A Russell Sprout and Tale of Four Schools: Part I.

Thank you all for your supportive comments following my last post. I really appreciate this aspect of the blogosphere there just seem to be so many great people out there.

This post was prompted by DJ Kirkby's comment to my previous post. It is a rather long post so I have elected to break it into two parts.

Meet Lu, the baby of our family.
We have three girls: E who is 23; Io who is just about to turn 20;
Lu at 16 is a full seven and a half years younger than E.

Lu is simultaneously a delight and a total handful. All our girls are very intelligent, each of our three has a very different worldview and vastly different strengths.

E is a social being, her first word wasn’t ‘mum’ or ‘dad’, rather it was ‘hello’. E can walk into a room full of strangers and in ten minutes all of them will be her friends.

Language is Io’s skill, I would never dream of trying to debate anything with her she would simply tie me in knots. She also has an amazing gift when it comes to drawing and painting.

Lu prefers much more structured things. She loves Maths and Science and until recently, her driving passion was competition chess. Amazingly, Lu has played chess since she was two years old. I was teaching a ten year old E to play when this tiny face peered over the edge of the table and said, ‘Can I play too?’
Of course being an indulgent dad I gave her a go. To my surprise Lu nut only understood but actually learnt to play.

By the time she was 3, Lu was beating her then 11 year old sister. Not surprisingly E quickly lost interest in the sport. Lu joined her first chess club when she went to primary (elementary) school, not the school club but the local adult chess club. Soon after she had us travelling all around the country for tournament play. She represented Oz as under 12 female in the World Youth Championships and she held the State Women’s Title at 12.

Now I don’t want to give the impression she is only good at very structured things like maths and chess. Like many bright kids Lu has an interest in all sorts of other pursuits: singing, music, sport, reading, animals, etc. etc.

Our two older girls found school easy. A piece of pie really, achieving everything they wanted and more. They did what they had to do in class and then cruised.

In theory, Lu should have found school easy, as easy as her sisters found it.

No such luck. To be fair to the schools Lu’s first year of school was ok. She was occupied with things like learning to read (which we had deliberately not taught her, E went to school already reading and was a bit bored in Year 1).

Once Lu had managed the basics like reading she rapidly became bored. After that things went down hill – quickly.
Oz has a good public education system, but we have always wanted a bit more for our girls and have elected to pay (usually more than we could really afford) for private schools. The girls usually got scholarships because they were clever and at one we paid half fees because I worked for a church organization (there are some perks working for charities).

So, because we had our kids at good schools, with good resources and (in theory) the capacity for structuring individual programs for kids, we went to the teachers. We repeatedly explained what the problem was. Repeatedly asked for an individual education plan (IEP). This had mixed results, in primary school they ranged from really disastrous; to just bad.

At the disastrous end of the spectrum, Lu’s grade three teacher was positively threatened by the concept that there might be a kid in his class who was smarter than him; it just got a whole lot worse when she beat him at the school chess club. Five times. In a row.

At the simply bad end we had teachers who meant well, and who coped well with bright kids; but who just didn’t get that they were dealing with a kid outside the box. They’d try giving Lu ‘extension’ work which simply meant more of the same. Another tack they tried was to get Lu to help the slower kids in class with their work. This simply frustrated Lu to tears, she couldn’t understand that anyone could struggle with something like maths.

By the time Lu finished primary school she was totally disengaged from education. In some ways she was her own worst enemy, when she was bored (which was always) she simply turned off: she refused to complete assignments; she wouldn’t finish class work. Her attitude was something along the lines of, ‘I showed you the first time that I understood the concept. Surely it is a waste of my time and yours to do it over and over.’

Lu’s school tried stick, detentions and loss of privileges, but for a strong minded person who already hated the system they became something to fight against. They tried carrot, prizes for first in the class etc. Lu’s response was usually something like: ‘but I would have to do all that boring stuff’; or ‘I get paid cash for beating adults at chess tournaments, why would I bother?’