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I Regret Putting My Daughter in Honors Classes
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Turns out, I was wrong.
I gave birth to a smart kid. Frighteningly smart. I wanted my daughter to grow up knowing that her father and I were going to do everything in our power to make sure she could be whatever she wanted when she grew up. We wanted her to be successful. What parent doesn’t want that for their kid?
Or course, when we start out as parents, many of us are young. Full of hopes and dreams and a bit of naivete.
Like so many other people, I couldn’t tell you what success was going to look like for her but I had a very prescriptive idea of what the path to it would look like. Scholarships to well-known, highly impressive universities where she would study great things and then people would clamor over themselves to hire her when she graduated.
Well, we got over that fast her freshman year in high school. We didn’t see it coming.
My daughter has always been an advanced student. When she was in preschool she was so bored we moved her to a private kindergarten so she wouldn't disrupt other kids. The public school district she was to go to refused to let her start regular kindergarten a year early. In retrospect, that made sense.