As a long-time Clemson fan...yeah, it's crazy. When I went, they were actively recruiting high-stats OOS students, and now they are deluged with applications. When I click over to college confidential, I see things like '6 students from our suburban Chicago/NJ high school applied' and its wild. There have always been students from all over at state flagships, but most students were in-state or from neighboring states. Now it reads like an ivy description - lots of people applying just to see if they can get in. I'm sure it wreaks havoc on the whole process - students apply and don't come, and students who would have been the target population now apply to lots more schools because there is no guarantee that they'll get in. And, since colleges have no idea how many will ultimately come, they are either working the waitlist or else running out of housing if they guess wrong. Ugh. I had thought that our college application season would be fairly easy since kid has good stats and wasn't looking at highly competitive schools, and now everywhere is getting way more applications than they can accept.

Pigs in a blanket (with either hot dogs or minis with cocktail-sized sausages), Veggie pinwheels - flavored cream cheese with chopped veggies rolled in a tortilla, or veggie 'pizza' with ranch/mayo/cream cheese spread over a crescent roll crust and topped with veggies. My mom makes something with a crushed pretzel crust, some sort of white fluff (sugar and cream cheese? cool whip? I have no idea) and then fruit pieces. I can get the recipe if you want - I need to get it anyway. I don't know if you could easily scale the crusts into small individual pans, but maybe? They might like a puff pancake - mostly eggs, a bit of flour, and it's cool to see it puff up. Yummy topped with honey, syrup, or sugared fruit. It's just a big popover, so you could do those instead if it would be easier to make individual ones. The middle schoolers at church were intrigued when I made popcorn old-school, in a pot with oil. It had a clear glass lid, upping the cool factor (most of them had only done it in the microwave). If there's something popcorn based - a trail mix or something - this might be a fun part to actually cook before letting them customize their bags of trail mix with dried fruit, nuts, chocolate chips, etc. I'm thinking of trying chocolate fondue with the middle schoolers in a few weeks - there is the chocolate, but also a lot of fruit or pretzels or whatever you want to dip. I'm thinking of handing it out with the chocolate in little dixie cups - nobody wants that many people to be dipping! Egg bites in muffin tins or small dishes - they can choose meat, veggies, cheese, etc to customize. Would muffins, where you make a generic batter and then people can customize (blueberries, dried apples and cinnamon, chocolate chips) work?

From a social perspective, asking people not to share pictures or video with Person X, or even 'Any relatives of Fred besides his mom' would have no repercussions at all in my world. But, I think you're right to think that being asked to take and share no video or pictures at all would be a problem. It's not just about people selfishly wanting to record every minute of their child's life. For my kids' entire lives, we either lived across the country from all relatives or in the same town as one set of grandparents, several hours away from all other relatives. My in-laws can no longer travel at all. The only way that they can see their grandchildren do anything is if we take video and pictures to them. My sibling works in athletics so will never be free to visit during an athletic season, and therefore will never see my kids play a sport outside of the video and pictures that we send. If we knew that we'd never be able to record anything, it would create hard feelings. But, if we knew that we just needed to keep it private, we'd be perfectly fine with that. We wouldn't think twice about a coach requesting that, and we'd be more careful about what we shared with whom. But, we've often been at events and snapped pictures to text to parents who can't be there, and I've also gotten pics from other parents who snapped a pic of my kid when I couldn't be there to see them. Edited to add: Release forms are about what the organization can share, not usually about individuals. Our co-op, preschool, church youth events, etc, have all had photo permission slips. Those are so that the school or co-op can/can't include the student in pictures that the organization posts on their websites or in emails. Those are not related to whether an individual parent can take a picture for their own use. If asked, most parents would be amenable to not sharing the pictures or making them available such that certain people could see them.

As a parent of 2 sports kids, I would actually be much more comfortable with being told not to share video with a particular person than being told not to share anything of any kid with any other parent. It is very common for there to be one or 2 people who take tons of pictures or record video that they share with all parents on the team. There are apps where play-by-play info and also video can be shared live as they occur during the game. These are really popular with parents who have to work during the game time, grandparents who can't travel, etc. It's not reasonable to block all of this from everybody. Even if, at this age, it is just one parent sending video this will possibly change depending on league or specific team or the tech capabilities of the parents on the team, so it seems like it would be good to go ahead and get a policy to deal with it. But, I don't know any parent who would not be willing to accommodate not sending or sharing with one person. Somebody administrating an app can make the info private and admit people individually. Footage or pictures can be shared in groups that do not include the person with the OP. In our sports circles, parents would likely become more protective of the kid involved and I don't see social exclusion happening, although I could be wrong. But, if parents are told not to set up a camera, record the game, and then send it to grandma I could see it causing resentment. For some sports (basball, for instance) it's easy to get video of just your kid. For other sports (basketball, volleyball) most plays involve multiple players so it would be very difficult to only share video or pics of your own kid with no others in the picture. But, it would be very easy to not share with one person if asked. Edited to answer the question - In this case, if I knew the parent I'd talk to them directly. If not, and the coach was willing, I'd let the coach handle it. Likely they should speak to the parent who is probably unknowingly violating the order directly and then send a general message to the parents.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for rude responses. But, there are also cultural differences as far as level of concern. When my kids were little (15ish years ago) we lived in Albuquerque, which has some really good museums - a hands-on kids museum, the atomic museum, a natural history museum, and a quirky hot air balloon museum. We used to rotate through them, but mostly alternated between the kids museum and the natural history museum, going to one each week during the winter months. It wasn't unusual for people with kids to dump their bag and jackets in a corner of a room so that they could explore with their kids, freeing their hands to point to things or pick up the kids so that they could see something better. We never gave it a second thought. Many of the docents in these museums (especially the atomic museum) are retired national lab or military or university people (all 3 are major local employers) but nobody ever said anything. To be fair, if one of them has asked 'Is this yours?' I probably wouldn't remember it, and it's unlikely that any body would have responded with anything other than 'Yes'. It's possible that they paid enough attention to notice a mom walking with 2 kids and then later notice that the jackets that went with those kids were piled on the bag that the mom was carrying while the mom was helping the kids read the exhibit, I don't know. I never went to museums in a bigger city when the kids were small unless it was a family trip with spouse. We did do the DC museums when the kids were in elementary and we didn't put stuff down like we did in Albuquerque, but that was mostly about crowds - you couldn't backtrack against the flow of traffic and I'd worry about theft. At that time (maybe 8 years ago), everybody went through a metal detector and all bags were searched. That being said, I'd never leave stuff unattended in an airport due to how security is approached. But, for those of us who don't live in large cities, unless we fly it's possible to go years at a time without dealing with any place that would be a big enough target that most would think to be worried about an abandoned bag. I realize that any place could be a possible target, but a mostly empty mall or a random Outback Steakhouse are not the primary things that one worries about. I do go to big sports events, but those all have clear bag policies so once inside there isn't much thought given to the contents of the very small clear bags. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the stadium had snipers positioned on roofs around the field.

My college dorm was built as a hotel, then converted to retirement apartments, and then became a dorm. It had 2, 3, and 4 person rooms with various layouts. I lived in 3 or 4 person rooms all 4 years, and as a former hotel each room had its own bathroom. I don't ever remember a conflict over using the bathroom. We did often have the situation where one person was in the shower while another used the toilet or brushed their teeth. I'm still close with 2 of the girls that i lived with during those years. I spent 2 summers working at camps on campus and lived in the bathroom-down-the-hall dorms. The advantage was that they were cleaned for us. The disadvantage was that if they got messed up on Friday, they stayed that way until Monday. Also you couldn't plan around other people since you didn't know everybody's schedule. It was rare for there to be no available shower because there were 6-8. But, you couldn't predict it. With the suites, we shared schedules so that we knew when each person needed to be getting ready. But, I usually lived with really awesome people, and that's not a guarantee.

Yes! I worked in a cancer research lab associated with a university hospital. Our entire lab worked on yeast as a model for chromatin structure, but every year we had to do HIPAA training. There may have been a couple of labs that worked with human tissue samples, but I only know of one MD in the building at the time so truly nobody worked with actual patients except for that one person, the center director. Apparently they knew that we didn't work with patients so we got to do the short version. Then I went to work at a community college, where I got to do FERPA. OSHA training at both, although in my experience the OSHA instructors could rarely answer questions that were actually relavent to the work (I once watched a professor ask for several years running to how to dispose of a filtration device that had concentrated chemicals, and every year they said that they'd get back to him...it sat in a corner of the lab for I think 10+ years). Radiation safety training was actually useful, in that the guy knew his stuff and we actually worked with radiation, although it was totally overkill for the kind of work that we did.

People above have given you all sorts of useful insights. If you want to do more to explore natural treatments, you might look at the book Healing ADD by Amen. We got a lot of insight using their clinic, but if you already have a diagnosis you might find that some of their supplements help. They may not, but it gives you something else to look at. Even simple things, like their recommendation of tyrosine supplements when doing focus tasks, can make a difference for some people. I'm not one of those people who believes that there is a natural solution for everything, but I do think that some people can be helped with the right combination of supplements so I thought I'd toss in another source for you to consider.

My kids both went to 2 day/week 1/2 day preschool at our church because it served a particular (and different!) purpose for each kid. But, I also realized that those few hours, which they were free to attend or skip as I saw fit, was about the level of schooling that I was comfortable with for my littles. I was ruminating on homeschooling but it seemed too weird. Then my older's Sunday school teacher, a public school K teacher, pulled me aside and said 'Please don't send kiddo to school. Kids like that get ignored because they already know everything.' I hated the idea of kid wasting as much time as I did in elementary - I spent so much time shelving books, helping other kids, staring at the wall, etc. So, when we made a cross-country move and were in an apartment looking for a house as older started K, I had an easy reason - I didn't want kid to start school and have to move mid-year. We found a co-op where kid took a few hours of fun classes once/week, and otherwise I did everything at home, teaching kid at kid's pace and grade level. Both sets of grandparents, initially dubious, were impressed, and kid's love of rec sports overcame their concerns about kid socializing normally. 🙂 By the end of K, kid was ready to start 4th grade math and had friends at the co-op, and I was developing a philosophy that my goal was to expose my kid to as much as possible, teach foundational skills as well as possible, and preserve time for play or read or meander around outside. So, I wanted to teach efficiently - not glossing over things, but eliminating busy work and thinking about the purpose behind why we did what we did so that there wasn't busywork. That didn't necessarily guide us to any particular type of curriculum. For instance, we used the Inference Jones workbooks to address a particular challenge that kid had. We used a 'how to use maps' workbook in K in part because I wanted the kids to have something tiny that they could do on their own - they liked that feeling of accomplishment. At different times with different kids I've made choices to do more or less together, more or less independent, have more or less output, move slower or faster, etc. Sometimes it's purely about academic needs and other times it's to address some other need. Over time, I also developed a philosophy about not asking kids to solve adult problems. I have the inkling that asking people to dwell on issues that they can't fix is bad for mental health, and I think it can make kids feel helpless. This isn't to say that I shelter them, but, for instance, rather than telling the kids that it's on them to solve climate change, we talked about what they could do to reduce the amount of waste that we generate. As they grow to high school we do more with public policy, the big picture, and how complex the world is. As we moved into the teen years, being efficient freed-up time has allowed the kids to participate in a bigger variety of activities - Science Olympiad and a sport for both, and then scouts for one and martial arts and violin for the other. My older completes a few credits every summer during high school to make it possible to juggle everything during the school year, and learning to own ones schedule and time management has been invaluable. During the high school years, I also love that, while we have used AP and DE for specific purposes and classes, kid hasn't been pushed to do the busywork associated with the classes in school nor to take the dumb/unneeded APs that is the only way for kids to get challenging material at many high schools. Kid chose to take the AP US History exam because it aligned nicely with a co-op history class that kid took with friends. But, for world history, kid read several books and then dug into a long, detailed history of warfare as the primary text. My younger may not ever do AP because, while equally smart, I can't see it being a great fit even if kid does take the same co-op history class. But, I could easily imagine younger graduating high school having earned, or being close to earning, an associates. Older is motivated by learning, younger is motivated by getting on with life, and I am glad that I can help both of them work somewhat with their natural inclinations.

This is a common problem for us, since my kids play sports in opposite seasons. We have several saucy meals that can go in the crock pot (salsa chicken, any of the ground beef meals like chili or sloppy joes). I often do 'bowls' with shredded meat that has been crock potted or instapotted and seasoned (and maybe crisped up in the skillet), along with a quick grain (quinoa, couscous, rice or mashed potato in the instapot), and a sauteed or roasted veggie. Or we do a meat that cooks quickly - kielbasa with peppers and onions along with a grain or bread. Sometimes I make big batches one day and plan for leftovers the next - chicken and dumplings, jambalaya, or a meat and veggie mea that reheats well. Sometimes we do something simple for dinner like grilled cheese and canned (or homemade ahead of time) soup or bean and corn quesadillas or tacos. Spouse tends to either be working from home or else is out of town for the week, so I often cook our big meal at lunchtime when everybody is home to eat it fresh (even if they are eating while reading for school or on a conference call) and then we have leftovers for dinner.

It's not that the hospital said that she was faking, it was that the hospital wanted the police to remove her. I seems reasonable for anybody to think that if the hospital says that somebody should be removed, that person is not critically ill. There have been publicized cases over the years, including this one, where that is clearly not the case. But, it's not crazy for one to assume that somebody being discharged from the hospital with no recommendation for accommodation (a wheelchair, crutches, a monitoring device, etc) is OK to get into a car. Having seen a hospital try to send a relative home post-surgery when the relative still had out-of-control pain and was just sitting in the bed, confusedly crying, while a nurse kept saying in an ugly voice 'Eat something - we can't give you anything for pain until you eat those crackers' while the patient was still too addled to actually figure out how to eat a cracker, I know that medical personnel can do things that defy common sense. And, in this situation, this patient needed what my relative had, a spouse who was willing to get in sombody's face and say that until the patient was more stable, they were not leaving the hospital. We really do need advocates for people in this situation. But, the police are not qualified to be that person. They likely can't afford to have an adversarial relationship with the hospital since I'd imagine that they work with it often and there is probably some degree of professional courtesy there. And, I'd imagine that plenty of doctors wouldn't treat the police any better - if they don't listen to the patient, I don't know that they'd listen to an officer. That doesn't mean that the officers behaved correctly, just that I don't know what they could have done that would have been likely to lead to a better outcome. Maybe taking her back to the ER would have worked, or maybe she'd have been stuck in the waiting room. I don't have a good feel for how that would have played out.

I'm in my late 40s and they were common when I was in my 'bridesmaid and wedding' years in my early 20s. I had a small one the day before my wedding - just the bridesmaids, my mom, and a couple of out-of-town friends, maybe 6-8 people total. No weird games, just brunch and chatting and gifts. One of my mom's close friends was there, and it didn't seem odd to people her age. Most gifts weren't anything too racy - a few little slip-style satin things, a few pretty gowns, some candles and lotion from bath and body works. Lingerie showers may look different in different places. In my circles, most brides in their early 20s wouldn't have much in the way of sexy sleepwear or underwear, having come from living with a group of girls in the dorms or with roommates in grad school. Most were religious - not super conservative by any means, but also not likely to have had much need for lingerie prior to getting married. I also had 2 other showers - one with spouse's relatives and one with my extended family (my parents' families live in the same place and know each other so it was just one shower with all of them together). Those were mostly the ones where we got everyday things like skillets and a crock pot and towels and silverware.

I do think that we put police in a hard position with regard to medical situations. If an officer wants to question somebody and the doctors say that the person is off limits for medical reasons, we expect the police to defer to the doctors. Couple that with the fact that most people defer to medical professionals anyway just because the average person lacks the training to do anything different, and I can see how the officers would assume that the doctors were right and this person was faking. It can be hard to make any headway with medical workers. I know a nurse who was dealing with abdominal pain and was turned away from the ER as pill-seeking because she mentioned a medicine by name. She went to another ER and had a hysterectomy to treat the condition within weeks. If a nurse can have this problem, I can see how untrained people get lost in the shuffle. In this case, the only thing that would have helped is more treatment at the hospital that she was at. I'd love to see some of the things mentioned above - step-down facilities, more social support, etc as an alternative to jail - but in this case she died before she could be taken anywhere.

We haven't done that specific AP, but my kid has found the videos on the college board website to be good review. I buy a prep book - usually from the 5 steps to a 5 series - but I think that kid invests a lot more time in the videos. Kid seems to have settled on the routine of watching the videos early - right now they are often viewed during lunch. Then, once the videos are done and most of the course content has been covered (maybe in April) kid tries a practice test and goes back and uses the prep book and videos to figure out what was missed. I'm not sure this is exactly right - Chemistry freshman year wasn't this well planned - but last year's bio and us history had more organized prep and this year kid started with the videos in January.

Several years ago, a friend went to the ER with her in-laws, having observed that the FIL was having a stroke. She said that they sat in the ER under a sign that said 'Be aware of these signs of stroke' being told that FIL was fine. Friend, who was working as a physical therapist at the time, said that she kept having to say 'He has every symptom on this list. He is having a stroke!'. Eventually the hospital agreed. There are amazing medical professionals who are highly competent and dedicated. But, I can also cite a list of medical mistakes that were caught by patients and families that I personally know. And, there are hard situations where the patient knows that something is off but there isn't much that can be detected by medical tests until the patient is in a crisis and there is more information to work from. It is hard, even for people who are very 'with it' in everyday life, to know how to advocate for themselves in the confusion of a medical situation. For those who aren't...we are trying to help some elderly, confused relatives dealing with some health problems and it's not easy.

A few thoughts based on the combined experience that spouse and I have being TAs, instructors, and students. -It really stinks when you can't put together your own good group. After some frustration early on, I had the same lab partner for multiple lab classes my last 2 years of college. We planned our schedules together. Spouse, a computer engineering major who had lots of group work because, similar to your daughter's work, that's often what it takes to do a meaningful project, took classes with the same 4-person group for 2 years. -A TA may not have the authority to do much about this type of situation. When I TA'd, I could make judgement calls about assigning points on a quiz or accepting work a day late but couldn't have decided to drop or significantly alter a major assignment. The TAs were the only instructors that they saw in the labs, but we couldn't make changes to the syllabus - those had to go through the course coordinator. -A professor might adjust the assignment, but will not do it if they aren't asked. There can be some feeling that if a student has a problem that needs the attention of the instructor, then the student will ask. Accommodations can be made to address a particular issue, but if the instructor proactively makes an offer of an adjusted assignment then they have to offer it to everybody. It's possible that other students are doing modified assignments due to similar group issues, but the only way to know is to ask. -Your daughter doesn't want to make them upset by asking for a change of some sort, but the group likely won't be any happier if, at the end, they find out that they are getting a zero. If fear of them being upset is the major deterrent, then talking so the professor now is less likely to lead to a bad outcome just because there is time for them to step up, which won't be there at the end of the semester. -The professor may do nothing anyway, which will be frustrating. Some faculty are fantastic, and some don't care that much or don't have a good grasp of what the 'real world' looks like. This isn't a slam on faculty, just that they, like the students, are people and varying levels of good or bad at their jobs.

I wouldn't care - whatever made sense at the time. When I drive teens, often everybody sits in the back. With some combos of people, it's a matter of height. It can be uncomfortable for some of our taller-than-6-feet guys to fit in the back of some cars, so they'd go in the front independent of the relationship. I"m also always happy for my teen to drive since I don't like doing it, so it's just as likely that the couple would have the front seat and I'd be in the back.

When we lived in NM and had a xeriscaped yard, it was very little work once it was established (hauling rock to cover the dirt was brutal). Yards were also tiny. Where we live now, most yards will be work that is proportional to their size. Wooded areas are easy, and a small yard would likely be a weekly cut with a push mower. Non-grass areas would be needing to mulch beds once/twice a year, plus regular weeding or use of roundup, and 1-2 times a year for hedge trimming, and time would be proportional to size. In our more semi-rural area where most people have a few acres, it takes longer to cut the grass but people don't expect you to do things like edging and people are less regular about things like mulchiing, and much less of the property is in 'beds' as opposed to 'fields' or gardens. Our fruit trees and garden take a ton of time, but that's not part of what most people have as yard work. A small raised bed, once built, is much less work if you want a few tomato plants or something like that.

I'm starting to plan 9th for my younger, and it's such a different situation than with my older! They have such different personalities and interests and struggles. For this kid, I'll be outsourcing most classes. This is definitely NOT what I did with my older, and isn't really my vision of homeschooling, but I think it's what needs to happen for this kid. So, I'm waiting on next year's co-op schedule to come out to see how classes will fit together there. I'm hoping that the schedule will work such that we can do biology, English, French, and geography/world history there. Some of these are available online if necessary, but that's definitely not preferable for this student. Then we'll sprinkle in whatever electives fit - it's unpredictable what is offered, but there are things to fulfill requirements for health, personal finance, fine arts, etc, so I'll have to see. Geometry will likely be Derek Owens. Kid may fulfill some of the easy things like personal finance over the summer with Fundafunda classes - most of these are taught by people that are local to us, and sometimes a couple of kids from co-op will decide to all take an online one together in the summer. Kid will probably knock out the PE requirement by tracking things like volleyball camp and extra karate (above and beyond the general extracurricular amount since kid takes extra classes in the summer). For extracurriculars, kid has violin, science olympiad, karate, and volleyball plus youth. This kid is super smart but struggles with time management and I have concerns that the high school workload is going to hit like a ton of bricks. Extracurriculars add some structure and incentive to get work done, so even though ti seems overly busy we find that it's hard to get kid to focus when there is 'too much' free time. It is quite the learning experience having kids who are not like you. Updated with specifics: Co-op for English, French, Biology (my class), Geography/World History, 1/2 credit of personal finance, also taking ballroom, which may count towards PE or Fine Arts, Derek Owens Geometry, PE and Bible at home

I'll have my first senior next year! It's weird because I usually start making a general plan at this time of year, when I have the Februaries, and then finalize it in March when the co-op schedule comes out and I figure out which classes we'll do at co-op and which we'll do at home. But, my older has mostly decided that next year's academic classes should either be for college credit or else be something interesting that we DIY. There is the possibility that kid will choose to take something fun, like chess or ballroom dance, at co-op with friends but it may or may not fit with the DE schedule. Kid only needs 1/2 credit of Bible and 1/2 credit of English to graduate. We can't decide exactly what to do for English and math until we have AP scores. Kid is doing Calc BC and Engl Lang this year, and if kid gets a 5 then kid will start with the 3rd calculus and a 200 level English class. If kid scores lower, then kid will probably start in the 2nd calculus and the second course of the freshman English sequence. Science will be the first physics with calculus DE course. It may be that kid does calculus the first semester and physics the second, both the spread the math around and also because kid does quiz bowl (that show that PBS does) and will have to participate a couple of mornings in the fall. We'll have to look at the lab schedule, but between those mornings and after school baseball practice, it may be easier to schedule the lab in the spring. We'll look at the social science requirements for kid's preferred colleges when choosing this. Kid did a DE psychology last semester, and depending on whether the colleges want depth (upper level courses in one field) or breadth (a sampling of psych, soc, econ, and/or history) then kid will make a choice based on what will count and looks interesting. We'll likely do a 1/2 credit of Bible at home, and may do 1/2 credit of AoPS - we have the book to do the second Counting and Probability. Kid may choose to do something with coding, but it's likely to be DIY since nothing at the CC transfers or looks interesting and this is spouse's field. This feels crazy light after years of doing 8 credits each year, and kid may choose to take something else, but those 6 credits may be it. But, kid also likes to read, and if there is more time then I'll probably leave an assortment of interesting books sitting around, and if kid reads them then I may turn that into a credit. I wish I could figure out how to create a yearly 1/2 credit of 'nonfiction books that are interesting and make you better informed' for this kid. I buy books to read to incorporate into classes or just for interest and kid plows through them when there is time. Kid will hopefully continue with quiz bowl, science olympiad, baseball, and earning their Eagle scout rank. Kid will probably try to get college applications done early. Kid isn't interested in super-competitive schools, and since some have early acceptance dates it would make life less stressful if we knew something from some of them in December. I'm not sure about summer. Kid has expressed interest in working at some baseball tournaments - kid usually plays in weekend ones but there are some that run Th/F and kid could work at those and then play on the weekend. That would be a great summer job and would let kid do the Eagle work and maybe get that mostly done over the summer? This is kid's busiest time of year, with baseball starting and science olympiad preparing for the state competition after winning at regionals. So, it'll be a bit before kiddo has time to give serious thought to what comes next.

If it lingers with no fever, also consider benedryl. It's been unusually warm and wet in my part of the south, so the folks with allergies are having some issues at a time of year that usually is OK.

To answer your second question, no, it's not unusual for kids to take all advanced classes. Some schools have 'advanced' as just college prep, while in other schools the advanced track is AP, which takes more time than college prep. If advanced just means college prep, then I'd imagine that lots of kids take all advanced. If advanced means AP or IB, then there are some who will take all AP and many will take some AP and some college prep. Some schools are highly competitive and offer tons of AP classes, while other schools only offer a handfull so it's hard to say what kids 'usually' do.

Advanced math kids often take algebra in 8th, but plenty of kids take it in 9th. If she isn't interested in a mathy field, I'd have her do Alg, Geometry, Alg. 2, and then maybe statistics if it's available, or precal if it's not. If she wants to 'catch up' with some of her classmates, is there an option to take geometry in summer school? Alternatively, she could continue along her current track and then possibly do DE for precal and calc or stats her senior year. She'd be taking an extra math credit, but it would let her achieve whatever goal she's set for herself. One of our friends did that - a 1-semester precal followed by 1 semester of calc. As for the perfectionism, I'd say that's not ideal. Maybe she's just that way right now because she feels like the regular classes should be easy and she needs to prove something, and it will settle down next year in the advanced classes? Or maybe it's the local school culture? It's hard to know.

From what my kids tell me, Scratch is an easier language - a lot of kids do it in early middle school. My kids did Fundafunda's scratch in middle school and then my older did python in...I think 9th grade.

Just talked to spouse, who is a computer engineer and is familiar with CS. His take - that associates would give a unique skill set and perspective so might be useful in that regard, but is unlikely to knock much time off because those classes aren't part of the CS core requirements. They might cover a requirement here and there or fulfill a CS elective, but they aren't likely to knock out the first year of classes or anything like that.