their term project. OK, that last one is pushing it.
You know you are smart and you know what you are interested in. Which means you know what it is like to be interested in something.
If he was reading when he was 1 and is as smart as he seems, you risk close to nothing taking him out of school now and trying home schooling. Always shove him back in next Sept. Indeed, you could probably re-enroll him at any time under current law.
Home school or get him in a better private school.
Me, I'm so completely jealous of kids now. They have a chance to be free of the government labor indoctrination camps known as public school. My parents bought me an encyclopedia and took me to the public library. That was living large back then.
Now it's Khan Academy and the Web. Your son is free to achieve and learn at his own pace, on the subjects that interest him, with Khan Academy providing yard sticks of progress to his achievement versus his age cohort and versus a corpus of knowledge. I'm trying to figure out how to turn my life into a video game where I get points for achievement, while Khan has already done that for kids.
Sounds like your kid is bright. Public school is child abuse for a bright kid. He will learn all the wrong lessons, things that will hamstring him for the rest of his life. He'll learn that he doesn't have to work. He'll learn that he can beat his peers while being a lazy jerk off. He'll learn that "being smart" is the standard of status, not achievement.
And he'll fail to learn how to drive himself. Fail to learn how to overcome setbacks. Fail to learn how to discipline himself.
Sounds lik...
This might be a viable option, but I'll point out that homeschooling a kid is a major long term time investment, and just because one is qualified to do it doesn't mean that one has enough time or mental energy for the task.
school... an important resource learning social skills.
Pulling him out of school is a great way to help him learn social skills.
Did you know that at school, during 80% of the time, kids are punished if they socialize?
Meanwhile, in the world outside the walls, there are many great kids of different ages as well as adults with whom to socialize, with no fear of punishment.
I'm puzzled why people think putting a bunch of unsocialized children in a pile will turn them into civilized adults.
Nobody else read Lord of the Flies?
Children learn social skills from those who have them, not by getting together and trying to reinvent civilization when they're 8 years old.
I'm puzzled why people think putting a bunch of unsocialized children in a pile will turn them into civilized adults.
The impression I have of public schools (at least the good ones) is that younger children are pretty closely supervised, and that much of what elementary teachers do all day is say "No Johnny, that wasn't nice, apologize to Suzy", or "Suzy, you need to share the scissors with Tommy."
The children are practicing social skills with each other, but it's a structured environment with adult supervision, and with adults who are specifically trained and tasked to help improve the children's social skills and emotional maturity.
An elementary school classroom that feels like Lord of the Flies, socially, is a very badly run classroom.
"Being punched by bullies" was one of the more common social interactions I had during my three years of middle school.
My suggestion, if that ever becomes the problem, would be to have the victim carry a concealed tape recorder and get the entire (verbal) portion on tape, including as much of a narration of the events as possible ("Why are you blocking me from going down this hallway?"). Armed with that recording, the guardian needs to confront the school officials and demand that effective measures be taken, or the media will become involved.
In my experience, the school administration either ignored stronger evidence or took actions which were ineffective; I never actually involved criminal court, although I should have, but I expect that they will decline to prosecute as well. The media, however, would love something like such a recording, combined with a "think of the children" banner. Threatening the administration with such a fate should be enough motivation to make them stop looking like they are looking for a solution and start looking for a solution; in addition, they might accept reasonable suggestions.
Again, I don't think that's what's happening in the OP, but I think it's important enough that anybody who has that kind of problem find it wherever they search; the low probability that my target audience is ever going to see this particular post is accounted for.
We didn't have a political thread on LW for a long time, did we? Would be a more appropriate place for this discussion. On one hand, I do not want to ignore your question, on the other hand, I have no desire to make this a long off-topic thread. Unfortunately, political topics are usually heavily mindkilling, they have thousands of connotations, so unless one writes a full book about the topic, there are many ways to misinterpret their answer.
Here are a few things that would deserve a longer discussion, but I don't want to have all of those discussions right here and right now:
1) Just because a word is used, even if it has its page on wikipedia, does not mean the concept is well-defined. To quote from the wikipedia page: "there is disagreement over what defines a rape culture and to what degree a given society meets the criteria to be considered a rape culture". What I am trying to say is that I agree that rape is bad, and I also agree that if you write a victim's report on a web page, you will find many comments blaming the victim. I agree with this completely. The part that I don't know (and wikipedia says there is no consensus even among people who use the word frequen...
Honestly, my "strategy" was "make hilarious amounts of trouble, eventually get sent to a private school where I was actually challenged."
Between the lack of challenge and the lack of socialization (I do hope he has friends, but if he doesn't he's going to have social problems for a long time (generalizing from my one example)), moving to a private school was the best thing that happened to me.
This seems like a story of many gifted children. I was a teacher at a school for gifted children, and a frequent story of how the parents discovered their children were gifted was something like this:
"The child was originally in a school for muggles which was so boring the child couldn't focus on lessons, and started making trouble. Teachers suspected the child cannot pay attention because of mental retardation (!!!) and sent the child to a psychologist. The psychologist gave the child an IQ test, concluded that it's actually Mensa-level smart, and told it to parents, who then used google or some other source to find the school for the gifted children."
Another random data point: Spending hours listening to boring stuff is something I cannot do even today, as an adult. Every meeting feels like a torture. Or if the meeting is longer than an hour, I sometimes fall asleep, which caused some trouble in one of my previous jobs (the managers insisted on having 90-minutes meetings every month, where they spent the first hour repeating the very same basic company strategy, only at the end getting to the new stuff). A child is expected to do similar stuff for 6 or more hours a day. I would go insane. Of course the usual coping strategy is to do something else to keep yourself awake, the main difference being what specific things one chooses to do.
I'd add another call for caution with this approach. This got longer than I meant; the short version is: beware of getting in to an arms race with smart people, particularly ones you love, because one or other of you will lose.
A bright child will be able to out-manoeuvre you in areas where they are motivated and you are not. If not now, soon. Think about it: there will already be things they are better at than you. (Some of those games, for instance.) Better not to rely long-term on a strategy that only works if you are able to continue to out-think them.
To spell it out, the risk is motivating him to avoid you learning about his behaviour, rather than motivating him to avoid the behaviour.
That was my experience as a child. Between about 11 and 16, I hung out with a bunch of troublemakers, but was regularly able to evade almost all the negative authority-imposed consequences their actions led to, largely by being much better at subterfuge than the others in the group. (The others in the group were among the least bright in the cohort.) My parents were both smart - but I knew more about what I was up to than they did, and was much more motivated in practice to avoid punishment than ...
My counter strategy for him trying to do this: no video games!
This strategy seems optimal for achieving the goal of maintaining your personal social dominance and in signalling your affiliation with the authority figures that the child chooses to defect against. Depending on just how gifted and resourceful the child is it may or may not result in the child optimising around you in the same way that they would optimise around any other part of the problem.
Yyyyyeahhh...
Okay, so. I really can't say very much, between Generalizing From One Example and not knowing anything about specific circumstances.
I am going to say that there exists a certain kind of intelligent child who will see what you are doing, resent you for it, and initiate a downward spiral that leads to a rather unpleasant relationship going into adulthood.
Not saying that this is an example, but ... be a little careful.
When I was in the third grade in suburban Massachusetts, I was bored in class. Somehow it was arranged that an MIT student (can't remember if grad or undergrad) would come chat with me periodically, I think for an hour or two a week. This was wonderful and he suggested all sorts of books and suchlike and explained what a derivative was.
I gather you're in the Pioneer valley. You might see if any of the college students around would like to spend time interacting with your young'n.
I drew a lot. My friends were always telling me what to draw. I still think very visually, and it feels very useful. Related to this I also learned the important skills of pretending to listen and hiding what I'm actually doing.
I think the common cause of boredom among bright students in public school might be that the class performs drills on skills which the student in question has already mastered.
Are you already ambidextrous? On assignments that are simply repeating the same content, try doing the work with your off-hand. For repetitive lectures, try taking notes with your off-hand.
Unconventional advice for an 8 year old. Distinct from advice for a parent.
Study humans and take notes on their behavior, because when you are older it may be hard to understand what it was like to be a kid.
Recognize strengths in others that surprise you. One of the ones that eluded this 31 year-old for 29 years is that interest in a subject is a variable that you are capable of controlling, and helps a lot with being good at a subject.
Teach others, and give others an opportunity to teach, because that is a social skill that will provide value in the setti...
This seems obvious but no one said it so i will:
Skip ahead some grades? (only for the classes he's bored in).
There's the Davidson Academy.
If he hasn't learned algebra yet, get him DragonBox; I'd be curious to learn whether he prefers explicit instruction.
I'll brainstorm suggestions, then.
Ask him if there's a language he'd like to learn. If there is, provide him materials to learn the basics (grammar, alphabet, fundamentals) and promise to send him to a language school that immerses you for x months during a break.
Ask him if he'd like tutored instruction in a subject; if he would, then, as others suggest, enslave a grad student.
Gift him a "Learn X the Hard Way" book. Alternatives include Real Python; I don't know what else they include.
Ask him if he has any life goals. If they are scientific in origin, take the goals seriously, lay out some milestones that might help in achieving them, and utilise Davidson's resources for all they're worth (including people).
Ask if he'd like to learn an instrument and/or how to sing, with instruction in music theory being another option. Accommodate.
Ask if he'd like to learn a martial art, and if he has any preferences. You could ask him this after taking him to a demonstration of the Shaolin Monks. If he has an interest in oriental languages, instruction in the language he's learning offers a practical immersive environment.
Have family writing competitions - everyone w
I remember my teacher would give me special assignments. Everyone in the class would have to turn in small book reports to showcase our reading and writing skills, but my teacher would assign me more challenging (and interesting!) books, both fiction and nonfiction. He would ask me to answer more challenging and complex questions in my reports. This probably depends on the personality of his teacher, but s/he might have taught children like your son before, and have some ideas for keeping him engaged.
For me, reading was the best coping strategy, with ...
I also went to a suburban public school. I coped with the boredom by reading.
My boredom turned into frustration, though. Boredom still allowed me the freedom to learn more advanced material, whereas frustration turned school into a terrible experience.
If your son expresses any interest in skipping grades, do it sooner, rather than later.
Back in that grade I got my hands on a Math book for a higher grade, and studied that whenever I had nothing better to do. By the time I started high school I was several years ahead in that subject. I'd recommend trying it, but it is a bit of a mixed blessing; on one hand its something productive to do, but on the other it only means he'd be more bored in later math classes.
It also depends a lot on the school and the teacher. If the teacher is one of those who actually cares about helping children, he or she may have some suggestions to offer, and having the teacher on board with the child doing something a little different in classes were he is ahead makes it a lot easier.
I used to read a lot in class, and the teachers didn't care because they were focused on teaching students that needed more help. I had a calculator I played with, and found things like 1111^2 = 1234321, and tried to understand these patterns. I discovered the Collatz Conjecture this way, began to learn about exponential functions, etc.
I also learned to draw probability trees from an explanation of the Monty Hall problem I read once, and I think learning that at a young age helped Bayesianism feel intuitive later on, and it was a fun thing to learn.
Second the Anki recommendation, but I'm not sure it's the most fun thing.
Writing fiction was something I enjoyed too, and improved my communication skills.
My parents stopped me from skipping a grade, and apart from a few math tricks, we didn't work on additional material at home. I fell into a trap of "minimum effort for maximum grade," and got really good at guessing the teacher's password. The story didn't change until graduate school, when I was unable to meet the minimum requirements without working, and that eventually led me to seek out fun challenges on my own.
I now have a young son of my own, and will not make the same mistake. I'm going to make sure he expects to fail sometimes, and that I praise his efforts to go beyond what's required. No idea if it will work.
Books, books, books (judiciously chosen, of course). Let him have his own all-you-can-read buffet at home.
I didn't get into a top-tier school until late high school, and it cost me dearly in lost opportunities later on. However you decide to handle your son's education, keep him challenged for as long as you can. If you are not into home-schooling (it is quite taxing on a parent), consider hiring a tutor or two. Grad students are cheap and would frequently give a discount or even do it for free for the sheer enjoyment of talking to a smart kid for a change.
Is there any option to make him "jump" to next year ? That's what I did in primary school, when I was getting too bored, my parents and teacher just "jumped" me to the next year, and it worked quite well.
Edit : well it has a lot of pros and some cons, if you care I can elaborate, but it's evidence from an individual case which isn't very reliable so...
I was lucky, was put into a class that corresponded to about the top 2% of a suburban population, probably about as filtering as the 30 or so best colleges. Put in that class starting in 3rd grade. It was such that I actually did OK in 3rd, had a VERY hard time in 4th grade (too hard, too much work), but emerged in 5th grade as in the top 25% or so of this very filtered class.
Many of my friends homeschool, more at younger ages than older. Often high schools have enough stratification in classes offered that a smart kid can merge back in taking APs and so on.
Resources for home schooling have never been better than they are now.
Well, we're still waiting on that proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.
Seriously however, how about introducing him to the Collatz Conjecture? Something to mull over when the vanilla work is finished. And given his interests, he'll no doubt think of multiple ways of attacking the problem. I saw chess, computers and videogames listed as interests, so he perhaps he could try writing a chess engine from scratch. Design the algorithms in class and code them at home.
These suggestions might be a little advanced for eight years old, but I expect the boredom problem will get worse over time.
While he doesn't have a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, after reading your comment he immediately told me what the Collatz Conjecture was.
Encourage creative projects, which build skill and accomplishment, and create opportunities to meet people who share common interests.
I hated school when I was 8. But I loved it whenever we traveled for a vacation. Meeting new people, seeing new things, eating new food, dropping out of my regular social circle... I enjoyed all of that the most in any given year. So, travel a lot. Museums and tourists spots of course. But also go to out of the way places. Visit new countries, if you can afford it. Maybe poorer countries as well, with significantly different lifestyles. Maybe show him religious places (I'm sure you're not religious) or take him on a pilgrimage just to see how much religion...
Read.
Read everything, even if you don't understand it. Read the words and symbols until that item is boring, them read another. At this stage, it barely even matters what you are reading. There is no teacher that can show you everything that there is to know, but strong reading skills will help you discover anything.
When I got to 5th grade, my parents homeschooled me, because I got into trouble all the time at school, complained loudly all the time about how much I hated it, and all my teachers would tell my parents "That kid just really doesn't like school." I didn't have nearly the dedication to teach myself, and my parents could only devote so much time to teaching me, but the standards to which the school district held me were ridiculously low. When I resumed normal schooling in 9th grade, the only subject I was behind in was the formal study of grammar...
I became a trouble-maker. By the fifth grade I was doing advanced math self-study in a corner and hanging out with the class hoodlum, smoking pot at recess. The teachers feared me because I saw through their constructs. I was easily the best speller in school, but I used to intentionally spell words wrong in spelling bees just to spite them. I guess I've always been a villain.
My coping strategy was to cause large amounts of disruptive trouble, generally go my own way and not pay attention, and then when I learned to read in grade 5, read books about physics and whatnot (I wish I'd found better books).
The best thing that could have happened to me at that age was a good mentor to build stuff with me and point out what I didn't know, a wider variety of better books, and a computer programming environment.
I guess the weakness of the above is that it doesn't build skill. Foundational skills and knowledge (socializing, reading, writi...
Definitely a time commitment. I suggest it on the theory that smarter students tend to educate themselves, and what the public school is doing is nearly a complete waste with a kid like this. So the homeschooler who achieves a better result than the public school in only a few hours of effort a week is way ahead of the game. The homeschooler may be aware that he could do so much more if he spent more time, but that way lies useless guilt. Put a small amount of work in as the schooler, and if that doesn't translate into enough effort on the part of the schooled so that the net outcome is ahead of what was going to happen in the gigantically mismatched public school, you can switch the kid back in.
If the kid has been reading, as reported in OP, since he was 1, then it is not a bad guess that he is a good candidate to teach himself other things a child is expected to learn. I am assuming he was not reading at 1 because of an intensive teaching effort, that he more or less picked it up on his own with minimal exposure from "teachers."
It strikes me that very little has been said about the costs to the parents of homeschooling.
Even if homeschoolers only spend a few hours a week teaching their children (and that assumes the children are motivated enough to teach themselves the rest), they still have to make sure someone is in the house with the children all the time, which requires either career sacrifices (unless they can work from home), or probably more money than private school would cost (childminders are very expensive).
Also, I'm not convinced that even the average gifted child woul... (read more)