[gwbas1c]

> In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless...

There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college.

For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization.

By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work.

The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip.

Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.