The Sylvan Learning Center

i dont know exactly as i have no kids but i've heard from people in the gym that its expensive but worth every penny. it seems like a good program.

 

My mom teaches at a Sylvan in Amarillo. She has 11 years teaching experience, and is doing this as a part-time gig in the summer. Alot of good teachers are at Sylvan. I could ask her some questions if you would like. Im pretty sure they operate under the same guidelines in Houston.

 

I want to throw a bit of caution your way if I might.

I was tested at the end of the 3rd grade as well and scored in the administrator's words "the highest we have seen in years". I was placed into an accelerated program apart from my normal friends. I could handle the work without a problem but my old friends said I was a brainiac or a nerd and I quickly started skipping school. Yes, in the 4th grade. My mom pulled me out of the program.

Tested again after 6th grade in a different school. Same thing "highest we have seen in years". By then my mother had remarried and my step dad was taking a real interest in us. The school said that I could spend the summer at Duke University between the 6th and 7th grade. The school put a ton of pressure on me to go and represent the school. I turned it down.

From then on I PURPOSELY got questions wrong on standardized tests so that they would leave me alone. I really stopped trying in high school.

Bottom line, Don't put too much presssure on the kid.

 

don't you mean:

"Bottom line, I could have been a brain surgeon or rocket scientist but because i never listened to Sylvan Learning Centre I spend the majority of my day on an internet message board."




but seriously, it helped my older brother out a lot in high school...but i've never been there.

 

Do what my father would do: go to the school and raise hell and give them **** until they concede to let your kid into G&T. They are all "standardized" and everything, but I bet they'd bend the rules just to get a jerk to leave them alone. You may want to get Fatty FatBastard to come with you.

My brother and I were both born in October, just after public school's age cut-off. They told my mother my brother would have to wait another year before entering, which she meekly accepted. He was one of the oldest's kids in his class and the curriculum wasn't advanced enough for him after that. So, when they tried to tell her the same thing for me, she wouldn't have it and insisted on having me start young until they caved.

 

If I remember right, the GT program just gets you put into all honors classes automatically. Can't you just put him into the classes individually?

 

Just wanted to toss my hat in on G/T stuff. Just like Mulder, I was in all the G/T classes in school since they tested us in third grade. I can tell you that I never gained anything of any use in these classes. In my experience, neither the schools nor the teachers had any idea what should constitute a "gifted and talented" (r****ded name, btw) curriculum, so essentially they just made them up as they went along. The worst teachers really came up with some bizarre ****, and a lot of it was geared to force us into a highly competitive environment with one another. It had nothing to do with learning and everything to do with keeping us busy and testing us so the school district could trot out some numbers every time they got in a jam.

I encountered some of the most righteous assholes I've ever met, both students and teachers, in the G/T program. There were a couple here and there who were great, but I can tell you that no child of mine will ever be in G/T. Let me assure you that this stuff definitely DOES NOT prepare your kid for the next level any better than "normal" classes. What it will do is INCREASE teachers' control over what and how he learns.

It was a very confusing experience for me. I can say for certain that I fared no better at all in high school or college than did my friends who were not in G/T, and I hated the coursework, so I gained nothing. Your son will begin to take an interest in school when he gets older and is given more choices- maybe he'll discover he really loves debate or playing the bass drum in band. The G/T program has done far more for parents' egos than it ever has for any child.

edit: Crums is right- G/T placement will have no effect on whether or not your kid is placed in honors classes later on down the road.

 

My sons were also a point or 2 shy of the gifted class. My daughter made it. I can say that our experience has been that I'm more impressed with the normal class than the gifted class. The normal class is more structured and straight forward, while the gifted class has more "freedom". Sometimes that "freedom" puts them at a disadvantage in tests.

I can't speak for Sylvia since I don't have any person experience there, but if you're happy with your school teachers, I'd let them do the teaching.

But the one thing I would do is let your child(ren) take the ACTs or SATs each year starting around 6/7/8th grade. That gets them more exposure to the test that will grant them placement into the best schools. It's like anything else, practice makes perfect.

 

I was GT - we called it Goofy and Tortured.

My take on it, unless it qualifies your kid to go to a magnet school, then it really isn't that big of a deal. I'm not really sure what perks a kid gets in the third grade. My parents chose not to send me to a magnet school, and the kids that came out of the magnet school seemed to be slightly better students in Jr. High. But I grew up in a small town, so it may be different in your school district.

As a once smart kid who is now a law student, I would focus on teaching him to be a good and disciplined student early. Gifted children tend to get bored with school, and finding a way to reward your child's hard work may benefit him the most in the long run.

As far as honors classes go in Jr. High and High School, depending on the school district, most regular level classes are a warzone. The teachers are evaluated on how many students pass standardized tests and how many students pass the course. Challenging the students is not a priority, due to the way public education is set up. If your kid can pass in an honors class, you're not doing him any good by putting him in with "regular" students.

 

Sorry some of you had bad experiences in GT programs. It just depends what your school offers. In my case, it felt like it saved my life.

I was pretty advanced at a young age (runs in my family; we do well early and hit a wall later). Maybe I shouldn't have done all that showing off in nursery school ("sorry, I forgot to bring anything for Show and Tell, but I can do a trick for you. Bring me any book, anything, and I'll read it to you"). They skipped me one grade already and would have skipped me more, but my parents knew that would have been too hard socially.

In first grade, I would stop in the middle of tests because I had been doing well but got bored/ didn't see the point in doing busy work. That was in a small town without a GT program, but they gave me special challenge activities to work on if/when I finished the other stuff.

When we moved to the big city, I was tested and was well over the minimum needed to get into GT. (ironically, one of the regular classroom teachers was convinced I was r****ded later and tried to tell my parents that... it was mainly because I wouldn't do what she said. No, I understood her perfectly well, I just didn't see why I should do some of that stuff. No one thought, at the time, to ask me about it.) Classroom work was boring and I would often sneak off behind the bookcase to read whatever was lying around.

Our GT program was held twice a week for each group. It gave me something to look forward to and an incentive to behave (so they wouldn't punish me by making me miss it). We went to a special room with a different teacher and did activities like "Brainteasers", "Brainstorm", "Values Clarification", and some others. We had units on different subjects that would last several weeks and usually at the end we had a field trip that got us involved in it. For instance, the one on "caves" - we got in small groups to see how many "words that have to do with caves that start with C" we could come up with in a certain amount of time, we got by ourselves to design "a menu for a cave restaurant", I think there was some education and looking up of information (I still remember finding out about the different species of bats), and at the end we went to see some sort of actual tourist cave.

I'm sharing all this because it was really a neat experience for us as kids. The creative activities especially, because we got to use our own imaginations and not just fill in the blanks in some rigid assignment. (There were puzzles too, where you were challenged to get the right answer, but they were interesting and motivating, and we weren't being graded.) The Values activities were more of a group discussion except that the teacher lets everyone speak about why they agree or disagree with something; no one point of view was advocated over the others, and we were taught to respect everyone. This was a good model for what a GT program ought to be; not just more classwork (we went back to our rooms to take care of that, and were supposed to take home whatever we had missed), but extra stuff. I wish more children had this opportunity.

As for high school - agree with bejezuz. My school was half magnet and half regular; all my classes were either Honors or had a lot of the Honors kids in them, and we were pretty well organized and focused. But when I occasionally had to run an errand to a "Standard" classroom... it was like stepping into a whole different world. They had it under control at least so it wasn't a warzone... but it was an apathy zone. The teacher would be up there trying to get information into the kids, trying to get them interested, and it was like a contest to see who could pay the least attention and stare into space thinking about how much they hated school. They didn't have any respect for it.

 

I had something similar happen with me. The teachers at the private school I was attending were astounded because I was finishing up all the workbooks they gave me at an unheard of pace. They doubled my workload and even had me in 2 extra subjects and I was still getting done before school was out. I never had homework. The teachers were all amazed they even "accidently" gave me a science book that was supposed to be for 9th grade and I read most of it although I was pretty confused (I was in 2nd grade)

My friends thought i was some sort of genius kid or something, in turn I thought they were pretty dumb because they didn't know all the State Capitals at age 5. It turns out I just had a really great memory, I wasn't exceptionally skilled, I just wanted to get the hell out of school so I finished up my work as quickly as possible. When I got into the higher grades I still got straight A's but I found out I wasn't the big genius everyone thought I was.

 

I was the kid in the back of the Honors class that was always asleep.

I graduated with a 3.5 from both high school and college. It's kind of sad to think what I could have done if I'd tried harder.

As for the GT thing, I was in the program in Fort Bend when I was in elementary school. I don't have any real feelings towards it one way or the other, really because I don't remember much of it. The only real positive thing I can think to say about is once you get in the mindset that you're going to be in the top of your class, you most likely will be.

 

Back on Sylvan, I can only say that I went to it a long time ago...probably early 90's sometime? Anyway, my parents were hoping it would help my vocabulary/writing/reading ability...but honestly, at least at that time, it seemed like they were catering to people who needed more help. And if you were at least semi-intelligent, they moved a little slowly. But that's based on a fuzzy memory, so take it with a grain of salt..

 

Ahhhh...TIPS.

I refused to go as well. "Mom, you are NOT sending me to Nerd Camp."

 

Hey. I went to TIP three times, 1988-90. The first time, little naive me thought it was going to be nerd camp. Of course, I was a "nerd" anyway and seemed to remain so no matter how much I tried to throw that reputation off (and I tried pretty hard). Some things surprised me:

-those kids were not nerds. Most of them were still cooler than me. In terms of social skills at the time. But I learned quickly and was "normal" (or TIP normal) by my second turn.

-those kids were smarter than I was. I got to see how it felt to be the dumb one, to make D's, to realize I was going to be screwed if I didn't study, to be the one making the teachers impatient because I still had my test when everyone else had finished. It depended on which subject I took - switching from sciences at the Marine Lab to Latin at the main campus seemed to completely change my performance and all of a sudden I was more than competitive enough.

-without my parents there, I wasn't very good at keeping up with my stuff, or studying, or doing my homework (at least doing it right and before the last minute), or hanging up my wet laundry so it didn't mold. Again, after messing all that stuff up the first time, I did it right after that, and was glad I had gotten it over with when I was 13 instead of waiting until college.

Any other TIPsters? Give a shout out if you're here...

(hey Raven, sorry to derail your thread, but we're just bumping it up, look at it that way )

 

I'd find a way to get your son in the G/T courses. I bet if you pressure them, they'll allow him in. Don't let your son languish in unchallenging classes 8 hours a day if you can help it.

I've never had experience with Sylvan Learning Center, but I'm curious if you've considered other types of activities? Sports, music, art, etc? My childhood was mostly focused on academics, but I wish I had more exposure to other things.

 

I think I was in an advanced class in elementry school at some point. I just remember being put in a different class one year where I got to use a computer and even did this thing where you build robots or machines from legos and then program them with an Apple II E.