but it was a small train wreck. Granted, it was only kindergarten, but it was discouraging. She already know how to read before entering kindergarten. When I went to parent teacher conferences at thanksgiving, they told me she was a little slow and maybe needed remedial classes. I told them I didn't think so, they said I might be in denial about her low intelligence. All the other kids were mostly through their alphabets, they told me, but my daughter had only learned 6 letters.
?! I told them she knew all the letters and could read, I had to have a meeting with the principal, who first tried to convince me that my kid had probably just memorized the story books I read to her and was faking it. She pulled her out of class, grabbed a random book off her shelf, and had my kid read it - which she did with no problem.
Even though it was self-paced, it was still not individualized. You couldn't "pass" a letter unless you traced it with your finger, did a bunch of other crap that was beneath her skill level. So she was still bored and just didn't do the work because she knew for her it had no value. So at the age of 5, I had to have a heart to heart talk with her about the need to just go through the motions to suck up, because the school was too rigid to let her just jump to her own level.
I was not happy that it was so "independent" that the teacher never caught on in 3 months that my kid was reading several grades above her age, not several years below.
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