As Brennan is growing up and making many choices that will impact his life, he is faced with decisions that he have to make himself. One of the first and important decisions is what High School he wanted to attend. He has a lot to contemplate comparing the pros and cons of each school: whether to attend local high school where they have a really good band program, other extra-curricular activities, and close to home or attend Poolesville HS where they have a very strong academic program but they don't have other extra-curricular programs, and is farther from home, and there will be longer class days which means he has to stay at school longer.
CC has always had a very strong academic background. Since he was about to start school, we got him into the Chinese Immersion Program at College Gardens ES, then we moved him to Fox Chapel ES for the Gifted and Talented (GT) program. After that, he didn't like the local kids where they were teasing him all the time. So for middle school we decided that he will attend local MS school instead of continuing into the GT middle school, which would have been not very good for him. In the local MS, he just excelled him almost all of his classes and wasn't challenged enough, even in honors classes.
As he is graduating from MS, he has to make decisions for the next four years. For high school, we encouraged him to take the Magnet Program test. We figure this is a good benchmark for him to see how much material he knows. On December 2017, he decided he would take the test. He didn't think much about it and didn't even study nor prepare for the test, where as we see many other students in the county actually took extra courses on the weekends and have specialized classes to prepare for them to take this exam. We didn't think much about the exam: if he gets accepted, he will think about it and if he doesn't he still can go to his local HS. On the day of the exam, there was literally hundreds of students going there to take the exam. When Da went to pick him up, he waited for a very long time because CC took his time to answer each and every question and wrote essays as needed. He was one of the last twenty kids to come out of the examination.
Well to our surprise, in February 2018 we finally received the results back from the test. He did really well on the exams and was offered to both programs at Poolesville HS. Now it is up to him to decide to accept the acceptance letter or not. It took him about two weeks to process the pros and cons of whether or not to go and he still couldn't make a decision. We tried to encourage him to go because the environment of how students will be similar to him and how good it could for him, however we also told him that it's his decision and we will support either school he chooses. He waited until the day Poolesville had a student orientation for all the accepted candidates so they can meet the current students and teachers to see how the program maybe beneficial for him. Within the hour and a half after meeting the students, teachers, and seeing the environment, he submitted his acceptance letter and was excited to attend the school in the fall.
CC has always had a very strong academic background. Since he was about to start school, we got him into the Chinese Immersion Program at College Gardens ES, then we moved him to Fox Chapel ES for the Gifted and Talented (GT) program. After that, he didn't like the local kids where they were teasing him all the time. So for middle school we decided that he will attend local MS school instead of continuing into the GT middle school, which would have been not very good for him. In the local MS, he just excelled him almost all of his classes and wasn't challenged enough, even in honors classes.
As he is graduating from MS, he has to make decisions for the next four years. For high school, we encouraged him to take the Magnet Program test. We figure this is a good benchmark for him to see how much material he knows. On December 2017, he decided he would take the test. He didn't think much about it and didn't even study nor prepare for the test, where as we see many other students in the county actually took extra courses on the weekends and have specialized classes to prepare for them to take this exam. We didn't think much about the exam: if he gets accepted, he will think about it and if he doesn't he still can go to his local HS. On the day of the exam, there was literally hundreds of students going there to take the exam. When Da went to pick him up, he waited for a very long time because CC took his time to answer each and every question and wrote essays as needed. He was one of the last twenty kids to come out of the examination.
Well to our surprise, in February 2018 we finally received the results back from the test. He did really well on the exams and was offered to both programs at Poolesville HS. Now it is up to him to decide to accept the acceptance letter or not. It took him about two weeks to process the pros and cons of whether or not to go and he still couldn't make a decision. We tried to encourage him to go because the environment of how students will be similar to him and how good it could for him, however we also told him that it's his decision and we will support either school he chooses. He waited until the day Poolesville had a student orientation for all the accepted candidates so they can meet the current students and teachers to see how the program maybe beneficial for him. Within the hour and a half after meeting the students, teachers, and seeing the environment, he submitted his acceptance letter and was excited to attend the school in the fall.
