National honors society (Plano, West, Rice: home, middle school, college)

[Sushi cake]

What is this and in which grade Plano students start participating?

[PISDstudent]

Originally Posted by Sushi cake

What is this and when do Plano students start participating?

8th grade- in Plano, you do community service in exchange for having it on your resume (8-10th grade is minimum 16 hours a year of service; at the senior highs it's 30 hours a year).

It's a national organization, and elsewhere it only requires that you maintain a certain GPA, but ther service requirements make it a bit more involved here. At Plano West, about 700-800 of the 2100 students are in it, so it's not a huge honor or anything.

[Sushi cake]

Thank you. What is Duke TIP and what's the difference between state & grand honors?

[GripeWater]

NHS is a good incentive for intellectual kids to do some humanitarian work.

TIP is middle school SAT based and basically to lure kids into attending courses but its a big honor to qualify. Grand honors means you scored exceptionally well and state honors is for ones who did good. They say ones who qualify for grand without prep classes are usually shoo ins for National Merit Scholarships.

[Keepingitsimple]

Only top performing 7th graders from every school get invited to take College Board's SAT or ACT to qualify for Duke's Talent Search. This year, 75,172 participated nationally. Of those, 23,379 students qualified for state recognition, and 1,670 students qualified for the grand recognition.

Gives parents bragging rights and being Grand Winning predicts that there is serous potential to be tapped. To be a Grand winner you must score above 1850 on SAT.

Its not required to spend money on prep classes or to enroll into Duke courses so for a small SAT fee any qualified student can go to local high school on a saturday and take SAT test with highschoolers.

[Big G]

Even better, Duke TIP and PISD have a special set up with ETS, so you can just go to Rice MS and take the SAT with nothing but other middle-schoolers.

My kid still laughs about how some of the Tiger Moms had to be told 4 or 5 times to "leave the testing area NOW". What, like they can sit next to Junior and help him operate the calculator???

[Keepingitsimple]

You got to love Tiger Moms. My neighbor's son was taking prep classes for years and was sick of it. My son took no classes at all, just went for SAT and both qualified for State with almost identical scores. We were very happy for both but Tiger Mom's son was devastated that his cousin made it to Grand and he brought shame to the family by getting only state. He didn't want to go home. Talk about pressure! A 7th grader doing better than 70% high schoolers wasn't good enough.

[synchronicity]

Originally Posted by Keepingitsimple

You got to love Tiger Moms. My neighbor's son was taking prep classes for years and was sick of it. My son took no classes at all, just went for SAT and both qualified for State with almost identical scores. We were very happy for both but Tiger Mom's son was devastated that his cousin made it to Grand and he brought shame to the family by getting only state. He didn't want to go home. Talk about pressure! A 7th grader doing better than 70% high schoolers wasn't good enough.

^This. Great test scores and such are certainly helpful, but above a certain point you'll get more benefit from being a charismatic, persuasive, effective communicator who is self-motivated. Nobody much cares if you team leader was 95th or 98th or 99th %ile on their standardized tests, but they damn well do care if thjey can get across concepts and ideas to their people, get buy-in and feedback from them on a project and motivate them to perform at their best.

Also, if a kid is naturally brilliant, they're naturally brilliant, and the testing will merely confirm that. Spending an insane amount of time working to deliberately improve one's test score, although often useful for various reasons, does not make one naturally brilliant. A good percentage of those NMSF kids didn't take a thousand hours of "test prep" with Tiger Mom hovering over them, they just read on their own from a young age and otherwise exercised their intellectual curiosity in ways many of their peers never did. Yes, I'm sure they had parents who generally encouraged and engaged them, but no, they didn't become math whizzes thanks to a non-stop barrage of flash cards at increased speeds. Three minutes of a Schoolhouse Rock episode at age 7 taught them the trick that 8 times 9 is 80 minus 8, and they then applied that trick for all simple multiplication.

But what do I know? I'm an idjit who believes kids should have time to be kids, and that my goal as a parent is to instill in them and help them develop the skills they need so they can function effectively on their own once they "leave the nest". I'd rather my kid grow up to be a happy, well-adjusted adult with a balanced and productive life than worry about whether they hit the 99th %ile on whatever alphabet-soup-named fill-in-the-circle-with-a-number-two-pencil test is thrown at them on any given day.

[GripeWater]

If kids have a pro academic environment at home and in school than usually they thrive naturally. I consider it well intentioned child abuse when parents push them to limits by enrolling them in all kind of courses & classes.

[Ramona72]

Originally Posted by Big G

Even better, Duke TIP and PISD have a special set up with ETS, so you can just go to Rice MS and take the SAT with nothing but other middle-schoolers.

My kid still laughs about how some of the Tiger Moms had to be told 4 or 5 times to "leave the testing area NOW". What, like they can sit next to Junior and help him operate the calculator???

When my kid took it (and qualified), nobody took prep classes and you would have been thought insane to even consider it. Most woke up 10 minutes before, dragged themselves into the test, forgot their calculator, and still breezed through it. We're talking about 13yo. They have their minds on other things. That said, I'm not sure anybody got Grand honors although many got state.