When she was tiny, I brought her to school and would sneak out of my classes to nurse her, then hand her to my mom or husband or a friend, so they could hang out with her while she slept and I took notes in the classroom next door. Then, when she was a little older, many of my professors allowed her to sleep in the classroom with me. While some kids had dreams of sugarplum fairies dancing through their heads, tiny Maddy had torts and gerrymandering and environmental damages to dream about.
She crawled around the university hallways while I celebrated graduation and learned to walk while I studied for the bar exam. Her first words mingled between my recitations of the rule of law. There was no chance that she could avoid being a strong student- not every child starts learning in law school. She hit the ground running and didn’t stop there.
I eventually decided to stick with education a little longer, so I went back to the schools for a few more years. Of course, little Maddy came along. We somehow lucked out by living right near the school district’s preschool program- the perfect storm of district employee’s children being taught by dozens of high school kids who were excited to try out their own teaching skills. With all the attention and support, Maddy learned to read when she was three and a half. By five, she was more than ready for kindergarten. Unfortunately, her birthday was beyond the cutoff for kindergarten entrance, so she was stuck doing an extra year of preschool. She continued to learn and to suck up every ounce of learning around her.
My friends laughed when Maddy would stare at them with her serious face. “Does she smile?” they would grin, trying to get her to laugh at their funny faces. “Yeah, sometimes,” I would say. One of them joked and said, “I can see why you call her Maddy. She always looks mad.” But Maddy didn’t have time for silly stuff. She was soaking up the world around her and she wanted to know everything.
In anticipation of the future, we had her privately tested for gifted services. She scored higher than any of us or the psychologist expected. We didn’t need the results yet, but kept them, knowing she would likely need additional services at some point.
Kindergarten finally came along and Maddy was so excited to finally get to go to the “big kid school,” which was the local, public Montessori school. The first days were a whirlwind of Maddy eagerly getting ready for school in the morning and then talking nonstop about all the things they did all day when she came home. She loved her teacher and the teacher seemed to really enjoy her too. Unfortunately, the school had combined preschool and kindergarten in a split-grade classroom, so she was already talking about how much she didn’t want to do more preschool stuff… she wanted to learn all the big stuff.
After the first two weeks we received a phone call from her teacher. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this because I really love your little Maddy. But the numbers of students are such that they are moving me to teach the first through third grade, multi-age classroom instead of the Pre-K and kindergarten class.”
I expressed our sadness at the change and then I laughed, “I wish you could take Maddy with you.”
And then she said something that changed the trajectory of Maddy’s elementary years: “Oh, that’s a great idea. She really would do well with the older students. Let me ask the principal if I can do that.”
So that’s how Maddy ended up in a first through third grade Montessori class, and within a short period of time she was doing the third-grade work. She stayed with that wonderful teacher for first grade, and again got to do more of the advanced work. But sadly, that teacher retired after that. She had another great teacher in second grade, who again let her access the higher-level content.
Maddy’s third grade teacher was also a nice person who seemed to enjoy Maddy, but he didn’t share the same confidence that her prior teachers had about giving her work outside of her grade level. He was a first-year teacher and didn’t think it was possible for him to allow her to access the upper grade curriculum. After he gave her several tests to essentially “prove she didn’t know everything” in the math units she’d been doing for two years, we chose to pull her out and homeschool her.
We didn’t know anything about homeschooling, but my husband worked from home and I was a teacher. We knew we could figure things out. We signed up for an option that the district provided that meant she would check in with a supervising teacher once a week, and the district would pay for all her supplies. Soon the mailman was bringing package after package full of interesting manipulatives and books and science experiment materials. Maddy thought it was like Christmas every day and was eager to get started. She rushed into the assignments and soon was ahead on those too. But that was okay, and the teacher encouraged it.
We moved to Florida when she was in fourth grade. We decided to let her go to school so she could meet other local kids. Florida’s old-fashioned program required her to be IQ tested again for gifted services, even though we had her results from when she was in preschool. They somehow implied she might have gotten less intelligent since then. The district psychologist tested her, and soon she was placed in the district’s fulltime gifted program. Again, she lucked out by being placed into a multi-age classroom with older kids, so she was able to absorb all of their lessons too.
Towards the end of her fourth grade, we realized she was going to need even more advanced work than to stay in that classroom again as a fifth grader. I was teaching at a middle school, so I asked the principal what options we had. “Bring her here,” he said. “How?” I asked, intrigued with the idea but a little nervous about my little nine-year-old doing middle school. “Take her out and homeschool her the rest of the year, then re-enroll her as a sixth grader for the fall.”
I loved that idea and so did Maddy. “I didn’t want to go to that same class again, Mom. I would love to go to school with the kids in your classes.” I reminded her that they would be in eighth grade by then, but that she would still see them on campus. She reminded me that she spent many a day volunteering in my classroom, tutoring my seventh graders. We both laughed because it was true. This kid was an academic rock star, and she always made friends with all the older kids too.
I realized she would be okay if we did it, so we pulled her out of the gifted class and again started homeschooling. This time we didn’t have the district’s support because Florida didn’t offer the same homeschool programs as Washington, but we didn’t mind. When I got off work in the afternoons, we would go to parks and museums and she read and did workbooks that I borrowed from the teachers I worked with at the middle school. She was all ready to start in the fall, but before we even got that far I got some news. I was chosen to be the next state gifted education specialist at the Florida Department of Education that I’d applied to earlier just in case there was a chance I might get it. So, we had to move yet again- this time to Tallahassee.
Maddy panicked a little, but we checked out the local middle school there and were pleasantly surprised to find out they had room in their pre-International Baccalaureate (IB) program. The school had a great reputation for providing a strong learning environment and Maddy fit right in immediately. She had more fun in that school and that program than she’d had in school for a long time. She finished the year there and participated in the afterschool choir program and middle school soccer, even though she was much smaller as a nine-year-old than the other kids in her grade.
Tallahassee wasn’t our thing, so we moved yet again after that year. But at that point we weren’t sure what to do with Miss Maddy. The local middle school wasn’t that great. Plus, when we went online and checked on the middle school state standards, we realized that she’d already learned all the concepts that were listed for seventh and eighth grade too. The pre-IB program at her last school had prepared her well, but pretty much too well for regular middle school. We realized she was going to need to homeschool again in order to continue to be interested in school and challenged.
We learned about Florida Virtual School’s Flex program, which allows kids to take whatever classes they want through the online format. We signed her up for a few advanced courses. And then we decided to apply to a program through Duke University’s Talent Identification Program (“Duke TIP,”) where they let seventh grade students take the ACT or SAT tests to see how they did, compared with other students their ages and compared with high school seniors who were applying to college.
Maddy took the ACT test with the seventh graders, but we knew at eleven years old she was younger than the other kids who were testing. Apparently, that didn’t matter. She scored really high and not only won awards from Duke TIP, but her scores showed she was college-ready in most subject areas. We realized we didn’t just have a smart kid on our hands, we had an exceptional one. And that wasn’t as exciting as it sounds, it was a little scary.
The world isn’t made for kids who learn that fast or are that capable. The education system is set up for students who stick to their grade levels or who skip a year or two. But not students who just turned eleven who are academically ready to skip the rest of middle school and all of high school and jump right into college. I knew she was smart, but figured there was no way she could actually do college yet- how would she know how to write essays or understand adult-level concepts about people and history and the world around her? I told her she could pick some high school classes to try, but that she wasn’t ready for college yet.
She chose the second semester of twelfth grade English. I choked. I wasn’t sure whether she would succeed in doing the assignments, and certainly expected it to be the first time she would fail at something. Maybe it would be a good learning experience to find out she couldn’t do everything she set out to do, so she would be humble and learn how to work hard for things that were difficult in her future. But, to our amazement, she didn’t fail. She soared. In fact, we became good friends with the teacher when she was almost done with the class because in one of her last teacher check-ins, Maddy asked me to get on the phone and talk to the teacher to let her know about her age. The teacher was amazed and said she didn’t realize she was so young, and that she was one of the top students in the class of eighteen-year-olds.
So, I agreed to talk to the college and see if she was eligible to take some classes. Florida allows students to dual-enroll in college courses if they meet the requirements, as early as sixth grade. At age twelve by then, she would have normally been in sixth grade, so we figured it wouldn’t be that big of a surprise that she was so young. They gave us a list of things we had to do, including having her take some intro to college and the online program on their computer.
We weren’t sure how to fill out her homeschool paperwork. Was she a seventh grader now, or a twelfth grader? I figured it was reasonable to sign her up as a ninth grader because we still wanted her to be able to access free college courses for a while. We figured she should look like a high schooler on paper so the college wasn’t too worried about her. So, we put ninth grade.
We enrolled her in an Applied Ethics course because it was available online (she didn’t drive yet, of course,) and when the year started, she jumped right in and read everything she could get her hands on to learn about all sorts of ethical dilemmas. She also learned a lot of things that I didn’t really think were appropriate for a twelve-year-old. But luckily she had a good sense of humor and had already learned all sorts of middle school humor when she went to sixth grade in Tallahassee. “It’s okay, Mom,” she laughed, “I took sex ed in sixth grade, and I got a perfect score on the test!” We laughed and gritted our teeth while she debated with her classmates about issues regarding drugs and unplanned pregnancies and murder. It was quite an experience for us as parents, but Maddy loved it. She was learning new things and everything about online college was novel.
When the semester was over, we tried to sign her up for more classes, but the registration link wasn’t working. I called and asked the registrar what was going on, expecting them to say we were doing something incorrectly. But instead, she said something that surprised us. “I’m sorry,” she told us, “but we made a mistake when we let Maddy register last semester. In order to do dual enrollment at the college, she has to be a tenth grader, but her paperwork says she’s only a ninth grader.” I tried to explain to the lady that we had just made that up. But she didn’t care. “I’m sorry,” she said, “since the homeschool office at the high school sent us documents saying she is in ninth grade, we have to consider her a ninth grader. She can do more college classes next year when she’s a tenth grader.”
I was shocked. “Are you saying she has to just hang out the rest of the year and not do school?”
“No,” she replied. “She can do high school classes and then do more college next year.”
“But, the issue is that she is beyond the high school level and really needs her appropriate level of classes now. I think that’s why they allow dual enrollment, so these kids have access to their correct level of schoolwork.”
But the lady didn’t care. “You’ll have to talk to the dean if you have any further questions.”
I asked for the dean. She transferred me to her line.
“I’m sorry,” the dean told me. “She’s just not a tenth grader and she has to be in order to take classes here.”
I told her about the state law that allowed dual enrollment from sixth grade on. She said that was something the high school was supposed to provide and that if Maddy wanted to do that, she would have to enroll in a college level class at the high school. I knew that wasn’t correct, but I couldn’t keep arguing with everyone.
I asked her to send me the email she got from the homeschool office at the school district, that said Maddy was a ninth grader. I wanted to see what she was talking about, but figured it was due to the paperwork we filled out earlier that year. She sent it to me and I read it. Then, I decided to write to them to let them know about the situation. I wasn’t sure what else we could do for Maddy’s education that year if she couldn’t do college.
“Dear Home Education Office,” I wrote (or something like that,) “We were told Maddy can’t attend college through dual enrollment this term because she has to be a tenth grader, even though she did great in her college class last semester. Please let me know what we should do.”
I got an email back within the day. It didn’t say anything, it just had an attachment. I opened it. It was the form they send each year confirming the student’s participation in the homeschool option, but this time it said, “Madeline is a tenth-grade student.” Yay! That was just what we needed. I emailed it to the dean at the college and within a couple days and another phone conversation, Maddy was finally enrolled for a couple college classes.
That would have been the end of the story and we could all relax and let her cruise through all the college classes she wanted to take for the next few years. However, our family chose to move yet again. This time we moved back to Washington where our extended family lives. We had to learn about the Washington dual enrollment program that they call Running Start. It is limited to just two years of college courses and the students have to be in eleventh grade (thanks to the Florida college issue, she was now considered as such!)
However, she had to take their placement test. She would have to score high enough to qualify for college English 101.
At first, Maddy was nervous and didn’t think she could do it. “I’m just thirteen,” she moaned. “I haven’t even had all the school that they expect a college student to have had, since I skipped most of middle school and all of high school.” But I told her she already took a much harder test- the ACT, and she scored just fine on that.
The next week we had some time so I told her to get ready so she could go take the test. She said she wasn’t ready. She was tired and didn’t want to do it. But I talked her into it. I parked and she went in and took the test. About an hour later, she came out with a sad expression on her face. “I didn’t pass,” she said, hanging her head. “I’m not smart enough to do college.” But I knew that wasn’t true. “I think you were just overtired and psyched yourself out. Next time you will pass.” We signed up for another test date.
The next time she took the test I was nervous. What if she came out and was sad again, and I was the one who insisted she go try again. But she came running out yelling that she passed. Sure enough, she scored more than ready for English 101.
So, Maddy again enrolled in college and was able to now take full course loads each term. The goal of Running Start is for the students to end the two-year program with their Associates degree.
Things were going along smoothly for a while, but then Maddy got this wild idea that she didn’t want to graduate from high school yet. She wanted to play high school soccer one more year before graduating. She was set to get her AA degree at the end of the spring term, but she begged to delay her high school graduation for another term so she could be considered a twelfth grader again in the fall for soccer purposes.
We ran the idea by her college advisor. Somehow, we lucked out in Washington and ended up with the world’s greatest college advisor. She quickly agreed that was a great goal, as Maddy would only be fifteen when she finished her AA, and she knew how much Maddy loved playing soccer with her teammates. “Just check with the high school athletics director to make sure that will be allowed,” she suggested.
So, we did. And he laughed. “No one’s ever done this,” he said. “Usually, people either graduate early and get out of here, or they graduate on time. No one has ever begged to stay in high school longer!” But somehow, he got permission for her to continue as a second-year senior. “Just make sure she has a full load of classes as a homeschooler,” he told us. “Then she will be legitimately a high school student still.” We laughed because she really had taken everything she needed for high school. But she hadn’t completed a senior project yet, which the local schools required. “Okay,” we told him, “she will take a bunch of fun classes to learn new things, but she will mainly be working on a senior project.” He agreed that sounded perfect, so that was the plan.
It was indeed the plan, until I talked her into applying for local universities, just in case she decided to just keep going and finish her Bachelor’s degree. Just in case the universities wanted her. Just in case we could maybe somehow afford it…. All of those things seemed like distant goals, until the first-choice local school responded even before they had all of her paperwork. I opened an email, expecting to see a list of things she still needed to submit, but it burst into a page full of confetti. “Congratulations!” it said. “You have been accepted to attend our university next fall!” Maddy grunted when I told her- she was just waking up. “I’m not going to college next year,” she said. “Remember, I’m playing high school soccer.”
But then we noticed they sent her the information to apply to an invitation-only scholarship. And then the package from the university came in the mail with a certificate saying she was getting a scholarship of ninety-two thousand dollars over four years. We were excited and in shock.
Maddy was conflicted at first. But after talking with several people, including the soccer coach, it was decided she could indeed take a gap year and enjoy high school soccer.
As you can see, this journey has been long and anything but easy. But somehow Maddy continued to keep soaring through the hard parts. She is excited that the local university wants her, but she is more excited about getting to stay and play soccer one more year with her friends. And in the end, she will still end up entering college a little early if she does so after next year when she is sixteen. Or even if she waits an additional year and goes at seventeen. She will enter with two years of college under her belt either way, and still be one of the youngest students on campus. So, we aren’t in a hurry anymore.
“I think I can relax and take a year or two off,” Maddy told me the other day. “I’ve been going three hundred miles an hour every year for my entire school experience. I want to get my drivers license and get a job and play lots of soccer.” And that is just what she will do. Because even kids who enter the world as infants in law school deserve to take some time to be kids. And you know what she wants to do when she finally does get done with her bachelor’s degree? Just guess… it’s the perfect ending to this little story. Yep, you’re right. She wants to go to law school. And I have a feeling she will soar there too.