My kids aren’t top students at all. They both have learning disabilities. My son is highly sports oriented, my daughter is very musical. They both have trouble with traditional subjects.
They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.
They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school.
They are doing very well now. Not straight A’s, but they are learning what they need to learn and flourishing as people.
I have seen this repeated for many other families. A lot of public schools are simply awful.
"B" students are in fact top students. That you think they aren't is one of the things I've been pushing back on in my career.
I have several learning disabilities including dyslexia and ADHD and was also a top student, so those aren't exactly determinative. Many of my top students are neurodivergent. I get a dozen letters every semester from my top students regarding their learning disabilities.
Excelling in sports and music is also indicative of highly talented students with vast aptitude. Your kids are actually probably far above average, but you can't see that, because your N=2.
I’m sorry, are you indicating you know my kids better than I do?
The kids got “B”s because everyone who showed up got Bs. It was social promotion.
This became painfully obvious when the first marking period scores in many classes was F and D in the private school. And was backed up by equally bad standardized testing scores.
No, I don't presume to know your children. But I am more qualified than you to compare them to other children, because that's part of my job (unless it's your job too, I dunno). Based on what you've told me, and that's all I have to go off of, your kids are above average. It's kind of wild to me that you're on here arguing with me that they're not.
Kids who get A's, B's (even some C's); and do sports or music are well on their way to successful futures. The kids getting Fs and Ds who aren't involved in any music or sports are the ones who won't be getting spots at top colleges. That's not to say they can't have successful futures nonetheless.
Maybe so we're all on the same page, you can articulate what the profile of a "top student" looks like to you.
You need a reality check, dude. The fact that you think you can judge people’s children better than their parents based on a few sentences on HN lays bare your poor assumptions.
I said I can judge your kids better relative to other kids because I have extensive experience doing it. If you think you can do that better without any experience actually evaluating kids, then I think it's you who needs the reality check. It's such hubris to think you can do the job of an experienced professional better without any experience or training whatsoever, and that's the whole problem with busybody parents.
The few sentences you provided are highly correlated with very successful students. Learning Latin in 5th grade is not something 90% of children do. Immediately your kid stands apart for having done that. Same with sports and music. Combine that with good grades, and that's the profile of a top student. What more do you want? Again, what's your conception of a top student, and how do your kids not qualify? Is it because they're not getting straight A's?
Still so wild to me that you, as a father, are arguing post after post to me, a dog on the internet, that your kids are below average. I mean, regardless of what reality I live in, what's up with that? Who are you really trying to convince here?
That's not how percentiles work. (The upthread 15-20 was %ile not %.)
I mean, I can imagine a test where the 15th-20th %ile range happened to be a score of 80-85%, but that would be coincidence or design of the specific test, not a natural equivalence.
I figure this was the same mistake as the first other response, I made the same one initially when reading that comment and thought they were saying "B" was lower than it should have been, not higher than it should have been. How "percentile" actually works isn't something I've given any thought in like a decade or more, my first read was "top 15-20%" before going back and remembering it's actually more like "bottom 15-20%" (or more precisely something like "better than 15-20% of other takers").
They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.
They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school.
They are doing very well now. Not straight A’s, but they are learning what they need to learn and flourishing as people.
I have seen this repeated for many other families. A lot of public schools are simply awful.