Locally, kids start staying home between 10-12, depending on the kid and length of time. One of mine would have been able to do school work while home alone. The other might or might not have done anything productive but enjoyed being independent. I did have stretches where I would leave mine home alone but not together due to potential for conflict.

One other challenge for these kiddos is their level of distraction. I taught a study skills class for 8-9th graders. I asked how long they could focus, and many insisted it was over an hour when I suggested studying intently for 20 minutes. When I asked how frequently they were disrupted by a text or notification of some sort, some replied Around 20 times an hour. They didn't feel that they needed to disconnect for bursts to be productive. I can't imagine learning when being interrupted every few minutes. I remember teens insisting that we could study while watching tv, but we learned that we couldn't and turned it off. They never take off their smart watch. The degree of phone attachment and expectations around response times seem to differ significantly between different social groups.

I think it's awful to spend a lot of time teaching young kids about things that they can't do anything to help solve. Lots of people, kids included, face real world stresses that they can't avoid or change (a loved one's illness or death, parental divorce, mistreatment by somebody, not being able to afford what a friend can, being academically behind, or too tall or too short or otherwise looking different from everybody else). We need to help them to deal with that rather than pile more on them. When you are 5 or 8, you can't do anything about pollution or systemic racism. But, you can make your community better by being less wasteful, not taking more than you need, not littering, picking up trash, being a good friend, welcoming a new kid, or some other kid-sized thing. Let them make a difference, and maybe they'll be be able to handle bigger challenges. I have a friend who had her kids at a private school K-8 specifically because they let kids be kids around all sorts of issues. They were aware of them, as were we when I was a kid, but they weren't presented as problems for us to solve, and I think that's a difference. I think that some of the things being discussed - overwhelming kids with adult issues, shooter drills, etc - can be issues on a societal level but I don't think they are what is affecting the kids in my classroom. I'm not even sure they are primary drivers of the lack of 'want to' that I see locally, just knowing the culture. But, I wonder if it's dramatic enough in some environments that it's setting the tone for teens as far as what they see on youtube or wherever they watch content. The stress, or apathy, is setting the tone for what 'normal' is in the same way that Teen magazine used to tell us what to wear. My kid who plays ball on a public school team, one of the motivated seniors that I was talking about, said that after AP exam scores came out and the kids didn't pass, they said that they didn't expect to - they had taken the class first semester on block scheduling, and the teacher didn't do anything to help them refresh second semester. My kid was incredulous - there are free videos on the college board website, and prep books at the library. One other thing that I'm seeing some of is that kids who don't have a ton of life experience are watching videos and then ascribing motives and diagnoses to other people. Their parent or teacher isn't just 'mean' (and by mean I mean saying no in a normal adult way), they are a narcissist. They aren't just upset because a sibling said something mean, they have trauma. Teens tend to be dramatic with emotions, but this vocabulary is causing some kids to take normal frustrations and upsets and believe that horrible things have happened to them. This is not to say that nobody deals with trauma or a narcissist parent, but most kids don't. I don't think that it's helpful for kids to tell themself that upsetting situations that in the past kids would have fretted over and then gotten over are going to cause them life-long trauma. But, they don't have the wisdom and perspective to recognize that the situation is part of normal life, because how could they? I wonder if this framing is causing similar 'under attack' feelings that were being talked about above in the active shooter drills. And, once the adults are framed as unreasonable, there's less incentive to take guidance from them - their suggestion to watch a video or ask for help or use a glossary is part of the same unreasonableness.

Facebook keeps feeding me ads for maternity wear. I'm closing in on 50 and my kids are teens. It's a lot cuter than what was available when I needed maternity wear, but not enticing enough for me to have another kid just to be able to wear it. I also get ads for baby toys. Maybe I watch reels with babies in them? Other than helping in the nursery at church sometimes, I don't have any babies in my orbit right now so it's weird. The ads for lands end or ll bean clothes seem much more appropriately targeted.

I think the struggle that I'm having with this discussion is that the things that I'm talking about are changes over the 12 years that I've taught, not from decades ago, or in a different setting. Some of the students are younger siblings of previous students. Multiple long-time teachers at our co-op are having the same struggles. We are trying to figure out if it's a cohort effect - that this group of students is reinforcing each others' behavior - or if there is some other influence causing it (videos they are sharing, attitudes on a TV show, etc). I have often had students who didn't find particular classes or subjects interesting, and some who didn't like school and focused on art or learning a trade. I've never, until this year, had discussions with students in which they said that they didn't want to have to learn anything and they just wanted to sit around listening to Taylor Swift. Several of the moms have discussed the fact that the kids will come to us and say 'I don't know what 'autosomal' means' and the moms will ask if they've checked their notes, looked in the glossary or index, etc. These are kids who are smart and capable, but they tend to think that if they don't remember it from classroom discussion, then it probably wasn't mentioned. Parents are working on it, but 'I don't know the definition for a vocabulary word' is not the kind of problem that most neurotypical teens need coaching on how to solve, and if so they don't continue to have that struggle all year. It's not learned helplessness and it's not neglect, in that most parents don't indulge it and do coach through it, and the kids ultimately end up doing the work. But, it's a new thing to have happening with more than the occasional student. In the first 3 weeks of class, I answered the question 'Do we need to write this down?' with 'If I write it on the board, it's important enough to write down' multiple times each class, because multiple students thought that they shouldn't have to do that much writing. Several refuse to take notes, taking pictures of the board after I write whatever I'm writing. I have occasionally had a student with a diagnosis of some sort ask to do this, but I wouldn't expect that 1/3 of the class has dyslexia or other issue that makes writing a challenge. Of course, not writing makes it even less likely that they'll remember anything. Even the ballroom dance teacher is seeing changes in student learning and interactions between students - it's not just academic. Meanwhile, this year's soon-to-be graduates and the seniors from last year are almost the opposite. Not everybody - there's variation between students, and teens are teens - but it was much less common for kids to just throw up their hands rather than ask a question or open their book or check out Khan Academy. I have tentatively settled on the idea that group norms are the biggest influence with these kids. I'm struggling to believe that a bunch of homeschooling parents suddenly became neglectful. I know the families enough to know that in some cases other children in the same family have diagnoses (and usually workarounds, medication, or therapy if needed), so I wouldn't expect that neurodivergence is the primary driver of the difference with this group. What it seems like, as somebody who has watched it in my classroom and also who has kids in both of these groups, is that in one group being capable is cool - they happily help each other and will ask for help when needed, but mastering things is important to them, while in the other saying 'It's impossible' is cool. In both groups, being sleep-deprived and being busy are part of the one-upmanship game for some teens, as it has been since I was in high school, so the groups are similar in other ways. So, I read the OP in light of those observations. I think that when I was a student we would have helped a kid who actually struggled to manage their lock, as we did with a couple of kids who had challenges in other areas, but we also would have looked askance at a kid who was an 'average kid' who just decided that it was too hard to learn. One of us would have said 'Come on, we'll practice after school' and we would have done that because we wouldn't have wanted a friend to be unable to manage this task. That's what I think the current crop of seniors at co-op would do, too. But, with the younger group...I think kids would be much more likely to say that it's too hard, and once a couple of the kids did it then likely several of them would follow suit. A couple of kids who don't say that the work is impossible - who have more of the mindset of the older kids - sometimes snark back at the the complaints, and they are considered judgey...which at this point they kind of are, but I think that it reinforces the dynamic even more. These are good kids, and I care about them. I've known some of these families for years. It's hard to watch them set themselves up to see challenge as impossible. I hate watching them not learn things, because while none of us know their likely life paths, I am guessing that they will be better served with basic academic knowledge, writing ability, and math skills. These kids aren't any less capable than the seniors were at their age, and we are working to figure out how to help them build confidence and learn skills. A couple of the teachers are working on it in different ways.

I don't have notetaking templates. Most weeks there's a weekly homework that aligns with the videos. The text is a reference, and some students read all of the chapters that align with the syllabus while others never open the book. There isn't a choice of assignments - each week has a homework and short quiz, and then there are small projects that go with each section to help students spend enough time with the material that they actually learn it. Thanks for tagging me!

My experience with the teens that I teach is almost the exact opposite of that. Parents and teachers are making repeated offers to help kids figure out all sorts of things and a portion of the kids act as if anything that they don't get the first time around is too hard for them to learn. The kids who take advantage of the offers are light years ahead of where many of us adults were at their age. But, it seems like there are also more kids that in the past who apply the 'I don't need to know that' that some kids have always said about a disliked academic subject to everyday life skills. One friend commented on the number of teens who would hang with her kids and couldn't fix themselves a snack or simple meal. I have more kids struggling to use the Canvas platform that I've taught with for the past several years - I offer to help repeatedly, but a month into the semester I'll hear from a parent that their kid never figured out how to submit assignments or find the videos. I'm not sure where it comes from, since I hadn't seen it before this year, but several of the kids seem to think that if they don't understand the material when they leave class (after hearing it once) then it's too hard. I'm working hard to teach them that they need to practice it at home, whether that means read or study or listen to a video, because very few of us understand complicated ideas after hearing them once.

I don't tell my kids that they can figure everything out on their own, but I try to teach that they have the ability to get things done. Like, when something needs to be assembled, I'm confident that I can figure it out on my own following the directions. But, if for whatever reason you aren't built to be able to figure out that sort of thing, that's Ok - what you need to do is figure out how to get the thing built. That may mean that you have to pay somebody to do it. It may mean that you swap tasks with a friend - they build your bookcase, you cook them dinner. It may mean that you know who in your family can do that sort of thing because family helps family. It all depends on your situation. But, I don't want them sitting around saying 'I wish I had a bookcase and I can afford this kit but there's no way for me to get it together'. I also don't want them to limit themselves by putting lots of things in the 'I can't do that' category. I tend to think that many people can do a lot of things, but it's reasonable to decide if DIY is the most efficient way to do something. I have a memory of my dad wanting me to learn to help with something and me saying that I'd never need to know how to do that and him replying that you never knew what you'd need to know so if the opportunity presented itself, learn it. Somewhere along the line, I also learned that the more I know, the bigger my world gets. Even in small things...in the past few years, I've learned to run the scoreboard at the ball field and run the stat programs for both baseball and volleyball. I've learned to use the teacher side of Canvas for my class. I've learned to use our new large riding lawnmower and hook the wagon up to it to haul stuff around the yard. I've learned to grow and cook with fresh herbs. None of these are huge things, but I like that I've been able to help my kids' teams, make my class more accessible to students, and help out the family by doing new things around the house. There are things that I outsource to my husband or other people, but I think of them as things that I don't know how to do, not things that I can't do if I ever need to learn how to do them. And, being willing to ask for help is huge. Most of the things that I've learned to do involved me sitting beside somebody and saying 'teach me how to do this', or me playing around with it and then asking for help when I got stuck. When I was an undergrad, one of the grad students said that he liked having me work on his project because I'd ask for help instead of screwing things up because I was too embarrassed to ask. It turns out that this is true for a lot of people, not just grumpy grad students - they are happy to have help, and if you are willing to work they are happy to teach. I'm rambling a bit, but what I sometimes see is not people who can't figure things out, but people who are unwilling to learn even when somebody is willing to teach them. I hate to see people do this when they are young because life throws all sorts of problems at you, and knowing things and having the confidence that you can learn to do more things can be really helpful.

I asked my kid if his teammates ever talked about using lockers (homeschool kid on a public school ball team). He said that when he said something about lockers they said 'oh, yeah, we have those...' in a way that implied that they rarely used them. But, on block schedules they only have 4 classes and 1 is usually PE or study hall, so only 3 books to carry around if they ever actually use books. They also tend to leave their stuff in the baseball clubhouse, which has open 'lockers' but also only ball players use it. They may steal your snickers and drink your water, but your coat or backpack is safe. 🙂 I tend to tell my kids that I don't want to hear complaints about fixable problems - I don't tell other people's kids that, but with my own I'd tell them that they have a choice - learn the locker combo or carry stuff - but make their decision and be quietly ok with it. I, too, am flummoxed that so many people have struggled so much with lockers, just because I don't know anybody who couldn't open them when we were in school. We practiced in 6th grade when we first got them, and then everybody used them. In some schools we had our own locks, and in others the locks were built in. If you buy a lock, it comes with directions, and it's not hard to find directions online, so poor directions don't seem like an insurmountable problem. My kid had one for his footlocker at scout camp so he learned in elementary school. For my last year or 2 of school, my boyfriend and I had lockers on opposite sides of the building so we knew the combination to both and used what made sense. At our co-op the chemical cabinets in the 2 science rooms have locks, so I open a combination lock every time I do a lab. While this wouldn't be a hill to die on, I try to send my kids out into the world with as many skills as possible and also with the knowledge that they can figure out things, even if they have to look it up or practice at home. Barring a disability of some sort, I'd be wanting them to practice this at home in case they ever needed to know. It was less awkward to learn to open a lock at home as a teen than it would have been to have no idea what to do when I took the co-op job and was handed the combination to the lock.

AI cheating is hard to prove in many instances, so giving a bad grade for poor writing or not following instructions is sometimes the path of least resistance. It doesn't reward the cheating, but it has less risk of pushback.

My older has taken DE classes online (and in person) and says that some online ones seem designed to encourage cheating - online texts so that they are easily searchable during quizzes and tests, for instance. The online classes are used at the public high school and kid's teammates imply that cheating like that is rampant. They seem to know it's wrong, but there is also some sense that if anybody really cared they'd make it harder to do. And, since the oline STEM classes had things like proctored tests in the testing center or formats that made cheating harder, I can see their point. I've always avoided that by asking open-ended questions, but now students just type them into AI, where it is much harder to prove cheating even though it is sometimes obvious when some questions are answered at a grad school level while others are answered in text-speak. I have several concerns that are bigger than the academic question of cheating. -If people don't know anything, they have no way to know when AI is feeding them nonsense. There are a lot of false statements in AI - Matt Taibbi has an article about AI claiming that he wrote a book that he hasn't written and Jonathan Turley has written about a sexual harassment allegation that never happened, for instance. For now, teachers will catch some AI cheating because the answer will contain things that aren't true. -Lack of knowledge because you can just ask siri greatly reduces the number of people who can innovate, even on a small scale, since innovation comes when people apply what they know to a new problem. If you don't know anything, it's hard to apply it. Obviously the internet also allows people to search for information that would have been hard to find in the past, but a lot of kids are just passive consumers of the internet rather than people who can dig around and find things...and they need enough knowledge to know what to look for. I've forgotten all sorts of biology information, but I remember enough to be able to find it again. Students don't know that there are answers to some questions and say 'it would be cool if we knew...' and I have to tell them 'We do know - I mean, I don't have it in my head right now, but I can find that answer!'.

We know several people who use 2-3 day/week hybrid schools. Some of them call it 'sort-of homeschooling' or 'not really homeschooling', so they definitely see a difference between that and more traditional homeschooling. There are some CC groups, and in the facebook for the area I see people recommend Acellus and similar programs. But, among most people that we know families do things at home or mix-and-match various things. Part of that is probably because our co-op, which is a once/week a la carte program, offers only enrichment classes for K-5. Every now and then somebody new will ask about offering phonics or some other core class and the leadership responds that core elementary classes can't be taught once/week so families need to take ownership of those things. In middle and high school we have a mix of core and enrichment, with some families choosing to take many core classes, others choosing mostly enrichment, and others choosing a mix. I've done different things with my 2 kids because they are so different. My older ( a senior) has done many home-designed interest-based classes. i outsourced foreign language and English because I knew we had co-op teachers who were passionate about their subjects, and kid loved their classes. Kid took a smattering of other academic classes but also great enrichment classes. Sometimes enrichment classes get turned into a credit - ballroom dance counted as fine arts for one kid, and PE for the other. Others, like chess, were just for fun. This kid also self-studied for several APs and has taken several DE courses. Every year we sat down together and talked about what to do for various subject areas and asked what would be interesting to do for electives, while I made sure that we checked boxes for our umbrella. My younger will be taking more core classes at co-op and has used Derek Owens for math. This isn't because I doubt my ability to teach - it's because this kid has some struggles that make it better for our family if most deadlines and grades come from somebody other than me. I wish it were different, but its not. My younger has encountered a kid on the club volleyball team who says that they are homeschooled but use an online program that only takes an hour a day. Even my kid who fights school has said 'That's not real homeschooling' and believes that's a ridiculously small amount of work. My kids have worked hard enough and learned enough that they don't like people thinking that their day looks like that. We have been so fortunate to get no pushback from anybody - kids on ball teams ask curiosity questions, but nobody seems to believe that they aren't learning - that they don't want other people getting the impression that homeschooling means 'no work'.

I had heard that UA-Huntsville was challenging for homeschoolers. But, because we had an umbrella (a local private school that is very hands-off - I actually wrote all of the counselor materials for my kid), I could submit their transcript and didn't have to jump through any homeschool hoops. It was well worth the yearly fee.

Some of us who have always lived in heat think the south has the better weather. 😀

I chose not to count any credits before high school, although they are listed as 'courses taken prior to 9th grade' because kid did some cool things like Number Theory. My older did 8/year for the first 3 years of high school. Then there was 1 DE over the summer and 3 in the fall of senior year. It was challenging - kid was taking Calc 3, Physics with Calc1, and British Lit, all online because of scheduling. The platforms and class design was not easy, and although kid did well it was a lot. So, this spring kid is doing 1 DE in person, and everything else at home. It will end up being 4 credits this spring, too, for a total of 32. My younger will likely not have as many. Kid is in 9th grade and will have 7.5 this year - the 4 core, foreign language, and then 1 credit PE and 1/2 credit each of fine arts, personal finance (required), and Bible. We will probably do Bible (required by umbrella) and fine arts (music lessons) every year. I try to knock out as many of the weird requirements in the first 2 years as I can, but this kid won't be taking cool electives to get that extra 1/2 or 1 credit. But, this student also doesn't like school but needs a college degree for their current preferred career path. This student doesn't like the idea of AP, but may choose to do DE in order to get through college more quickly. If that is the case, then credits could pile up more quickly.

That sounds very familiar. My kids definitely did not play with the same toys in the same ways. Both do sports, both do academic competitions, and we encourage them to do whatever interests them. I remember once when my preschool boy was laying on the floor pushing cars back and forth and my mom smiled and said that girls never play like that...and I realized that, while it's a stereotype, it is much more common to see that among boys. Many evenings, both kids barge in the door at the same time and want to tell me about ball practice. One says 'Teammate got frustrated and the coach said...' and the other says 'Teammate made a great play doing X but struggled with Y'. In other words, one tells me about the people/relationships and the other gives a play by play. They get the same questions from me - how was practice, what did coach say, did anything go well/badly, etc. I get totally different information from each, though, and it fits the stereotypes.

I remember doing a career test in high school and it sorted kids into whether they were interested in ideas, people, or things. I'd guess that girls orient more to people while boys tend towards things. It may be nurture or innate. Watching how differently even little kids play on average, I'd bet there is some innate tendency in the mix, but nothing deterministic.

I don't see that with math here - we run in homeschool circles, but with science and math there doesn't seem to be a huge sex gap. For algebra classes at co-op, the girls are more often than not the better students. But, early on (middle school) there is a skew of the girls towards bio sci. When kids choose science olympiad events, the girls disproportionately request anatomy, epidemiology, genetics, or cell biology and boys disproportionately request astronomy and circuits. Epidemiology has math (especially at the levels of middle schoolers). but it doesn't seem to be a deterrent. But, the kids that are several years ahead in math (have taken calc 2 or 3 in high school) are disproportionately male. And, as to your other post - I agree. I kind of talked around it, but many scientists and engineers live and breathe work, especially at the PhD level. I know that he's a controversial figure, but I remember a talk where Jordan Peterson said that in counseling lawyers he found that men and women succeed equally at moving up the chain in big law until they turned 30, at which point women were more likely to decide that they wanted their life to be more than work. It wasn't different abilities or overt discrimination, it was different priorities. I think it's true in research, too. Spouse and I both earned PhDs and were successful in our fields. But, at some point I realized that I had no desire to spend the rest of my life absorbed in research. If I could have done it as a 10 hour/week part-time gig when I had little kids, I might have kept at it. But, it's all or nothing, so nothing it is. And, it turns out that I love teaching (which I could do part-time - I taught 1 CC class a semester for several years). And teaching led me to homeschooling, which has led to me volunteering...and it's a bit of 'if you give a mouse a cookie' but seeing what was missing in my college student's education has made me passionate about elementary education and I'm looking for new volunteer work once my older graduates. But all of that is work that can be done part-time (whether paid or volunteer). I realized a long time ago that I would never want to put in the time and mental energy that spouse does - it was fun in our 20s, but isn't a lifestyle that I want. We know women who do, but there are fewer of them than there are men.

I don't tend to think it's a crisis if every field doesn't have equal male-female representation. I don't want artificial barriers to entry for either sex, but even if all things were equal I don't think that there is likely to be an equal division among career paths. All it takes is a few skewing events - if more women choose to be stay-at-home parents than men, and also more women choose careers involving children (such as teachers), then there are fewer women, relative to the number of men, who are left to work in engineering. And there are many fields where women outnumber men. One kid did a lot of speech therapy at a university where students were trained, and females outnumbered males by a wide margin in every class over the years that we were there. I would love to see more part-time opportunities, but there are also fields where I struggle to see how it would work. My college dorm room had 3 of us, and all 3 have STEM PhDs. All of us teach in varying capacities, because the hours are the easiest for working around with a family. When I left academic research after my postdoc, I thought about ways that research jobs could be turned to part-time, and I couldn't really see how it would work in most situations. People work long hours, and the job is hard to share. The physical work is easy enough - I often shared that with undergrads in training - but without somebody to spend time daily to assimilate all of the information into one brain, it would have been challenging to keep the project moving forward and catch all of the observations that need to be made (usually at least 1/4 of my time as a bench scientist was spent thinking and reading, and had I worked 1/2 of the hours and shared the job, we would both need to spend the same amount of time reading and thinking that I was doing). I feel like some areas of engineering tend to be that way, too. Many engineers spend a lot of time working to produce a product ASAP for a customer, and somebody working 1/2 time would take longer to do that. But, it's hard to spread the work out between people because one person has to know all of it to catch mistakes. It's not much different than a household in some ways - for any given 'project' at the house, either spouse and I are in charge of it because otherwise it would be challenging to get it all done. Usually only one of us plans a meal - we may leave directions for the other to put something in the oven at a particular time, but we aren't both just doing things at different times to work towards preparation with neither of us having planned and coordinated it. There may be solutions that work in some situations, but spouse and I have spent a lot of time talking about it in our different fields, and it would be hard. I do wonder if there could be openings for part-time work that is more erratic - hourly or 'by the piece' work, rather than a salaried part-time job. That might allow for part-time to mean 'work on this short-term project and then have a break when it's over' which could work better with the ebb and flow of schedules and also work for an engineering company's priorities. Or an hourly worker whose job didn't have a lot of promotion potential but could do certain parts of a project in a predictable amount of time so that the company could work around it and nobody else would be dependent on daily interactions - they're just waiting for a specific finished product. It also probably depends heavily on the type of engineering that one does. Spouse works on things that tend to be multi-year projects involving teams scattered across the country (and sometimes world). Lots of coordination, lots of travel and/or conference calls at odd hours across time zones, and no real 'end' to a project. On the other hand, a structural engineer can be working over a much shorter time frame. They may work on a big building project, or they may be assessing a house that was damaged by a fire. The fire might involve a day of a local visit and then however long it takes to crunch some numbers and write a report. It would be a lot easier to have that kind of work be part-time than what spouse does.

It's unfortunate that STEM is all lumped together. The bio sciences are heavily female, especially at the undergrad level. Even 30 years ago our starting grad school class in genetics had 3 males and 10 females. Engineering fields tend to be more male. I also think it's somewhat dependent on the community. We are in the middle of Science Olympiad and just tried a Science Bowl (a quiz bowl-like contest but hard core science). On our homeschool teams, the split is usually around 50-50, with just some variation from year to year. At other schools, the teams were sometimes highly skewed male or female, making me think it's mostly group dynamics.

Spouse and I both have STEM degrees (computer engineering with a math minor and biochem). At the time that we studied, I had a fairly high number of English and social science/humanities classes required (at least 2 English 200-level and above, a certain number of 300-level courses). Spouse had fewer hours, but had more specific requirements. There was a university-wide requirement for either tech writing or public speaking. We printed the degree plans for computer engineering at the schools kid is considering, and the requirements are similar between schools but somewhat different than what we took. Many schools require public speaking, and many have a list of courses in each of several categories and students must choose 1 or more from each category - global perspectives, multicultural requirement, etc. Some states require either US History or Western Civ for their public U students. Each prof and course can vary dramatically in how they assess students - 25-50 multiple choice questions, a test with short answers, analysis papers, weekly reflections, etc. The one private school that kid considered didn't require specific classes like Western Civ, but did have a fairly high number of humanities classes that had to be taken on campus (not DE) since they prioritized well-roundedness even though it was an engineering school (Rose-Hulman). My kid found that DE British Lit, Philosophy (ethics) and Psychology would fulfill requirements at some of kid's preferred schools (kid APd out of composition and US History). The classes didn't have huge writing requirements, but there were frequent reflection writings (sometimes posted on message boards) and some 2-3 page papers. British Lit, for example, required compare-contrast between 2 works of lit. Lab reports are very discipline-specific. Physics labs at the schools that we were involved in required more calculations and not a traditional report. Biology only had a handful of lab reports (but, at one school where I taught, the lab was reworked to have every-other-week lab reports). Chemistry (all of it - freshman, organic, quantitative analysis) required weekly lab reports. Biochem (400 level) only had a handful of lab reports each semester, but they could be 10+ pages long. The breakdowns could vary by school and which specific classes you take, but the point is that even within STEM there is a ton of variation. I second the idea of looking specifically at each school to see what supports are offered. We've heard of several schools that seem to focus on providing support for specific student issues - one does a fantastic job with dyslexia, others have great autism support, etc. This makes sense, in that it can be hard for a small school to have the resources to provide extensive help for a variety of needs. I would definitely check out multiple schools and not rule out big schools unless you feel that your student would be overwhelmed. I saw that one of kid's potential big state schools has a section of a dorm set aside for students on the spectrum - I'm not sure how many it can accommodate, but it was on the housing page where it listed other living-learning communities.

In both my family and my part of the country, old recipes stick around. There are lots of variations on 7-layer salad, but it's one of the dishes that my extended family requests that I bring to Thanksgiving. There was a restaurant nearby that served it as a main dish topped with grilled chicken (the restaurant burned down - otherwise it would still be serving it!). But, we still make deviled eggs, too. 🙂 A local tearoom offers deviled eggs, pear salad (a 1/2 canned pear with goop and a cherry in the divot), and a cherry jello salad among their side options, to accompany your chicken salad croissant or quiche. It's a popular ladies lunch spot.

Some of the kids that I volunteer with are taught this way - if they have 62 x 27 then they make a square that looks something like 60 2 20 7 and then they fill it in like a punnet square. I think it's a useful way for them to see what's happening, but they don't always seem to go back and show them how to do the algorithm and explain how it's the same thing, so kids continue to do this really inefficient method. They can make a bigger square and do hundreds. It is also a way of doing mental math, but the kids that I work with are often using a chart with the multiplication tables written on it to look up each step so definitely no mental math happening. They do something similar for division - each problem takes 1/3 of a page because they draw these big boxes and do something in each box.

I've been involved in several kinds. Sometimes it's just trying to help young kids with homework the same way that a parent might. Sometimes it's pulling kids out to start at the beginning, teaching phonics or arithmetic independent of the school assignment. Sometimes a person would want to work long term with 1-2 kids, helping them manage their algebra. I've seen kids make huge strides in after school programs, but nothing was offered to them in school. Schools say that they want volunteers, but across 2-3 states and 20 years I have not found that to be true.

I would encourage him to get the AS or do something that would earn a certificate so that he has a backup plan in case of injury. But, I wouldn't push a 4-year degree on a student at the end of that. I told both of my kids that I want them to have a plan for how to earn a living, but they don't need a 4-year degree unless the degree is required for the plan. If their choice had a risk of injury, I'd encourage a certificate in a related field. The learning would be useful for what they want to do, and the certificate would be a back-up plan.