>Thank you for sharing that. After the experience of my niece and myself, I decided to keep Haley in highschool despite the school and counselors recommendations. She has a small group of friends and her best friend that she has been close to since the 5th grade. They plan on attending the same college. That may or may not happen (probably not), but I felt the social growth they experience in high school was just as important as her academic growth. I hope I made the right decision. Only time will tell.

Fortunately, for my boys, schools have a lot more options for gifted kids now. We worked pretty hard to keep them challenged and it seems to have worked.

Nonetheless, the most telling comment I've heard from them came from Nathaniel. Despite being a straight A student all the way through, he never really liked school. It was what he did so that they'd let him do the stuff he really wanted to do (music, theater, student government).

Someone asked him how he liked college and he said he loved it because it was like the electives in high school. It wasn't that he was taking easy courses, but that he got to choose what to take according to his interests. He also landed in a place that's really good for him. Rather than pre-registering for courses and then having to go through a drop-add process, Yale uses a two-week "shopping" period at the beginning of the semester. You go to whatever courses you're interested in and by the end of the two weeks, you register for the ones you want to keep. Perfect for Nathaniel, where who's teaching and how a course is taught matters more than the content.

Tamar