“Get your hands on a more advanced text” has worked fantastically in my life.
I ripped through self-directed math workbooks during elementary school and used math textbooks during summers. By the time I was 8 they just had me go to an upper grade’s classroom for that subject; later I’d get a ride to a nearby middle school; likewise for taking high school math classes in middle school and college math classes in high school. If I’d just had to suffer through reruns of everything I’d already learned it might have been awful, but the combination of me studying ahead and my father working the public schools’ bureaucracy was invaluable. I probably wasn’t emotionally ready to skip a grade entirely, but thanks to a school system that was relatively conducive to individualized learning I still managed to skip ahead in the subjects I was best at.
And for that matter, the one time I did have to relearn the same thing twice, that worked out pretty well too. One of my favorite high school teachers knew I was doing college-level math and had watched me excel in her chemistry class, so when I subsequently got assigned to her physics class she just gave me her old college textbook and let me study on my own. This basically saved my scholarship when I finally got to college. My “sign up for the hardest classes I can get into” strategy didn’t work as well at an elite private college as it had at a slightly-above-average public high school, and earning an easy A+ in an accelerated physics class kept my overall GPA from dropping below 3.0 while I struggled to adjust to the sudden necessity of actually studying and working hard to learn.
“Get your hands on a more advanced text” has worked fantastically in my life.
I ripped through self-directed math workbooks during elementary school and used math textbooks during summers. By the time I was 8 they just had me go to an upper grade’s classroom for that subject; later I’d get a ride to a nearby middle school; likewise for taking high school math classes in middle school and college math classes in high school. If I’d just had to suffer through reruns of everything I’d already learned it might have been awful, but the combination of me studying ahead and my father working the public schools’ bureaucracy was invaluable. I probably wasn’t emotionally ready to skip a grade entirely, but thanks to a school system that was relatively conducive to individualized learning I still managed to skip ahead in the subjects I was best at.
And for that matter, the one time I did have to relearn the same thing twice, that worked out pretty well too. One of my favorite high school teachers knew I was doing college-level math and had watched me excel in her chemistry class, so when I subsequently got assigned to her physics class she just gave me her old college textbook and let me study on my own. This basically saved my scholarship when I finally got to college. My “sign up for the hardest classes I can get into” strategy didn’t work as well at an elite private college as it had at a slightly-above-average public high school, and earning an easy A+ in an accelerated physics class kept my overall GPA from dropping below 3.0 while I struggled to adjust to the sudden necessity of actually studying and working hard to learn.