Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Space and Time

My niece was riding in the car with my grand-nephew when the announcement was made that gravity waves had been detected. I'll tell it in her words.

"I told Michael the news, and after pausing a moment to take it in, he said excitedly, "so that means space and time are OBJECTS!""

Objects that can be manipulated, twisted, deformed, and even perhaps torn.

He's 8 years old and home schooled. I think this kid needs to find a Physics mentor.

Marosz is available, he is passionate. Yeah okay there is that.

Hey it's better than me, I don't teach people they believe weird stuff

Seriously however there are plenty of good physics tutors out there and if the home school teacher is weak in that area they probably do need to supplement it.

One of the advantages of home schooling is that you can adapt the teaching to the needs or abilities of the individual student. So if you have a chance like that you can go ahead and start him working on physics, more than you can in public schooling where they have to work with big bunches of kids who all have different needs/abilities.

One of the problems of home schooling is that figuring out how to meet the special needs/abilities is difficult, to say the least. The average parent just doesn't have the training or knowledge to go off in different directions. There is a lot of material for home schooling available but I don't know that there is a lot of specialized information for different requirements. In fact most parents are poorly equipped to just teach basic school work. It takes a lot of work to keep up with where your kids are and where they need to be going.

So unless you really want to work hard to keep ahead of your kids, and have time to do it public school is probably the best you can do. It is a long way from perfect, but at least they do their best to get the basics into the students.

Bill Gill

My niece works HARD at keeping ahead of her kids, and she is gifted as well. There are some "canned" curricula out there but her kids have devoured those and need more, more advanced levels at early ages Or individual mentoring by the sort of person who can patiently wait while they work through the fallacies to the meat of modern physics. Not someone like Orac, who takes a whip cord and a chain saw to any thing he sees as fallacy without considering the steps to that fallacy and the ways around it.

It sounds like your niece is a really great parent. And it sounds like she has run into some of the same road blocks that others have run into in trying to keep up with exceptional kids.

I don't have any great advice for her. I'm afraid she will just have to keep plugging away at it. I suspect that there are very few private schools that could do what she is trying to do. Public schools are really unable to do much. They are overwhelmed just trying to stay ahead of the needs of all the 'ordinary' students.

There are no telling how many extraordinary students out there who just don't get the recognition and teaching that they need to excel. And of course those kids are extraordinary in so many different ways that meeting the needs of each one is impossible in a school setting and very few parents are equipped to provide the needed support. And of course there is the time required to fit it in with all the other parts of life.

Bill Gill