I'm guessing there's some issue with the left hand side not being continuous when x<0 and somehow that makes Desmos 'forget' about x=0 being a solution? It might be better to coach in a situation like this to graph two equations 'y= \sqrt{2x+1}-\sqrt{x}' and 'y=1'. That will show you two intersection points (x=0 and x=4).

Just an update. My kid decided to stick with the class. For homework, they do some online work required for lab prep, read the chapter, make flashcards, and study the flashcards. It takes less than 6 hours a week, I'd say. The first of the five exams (four units exams and a final) is done, and they got a A. They also got an A on the first 2 of 10 quizzes. I'm really confused as to what the professor expects students to do for 10-15 hours outside of class (he's told the class that reading the chapter multiple times is not what they're supposed to do and won't help) and why he implies it is that hard to get a C.

So if, for example, my kid does AOPS for math, I shouldn't label it as honors unless I also provide honors level work for things like English and foreign languages? Does the same apply to AP? I'm comfortable teaching AP math and science, but I wouldn't be good at teaching, say APUSH. Does it look bad to have no AP humanities courses when there are AP STEM courses?

I've used some curricula that has called itself honors, and that's driving part of the question.

The oldest isn't currently looking at colleges that are too selective, but I have no idea about my middle child. Youngest is not yet in high school. I don't think any of them will be wanting highly rejective schools. It's probably less of a concern for admissions, and more for impact on potential merit aid.

For a college bound kid, how important is it to take honors vs non-honors courses? I'm not talking about GPA weighting (although I guess that would factor into the decision slightly). More about the in-depth/challenge level of honors vs non-honors. If you have a STEM kid, do they need honors humanities courses? If you have a humanities kid, do they need honors STEM courses? What if they're capable of those honors courses, but they really don't like them? Does the answer change if the kid will be chasing merit aid? If the kid starts out doing honors courses in a subject area, but asks to do less challenging/time consuming course, does it look bad to drop down to non-honors (for example, honors biology one year but non-honors chemistry the next)? In a situation like that, is it better to not label any of the courses in that sequence honors rather than have the drop in rigor?

Thanks, everyone! I'll pass these suggestions along to her.

A friend is pulling her 7th grader out of school because she feels the school is failing him. His handwriting is illegible, he can't write a coherent paragraph to save his life, spelling is below grade level. Remarkably, reading is fine. The school has not suggested there to be any learning disabilities. She asked for my help in finding a curriculum that isn't babyish, but will build from the ground up. I told her I would ask around, as it's been a while since I've covered paragraphs with my kids. I don't think she wants to prioritize grammar, unless people think it will help with writing. Any suggestions?

Would he be able to get a teacher to help put together a team at his school? A FIRST Tech Challenge team is only 5-15 students. The hardest part would likely be fundraising for a new team, I think they say to plan for $2-3,000 for a first year team.

A template is different than copying from a picture, it is a pre-made, fill in the blank form. If you can't fill out a template for a transcript because of lack of familiarity, you won't be able to fill out a transcript generator any better. An online transcript generator is going to have the same blank boxes that a template has, and it sounds like you think you don't know what goes where. If you truly can't fill a template, and the links I gave don't help, then you need to pay a consultant to help you do this.

I made my own template (you can use Word or Excel to do this). There are also lots of templates to download or pay for online. They're really not that much harder to use than an online transcript generator. Here's some sites I've liked that demystify the homeschool high school process: https://fearlesshomeschoolers.com/blog/ https://simplify4you.com/resources/ On this next site, the GPA and transcript courses might be helpful. You can ignore the stuff about getting college credit, that is not a requirement for high school. https://hs4cc-academy.thinkific.com/collections/hs4cc-free-courses?page=1

My oldest is a STEM type. My husband and I are both STEM types. That's been easy enough to figure out. My 9th grader is a humanities/art type. Right now she's slightly interested in some sort of design career (graphic, product, landscape, interior, whatever). A quick look at programs shows that she might need to have a portfolio for applications. We know nothing about portfolios. Do we need to start taking detailed pictures of her work? How do we best go about doing that for 3D work (most of what she's done)? For 2D? Does she need to branch out into other media to have variety? Or dive deep into a limited number of crafts to improve technique? How important is digital art? Is a portfolio a physical product or a digital one? If digital, where does one go to get one setup online? And non-portfolio questions: She has a stylus and a tablet for digital drawing, should we get her a Wacom tablet? How do you balance art and academics on the transcript? I've been of the mind that it's better to have academic electives, but I'm guessing that's not the case here? In my brief searching, I've read that many design careers are saturated with junior designers and can be hard to break into. Does anyone have experience with this? We don't want her to work freelance or be a starving artist, she has medical needs that require a job with health benefits.

Blue Tent has both a self-paced AP and non-AP statistics course. https://www.bluetentonline.com/ap-statistics

I have a Lucid brand shredded foam pillow. The stuffing is a mixture of polyfil and memory foam and has a plush cover, so overall it doesn't feel lumpy. It's also adjustable and comes with a ton of stuffing (I could almost stuff a 2nd pillow with the amount that I took out). If it ever feels flat or misshapen, I just shake it and it fluffs back up. I've had it for about 2.5 years and it's still really nice. My only complaint is that in warm weather it's squishier than in cold weather, which makes me sometimes readjust the filling amount. It looks like they have one just for side sleepers. https://lucidmattress.com/bedding/pillows/

Even young adults! I was at Target last week and the cell phone guys were chatting with me, trying to get me to switch my carrier. As small talk, one of them asked if I was ready for the coming cold and if I knew how cold it was going to be. When I told him the windchill was already at -20°F, he got this panicked look on his face and told me he hadn't worn a coat to work that day. It may have not been -20 windchill cold that morning, but it was still very cold winter temperatures.

Please don't quote, I might delete later. My two high schoolers both have a "trouble subject". Different subject for each of them, one is science and the other is writing. Neither of them is bad at the subject; what they actually complete is A work. But they avoid doing it, "forget" to do it, and procrastinate to excessive degrees. My 11th grader is in danger of earning a D due to lack of work. <snip> As a homeschooler, I have to be the one to give the bad grade and figure out how to clean up my kid's mess by figuring out how to get them to learn the material, do the work, and get the credit needed to graduate. <snip> I'm hoping for encouragement that I'm not a failure here. <snip> I'm also hoping for advice. How do I graduate and prepare for college the 11th grader that won't write? I need some crash course in the writing that colleges expect for a STEM minded, very reluctant writer. Something that will end the tears on my part and the "I try, but I just can't bring myself to do it the work" on the student's part. [9th grader potential enrollment in public school] And how do I preserve the relationship with the 9th grader, reduce the stress I'm feeling about their education, avoid the situation older sibling is in, and avoid having them do remedial work over the next two summers in the form of credit recovery? <snip> edited to remove some details

It's listed as the biology class for non-biology majors. It seems to be the biology class for an AS in Nursing or EMT (required for both programs). It's also the course you get credit for if you pass the AP Bio exam. The one for bio majors has a strong recommendation that you've taken chemistry recently, this one does not. When looking at the course descriptions for the two courses, it seems that the one for bio majors requires formal lab reports (this one does not). Other than the lab reports and chemistry pre-reqs, they have a very similar course description/topic list. Since this is at a community college, I looked at how it would transfer to the state flagship to get an idea of what type of course it is for four-year degrees. According to transferology, both this course and the one for bio majors transfer to the state flagship as the same course. There seem to be at least three levels of "intro to biology" at the state flagship. The highest is the one for biology/biochem majors (which is not what this transfers as). Most of the engineering programs don't require biology. When they do, it seems to be the middle level one, which is supposedly what this would transfer as. I'm guessing the lowest level one is for people who want to take bio for their natural science lab requirement.

3.85 is the difficulty score--reviews have two scores, one for quality (he has 4.6 overall on that) and one for difficulty (3.85 for that). Also, labs and in class quizzes are part of the grade. The final is about 22% of the grade, the unit tests are about 48% of the grade, the other 30% is quizzes and labs (at about equal weight). It does seem weird to me that there is no homework, but it's not like the textbook helps him with that. There are seven different sections of this class available this semester. Three are completely asynchronous online (including labs), which my kid vetoed. One has in person labs but online/async lecture. Of the three on campus options, one didn't exist in early registration (it must have been added later). From reading reviews of the various bio profs and talking to classmates, my kid says that there seems to be a sizable D/F rate for this class at this school in general, regardless of professor. To put the 4.6 RMP rating in context, the other two in person professors have a 4.2 and a 3.5.

The plot thickens. Looking through the online platform, the syllabus, and the textbook, there's no homework. It doesn't look like it's even "Here's some suggested work, but I'm not grading it." The textbook has 12 multiple choice review questions at the end of each chapter. So it's not even like you could do practice problems on your own if you wanted to. The wording from the syllabus on study time: So that study time is just on reading and studying the textbook, not exercises/practice problems. According to the course schedule/outline, he usually covers about a chapter a week. Chapters look to be about 20 pages long, with lots of pictures and boxes highlighting key ideas/concepts. The Rate My Professor overall score is 4.6. Students are praising him for how helpful and kind he is, even those that report getting a D in the course. The overall score is based on 67 ratings. Of the 20 with written reviews, the difficulty score is 3.85. There are conflicting comments about the study guide matching the exams and the study guide questions not being even close to what the exams cover. edited for clarity of the RMP score.

So you've answered part of my question, that 8 hours outside of class is about reasonable. But what about this situation, where the professor (whether by fallacy or experience) thinks that will not get a student a C in the course? If you were advising a student that needs an A or B, and the professor is insisting they put in twice the reasonable amount of work in order to pass, and the student doesn't have 10 extra hours a week, what would you advise?

My eldest's biology class professor is claiming that for the community college 4 credit biology for non-majors course (3 hours of lecture, 1 lab a week), they should expect to put in 12-18 hours of study time to get a C. That seems to imply that a student would need to put in 20-30 hours of study time outside of class to get an A or B. That seems off to need to put in so many hours for a 4 credit course, even if it is a lab science. I know the guideline of 2-3x study time per credit, 3-4x for a lab science, but this is well beyond that. Is this typical of this level of course? If we know our kid won't be able to put in 36 hours of classroom + study time into a single course, should we have them drop it now before it would be a W on the transcript? edit: this is a full semester course, not an accelerated course.

My high school was one of those with unique topical history courses. For that school, it was a way to diversify the parts of the world that are covered. They were all only a semester long and covered specific places (I believe we had a China course and a Latin America course, among others). I think some might have been on specific topics instead of locations. And some were more humanities/culture focused than history focused (one focused on Mexican art, literature, and music). Everyone had to choose 2. So we had the typical blast-through-western-history-in-a-year course, the typical American history (regular, honors, or AP), one year of these world culture type courses, and senior year people could skip history, take an extra AP like European History, or do more of the unique topical courses (including things like econ, logic, psychology, etc). Edited: It looks like they've added a civics requirement. So they've only kept a few of the more popular options.

Other than DE, I've never outsourced classes for my kids. I'm considering maybe doing that for English or History next year for my oldest (will be a senior). I've noticed that registration for online, live homeschool courses is often early (like Feb/March), but we won't know the fall DE courses until later than that, and we wouldn't even have an idea of spring courses until summer (and won't be able to register for them until Oct/Nov). I think DE has more value for this student, and as such, I wouldn't want to sign up for an online homeschool course and then find it conflicts with the desired DE courses. So how do you make sure you don't have schedule conflicts when trying to sign up for courses from multiple sources where you don't even know the class schedule for one until after registration for the other?

You can find schools by ABET accreditation. The main programs that you'll find at smaller public schools would be civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. So I'd search for one of those majors (often, but not always, a school will have all three), and then cross check that with a list of D3 schools. Here's Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering programs in the US (411 schools, but some schools show up twice if they've changed their name): https://amspub.abet.org/aps/category-search?disciplines=48&degreeLevels=B&countries=US In my geographically limited searching for my own kid, I've found that private schools often aren't ABET accredited unless they're an engineering school (like Rose-Hulman or Illinois Tech). You could try matching just the public schools on the D3 list (81 schools) with the link above. Division 3 schools: https://www.ncsasports.org/division-3-colleges

My youngest is way more social than the other two. We have time to decide, but we already see that we may wind up doing public high school for this one for social reasons. I'm trying to figure out curriculum plans for next year (still middle school), and want to make sure I get her well prepared for high school. Academically, what skills should be solid for a public school 9th grader? I figure we're good on math, as algebra should be done with enough time for any placement tests that may be required. What about writing? Are timed essays a thing still? If so, what sort of time frame for a basic five paragraph essay? I assume students need to know how to do a basic research report. What about writing and defending a thesis? Is it expected that kids know anything about literatary analysis when entering 9th grade? Other than the skills of notetaking and using a planner, what non-academic skills should students have? Anything else we can do to help make the transition as smooth as possible?