While at this point I'm not sure anything short of a study where they put 10,000 people without covid in an enclosed space for 8 hours with a bunch of covid positive people and gave half of them masks and half of them nothing (which, obviously, isn't going to happen) would convince those who are still mask skeptics...here's an interesting report from the CDC that showed a 37% reduction in cases in schools that required teachers and staff to mask vs. those that didn't. Improved ventilation was similarly helpful (39% reduction). Interestingly, they didn't see the same reduction when student masking was required. I would guess that's because they only looked at K-5, so generally kids under 10 who seem to spread covid at a much lower rate than older kids and adults. (I saw another report recently that showed that it was considerably more common for teachers to spread to students than the other way around, although there were cases of both). I'd love to see a report on high schools and/or middle schools to see how they compared. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e1.htm?s_cid=mm7021e1_w

oh, good! I mostly know about booking campgrounds, and those are increasingly impossible at popular RVing destinations.

Just noticed that you said this summer....you may run into trouble booking stuff this late for this summer. A lot of places always book up early, and it's likely to be a very big year for places like Yellowstone since so many people are still staying in the US and looking for outdoorsy stuff (and making up for canceled trips last year). On the other hand, Yellowstone gets a ton of visitors from overseas, too, so it might be mitigated somewhat by fewer international tourists. But even in a normal year places book early.

We went four years ago in mid-June. I think we had 5 full days, one of which got eaten up taking my youngest to the only doctor in West Yellowstone (or within an hour or so of West Yellowstone, for that matter, as I recall). We had our travel trailer with us, so we split our time between Fishing Bridge inside the park and Grizzly RV (they also have cabins, I believe) in West Yellowstone, right outside the west entrance. We roughly split the park into quarters and did the northwest one day, northeast another day, southeast one day, etc. We certainly didn't see the whole park, but we hit a lot of highlights. General advice: it really is crowded in season. I thought, "it's in the middle of nowhere, and I've been to Disney World. How crowded can it be?" But, no, it's really crowded. So get to the big places early in the day if you can. It's huge. You'll do a ton of driving. But it's very pretty driving. It's overwhelmingly big and there's an overwhelming amount of planning information out there, but it's actually a fairly easy park to plan an itinerary for because it's all pretty nicely laid out, with visitors center along the loop road near all the biggest attractions. West Yellowstone is a really nice little town. If you have time to see Grand Teton, too, do that--it's not far away, and it's beautiful and a very different vibe from Yellowstone. Like if I had a week, I'd give 2 days to the Tetons. My blog in my signature has several Yellowstone posts if you want to hear me blather on about it a lot more.

yep--I saw it! I responded to the moderna one for me 🙂

It's a full length test, but some of them are different from the paper test; it just depends on the subject. Like APUSH will have no long essay and extra short answer questions.

I'm in planning mode this weekend, it seems. I need economics for my 12th and 10th graders next year--just 1/2 credit, nothing too intense. My oldest used a Great Courses class, supplemented with Planet Money and some Khan stuff. The Great Courses was fine (a bit center right for my tastes, but fine), but it was already outdated 2 years ago so it's even more so now. I noticed there's a Paul Krugman masterclass on economics. Who's used Masterclass stuff for high school credit? Is it...academic enough? Or does real learning require that cheesy Great Courses studio and professors awkwardly looking from camera to camera?

I just put weighted, with a key at the bottom specifying grading scale and that I added .5 for honors and 1.0 for AP and DE (I tried to keep it the same as what our local public schools do)

This is what it looked like on my oldest's transcript, btw:

I did; I added a key at the bottom that said which classes came from where. We didn't have that many different places, though...I think I'd still have included them, but I guess you could just talk about it elsewhere in the application (in your course descriptions) for non DE classes. But having it on the transcript makes it clear which grades are from you and which are from someone else.

Still waiting here; we got stuck doing the June online ones.

You guys have gotten me excited about some kind of physics of music class (perhaps despite my better judgement). When I suggested it to DS, he said, "I don't really like science." So that was encouraging 😉 But I pointed out that the choice is likely between a physics of music class or a regular old physics class, and he got slightly more interested. I need to look around a little more, but at the moment I'm leaning toward having him take the local, likely pretty basic class that's probably going to be offered in the fall and supplementing with other stuff to make it a full credit. I would like for him to be able to do some in person classes and labs, since he missed out on all of that this year. He sounded fairly interested in the ASU astronomy class, too @fourisenough...so we'll keep that on the list, too. Do you happen to know if it's a synchronous class or not? I couldn't figure it out from the website.

It's true. I just know my own track record with trying to teach or facilitate science at home, and it's....not great. It's really just the one thing I don't want to be in charge of, and somehow I keep ending up in charge of it anyway.

I could...I'm just worried it wouldn't actually get done with as busy as he'll be next year. But maybe we could be very disciplined! I had very grand plans for a history of baseball elective with my last senior, and...well. We don't know much more about the history of baseball now than we did when we first started planning the class. ETA: the book looks really cool, though. And says it has projects. Fun! I WANT to be the homeschooler who designs amazing, creative classes, but in reality I seem to the kind who's good at finding fun movies to watch while we do a fairly standard history class. Also I make everyone talk about poetry way more than most kids have to.

Some state legislation passed recently that limited our DE options some (at least the ones that the state will pay for)...the U where he does DE really doesn't have many options that are both open to DE students and that he has the prereqs for. I was just looking today and not seeing much at all that looked possible/appealing.

It really is mostly just time/scheduling that's holding me back from having him do more physics DE. But I need to get him to look at the course schedule for fall; mostly I'm just trying to keep everything to T/Th fall semester so we have plenty of time for travel on long weekends (and then be done with DE by spring when auditions will happen)...it might well be possible to do that and still get the lab scheduled. Another option is to do AP physics 2 at home (we used the physics-prep.com course this year, and they have the same thing for physics 2). Which he wouldn't love, but it would definitely be doable.

Everywhere he's looking he'll need to audition into the music school in addition to being admitted to the college; they're all schools that have a conservatory style music school within a college or university.

Thanks! He was supposed to take a DE geology class this year, and then...pandemic. I just looked, and it doesn't seem like it's being offered DE anymore--which is too bad because he'd probably enjoy it. As far as academically competitive schools go, he's probably applying to Vanderbilt, and then definitely to Oberlin and Bard--I'm fairly certain he'll be fine at Oberlin and Bard and that it's the clarinet part he needs to worry about...I'm not positive how true that would be at Vanderbilt (which might actually be the easiest of the three for clarinet). I'd love to find a music-science elective--thanks for the link to that one--I hadn't seen it! A local co-op will likely be offering a physics of music class, too, but it's only 6-8 weeks and it says it assumes no previous music or physics experience, so it might well be too light. That sounds awesome! I need the professor to send me a syllabus, though (or just offer to teach him over zoom 😉 )--I'd love something like that for him, but I am absolutely not up for putting it together myself! This is why science always breaks down; between me and my husband we've got humanities and math covered, languages are easy to outsource, but science always causes trouble. Every year I think I finally have it figured out, and every year something messes it up.

Trying to figure out science is going to finally kill me one of these days. I HATE it, and it never works out the way it's supposed to. Anyway. My rising senior is planning to apply as a clarinet performance major next year, and I'm fairly certain that's not going to change. So my understanding is that, generally speaking, his audition is going to matter more than anything else, and if the clarinet prof wants him he'll probably get in as long as he's reasonably academically prepared. But some of the schools are pretty to very selective, so I want to make sure we avoid any academic red flags. Vanderbilt's the one I'm most worried about with this. So--science. We did biology at home his 9th grade year and he has a decent but not incredible subject test score he can submit for that (I can't remember what it was exactly--high 600s). He took chemistry at a homeschool co-op in 10th. He's doing AP Physics 1 this year and taking the AP exam in June. It's a self-paced course that he's pretty much doing on his own, so I don't have a great idea of how that's going to go, but he seems fairly confident about the practice problems he's been doing, so I would be very surprised if he didn't get at least a 3, and if I had to guess I'd bet on a 4. What next? He could do another physics DE (assuming, I think, that he gets at least a 3 on the AP exam), but does he need to? He'd rather not, and I was hoping to leave his schedule next year as flexible as possible to make time for college visits, auditions, and plenty of time getting ready for auditions. college lab science classes and a flexible schedule don't go together super well, IME. Should he just do something elective-y next year instead? (what?!) His science is already relatively light (it's the only place that is, particularly: he's doing calc AB this year and will take statistics DE in the fall. He'll graduate with 4-5 social science AP classes (and that's the area he's most interested in aside from music). He has 4 spanish credits already, including 2 DE), but I'm not sure if it really matters given that he's going to major in music.

Science was probably the weakest part of my oldest's transcript. He had physical science in 9th grade at a co-op, too, and then he did chemistry at the same place, two semesters of college physics DE (one algebra based and one calc based), and bio we just did at home his senior year after running into problems with every plan to do it elsewhere. It was very much not AP biology. He did well with admissions and got into some very selective schools, so it doesn't seem to have been a problem. He's a math major, but I don't think he applied anywhere where you had to apply as a particular major, so I don't know if that mattered much. So I don't think it hurt him with admissions (he had several other AP scores and lots of DE), but we also weren't worried about it putting him behind in college classes, since he had no interest at all in taking more biology or anything that would require biology in college.

I had my first 3 in 4 1/2 years and then my last 7 years later. It's definitely challenging in a lot of the ways other people have mentioned. My first three are a tight little pack with a lot of common interests (my middle two especially are total BFFs and always together). I thought maybe trailing so far behind would make for a kid who was good at entertaining himself, but the opposite has been true. Which is taxing for all of us. So he always wants a parent or older brother to be interacting with him, and he also can have trouble relating to kids his own age; he'll yammer on and on to adults he's just met, but is very shy with other kids. BUT he's also a great kid; can't imagine the family without him, I'm so glad there'll be a kid at home when his brothers are all gone in a few years (although the dynamic of having just one kid will undoubtably be weird), and his brothers are usually great with him. I get a lot of joy out of watching them together. I worry that he's getting such a different experience growing up than his brothers have, but it's not really better or worse--just different. He doesn't have a built in set of friends, but he does have more patient, less overwhelmed parents. For example.

I wish they'd say what the percentage was for people who aren't vaccinated!

Right--I'll make it easy for you, schools: 0% of the elementary school students have been vaccinated, so 100% of them should still be wearing masks. Part of the announcement was bragging that 80% of staff that responded to a survey they sent out have been vaccinated. Clearly they deliberately pushed it back to after school was out so that it wouldn't matter that much (is there in person summer school for elementary students? I don't know), but it would be nice if for once they just had the courage to say, "we're sticking with CDC guidelines, because we think they're a better source of information than the random angry parents who are making our lives difficult right now."

Our county just called it: masks recommended instead of required for schools as of June 1, because with the new CDC guidance it would be "impractical" to try to figure out who's vaccinated and who's not. Or they could, you know, just keep following the CDC guidelines for schools, which the CDC says haven't changed. School's out before June 1, so I don't really have it in me to get that worked up, but the willful ignorance drives me a bit crazy: "what could we DO?! The CDC made us do it!" It's the county the CDC is literally located in, so if they didn't see this kind of thing coming, they really should have.

Wonder if this the sort of reaction the CDC was hoping for: https://www.ajc.com/news/anti-mask-crowd-disrupts-gwinnett-school-board-meeting/IYO7R6GHJ5DTLEFCQHER7V3GBA/ nice work, folks: