This was a serious problem at the bricks-and-mortar university I attended. Yes, there were quiet dorms and other forms of specialist dorm (there was even consideration of having an alcohol recovery floor, though that never got past the planning stage). Considerable effort was made to socially include sober and teetotaller students, including many activities where alcohol was not an option. However, there was still a large endemic culture of binge drinking on campus. One attempt that looked promising at the time but whose success still being evaluated when I graduated was to prevent clubs from block-booking events involving alcohol (the idea was to make them look less cool). Unfortunately, the confluence of the first moment of freedom for many students being university enrolment age and the legal age to drink alcohol being 18 led to a problem that hasn't really been solved. The good news is that the current generation of students averages less tolerant of alcohol (both in terms of drinking less of it themselves, in safer drinking patterns, and of discouraging the habit among their peers). The bad news is polarisation; the relatively small number who haven't reduced their drinking have instead become more likely to drink more, binge more, drink in ways others around them consider anti-social and/or dangerous and more likely to egg peers into having "just one drink" when the peer would rather have zero. Demand for how to deal with this has not kept up. The whole situation is a sad mess. My current university has not got this problem - because statistically the average student is in their late 20s and most people have either got out of the experimental phase of alcohol by that point in their lives, or know with certainty that they never will enter it in the first place. (Most of the rest are either not interested in pursuing a degree at the same time or are quite aware that they are not capable of doing it justice due to the heavy drinking). To change subject, my own course is in its latter stages. I am halfway through submitting the portfolio, which has lots of fiddly bits meaning I'm managing to get about 15% submitted per hour before frustration kicks in at the uploading system. Hopefully by the end of next week, all of this work I've prepared for the portfolio will actually be in the system. (The deadline is a month away, and I also need to submit an exam).

Seconding the blending work and running around outside, and also wanting to add listening to lots of books and spoken language (whether you're reading them, other adults are reading them or as audiobooks). It is of course possible that OP is already doing lots of all these things, but I have no specific advice to offer on the "which curriculum" side of it, except to say mixing things up can sometimes help, simply through providing variety.

Yikes! The only time there was an intentional reward or penalty connected with any of the fundraisers I've seen or participated in at schools so far was the threat of detention for deliberately messing up (if a student chose not to participate, the penalty was only possible if the student had deliberately interfered with the letter informing the parent of the event - and in these days where email and texts are preferred, not every student would be given a letter to lose/damage in the first place). Also, the children in my experience never sold anything to benefit the school individually - rather, the children would sing/play instruments/dance round a maypole and the adults got the job of selling things and soliciting donations.

Where I live (central England), the cost of public school itself varies quite a bit, although it is hardly ever free. Uniforms: there will almost certainly be one. £250 per year (on top of the amount that would have been bought if homeschooling) is typical, but some primary schools may only cost around £40 per year (two sets of regular clothing that happens to be in a specific colour, with the average year containing a mid-year growth spurt). Some of the stricter secondary schools can be more like £400 per year, due to wanting a much longer list of items from a specific supplier. Books: Usually none in primary school. Often rises to £10-£30 a year (fee includes all subjects; schools differ for which subjects attract the charge) in secondary school, plus another £10-£30 for each course that has an exam at the end of that specific year to cover revision materials (so maths would get the extra charge in GCSE year but not the others). Other supplies: similar to what the same items would cost in homeschool. Schools have different lists of what is required, but these are often shorter than I've heard is common in USA schools (there's no expectation of supplying tissues to the teachers, for instance - as you will see, schools typically prefer financial donations if they're soliciting contributions at all). Lunch: the absolute bugbear of many cost-conscious parents. Typically £2.50 per meal, and it's common knowledge by this point that in many schools, they only get 61 p per meal spent on the ingredients because the law requires it. (Costs to external suppliers for labour and services are the most commonly-cited additional costs in audits, though the sheer cost of heating is becoming an increasing factor, and ingredient costs are themselves rising). Quantities are reducing and unhealthy food is creeping back onto the menu simply to make the figures work. It has reached the point where it is usually half the price, and often healthier, to send in a packed lunch with pre-packaged ingredients (so, not even taking the home-made element into account) - if the school permits this. An increasing number of students also find school food unpalatable due to these changes, meaning that expenditure gains absolutely nothing. This is where the cost saving of homeschooling is most transparent. Some schools cost less than this, some give out actually nutritious meals. Breakfast is free where offered, and all primary schools are required to offer it (some secondary schools do too, especially in high-poverty or very affluent areas), but is a drop in the ocean in comparison to the high cost of lunch. School is 39 weeks a year in central England, so typical saving on lunch for homeschooling works out at £487.50 per year (assuming homeschooling lunch is a pre-packed meal from a shop rather than the cheaper but more variable cost of home cooking). The calculation also assumes that free school meals are not in play - this happens automatically in some schools (either for specific year groups or the entire school, the latter being more common at special schools and places where most people are low-income), but otherwise only covers students whose parents earn below a certain income that's largely only possible if the household is running on government benefits and/or part-time income(s) (the threshold is below a single full-time minimum wage). Transport: increasingly, even free public transport requires a £10 annual fee for the photo (as school buses start letting fee-paying general members of the public use the buses to save money and increase rural transport options for adults, on the understanding that they are then bound by the same rules as the children on board). However, even this only helps if one lives near a bus route. Otherwise, walking (the officially encouraged option), cycling or the car are the only options, and many school routes are considered too unsafe for children to walk due to inconsiderate traffic, bullying and/or badly-planned access routes to the school. Cycling sheds and the like are often no longer provided by schools as security cannot be guaranteed. Students with special educational needs that involve transport get that transport free (even if it is an adapted taxi) since otherwise most of them could not access school at all. The car costs an average of 20 gallons per year, currently £160, but if it's on the way to work that's somewhat cheaper. After-school clubs: often attract fees of £2-£3 a session nowadays, to pay for the teacher. This is far from a blanket rule, and many schools that do charge have free alternatives (e.g. the ability to use the library while waiting for transport home instead). Donations: British schools rarely have teacher kit lists, but many schools do solicit for donations. There are strict rules about this. Community events that are also fundraising are common and traditional (e.g. May Day carnivals, Christmas choir concerts). Some schools outright request donations (£10-£50 a year is typical) but the wording is tightly controlled - schools have to make it clear that schooling won't be affected for the specific children whose parents don't partake, also there have to be protections if someone on a sufficiently low income tries to donate (to make sure it's not peer pressure or inadvertent child coercion at play). However, parents do feel that pressure and it's not surprising if parents are finding themselves paying, say, £30-£40 a year on these elements. Sometimes there is separate fundraising or per-participant fees for specific elaborate field trips (think "spend a week abroad" or "three-day adventure trip"), although the typical field trip integrated into school hours is free (apart from optional gift shop expenditure and any extra clothes needed - that would probably have been bought anyway had a homeschooler organised the trip). The exception is if the location charges schools entry fees for children of the age that are visiting, which is not a given even for museums that charge homeschoolers (local schools often get free entry to paid-for educational attractions as a gesture of goodwill). Note that British homeschoolers often put students into college for examinable subjects on exam year, simply because otherwise it can cost around £400 per subject to get assessed, and an academically-included student typically needs 5 (GCSE Maths/English and 3 A-Levels or equivalently-priced qualifications appropriate to their preferred degree). Another big complaint from homeschoolers.

If you are doing a non-option #1, you could speak to individual members of the Alliance Française to see if any of them would be open to conversing with your daughter, even if it is once a week for part of the year. This would probably be less socially daunting than going to the whole Alliance Française class (since you could be reasonably confident of her speaking to the same stranger through the year), but still gives an opportunity to maintain French speaking skills - and of course those hours can be counted towards the credit, giving you fewer hours to plan in detail elsewhere on the course.

I'd like to add a couple of writing skills that may also be transferable to other areas: - Citations - Answering the question presented - Wise use of typing assistance tools like spellcheck and grammar check (including when not to follow the computer's suggestion). In all three cases, it's sufficient to be working towards these skills - nobody is expected to have fully mastered them before college.

What parts are the ones that build on each other, what parts are the context? Have multiple contexts to get each of the "build on each other" parts that are all considered valid pathways through engineering, and there is a more flexible course (that if done in a thoroughgoing way, would also be more flexible in at least one sense than any of the course structures we've discussed in this thread - even the course I mentioned still has only one module that is considered suitable to teach certain subjects, and membership of professional organisations is therefore affected if those specific modules get dropped). Clarita gave a good course-specific example for how certain essential content can be taught in multiple ways. The research I quoted didn't know why more women cared about the engineering course being flexible than men, as it was designed to be an initial exploration (of a gender difference result that had not been expected). That would be for other research to figure out. That was the finding, and perhaps some of the statistics various people have been giving about their courses would help future researchers zero in on what type of flexibility, exactly, is the type to make the most effective difference and still develop really good engineers out of the process.

Possibly because there's evidence coming in that small changes to the situation makes a big difference. If the Open University study generalises, then something approaching half of the young women interested in engineering in high school could be getting lost simply because most engineering courses only allow one path through the core engineering modules, rather than offering a choice of modules that cover the same essential content. Even offering students the choice of learning essential topics through the context of different types of engineering (instead of cramming all of them into the same module and insisting students only take that one) might result in some improvement without causing the individual accreditation difficulties that can open up when making engineering a free-for-all degree. If it's possible to halve the number of female students lost to engineering by a relatively small change of curriculum format, then I would venture to suggest that the gender difference isn't as important as intuition might suggest. (It's also worth adding that there are simply many more university spaces in biological courses these days than engineering, to the point where despite the bias, there are also more young men pursuing biology than engineering. There are possible directions for this, some of which could feed into Roadrunner's suggestion. There is a lot we don't know about this subject and there may well turn out to be merit in the intuitive position, so nothing can be ruled out yet.

Not just workplaces, but the education establishments as well. Open University has an Open STEM course which allows free access to engineering courses (provided module pre-requisites are met) in addition to its conventional engineering degree. It found that in October 2019, the gender imbalance in the engineering introductory unit almost halved in the Open STEM version compared to the conventional engineering degree (33% women in the Open STEM route compared to 16% in the conventional route). Prominent reasons cited by students for this include: - the ability to substitute one or two disliked modules for something else, including from a completely different subject (a common complaint was that some modules just weren't desirable to study) - breadth of study (for example, some women wanted to combine engineering and mathematics, to an extent the conventional engineering course did not permit) - confidence I'd like to see a follow-up study, since mathematically most of the students in that cohort would be over halfway through their degrees, and some would have completed them. However, a couple of other studies indicate that multi-discipline scientific courses are attractive to women in ways that single-subject engineering is not. It's possible that colleges/universities that only allow one fixed route through their engineering degree could be losing a large number of women that would otherwise at least give studying engineering a try. It would also go some way towards explaining why liberal arts colleges have a greater proportion of women doing engineering - they typically have ways of integrating some breadth into studies and a cultural expectation that the breadth be taken at least somewhat seriously. Scotland cares if some fields are female-dominated - it requires those of its universities with courses in any field where Scottish student gender bias is at/above 25%/75% in favour of either men or women to take measures to reduce the bias, known as the Gender Action Plan. (Currently, fields classed as male-dominated are Architecture, Building/Planning, Engineering, Technologies and Computer Science, and those classed as female-dominated fields are Social Sciences, Nursing, Teaching and Psychology. The statistics will be reviews, and focus subjects changed as appropriate, when people get round to it - this was meant to happen last year but COVID led to an indefinite delay).

This may depend on which STEM field is involved and where one is studying. Across the UK, women comprise 81% of the 2020-2021 intake of student vets and psychologists, about half of general biology students, 42% of physics and chemistry students, 30% of maths students and 21% of computing and engineering students. The statistics for other places may be different.

6-10 experiments from a book containing a good range of biology/biology-related experiments, such as the Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments by Thompson & Thompson, would complement the work already done in Miller-Levine nicely. (You'd be surprised how few experiments some lab classes in schools have). Spread them out when you want a hands-on break from the writing- and conversation-heavy work done elsewhere, or simply in weeks where the workload is lower than otherwise, and let it spill into 12th grade if needed or desired. (If your student desires more "experiment breaks" in 12th, but does not want them to be in biology, there exist similar experiment-focused books for chemistry and physics).

History I-IV is a perfectly valid naming convention, although it's entirely reasonable to mention civics/econ on the transcript if your pathway through history/social studies (be that the WTM method or not) involves enough work on those topics that it's worth specifically mentioning. History IV: Modern History and Civics is a possible example title (obviously, change the time period and additional bit ), bearing in mind that in the WTM method, you'll probably sprinkle teaching about civics, government and/or economy across the 10th-12th years. (History II: Medieval History and American History I. followed by History III: Early Modern History and American History II, could convey to colleges that you included the study of American history as an integral part of your WTM-style history). Please bear in mind that a WTM approach still leaves some scope for student-chosen specialisation, if there's a particular part of history or social sciences that particularly interests your oldest, without adding more books or time. Simply make sure a sufficient number of the selected Great Books have something to say about the chosen area. Nobody in the 21st century is likely to study every Great Book in the high school years because there's too many of them. You're not even obliged to give 2-3 credits a year for the work like WTM 3rd edition does (thus not obliged to set 2-3 credits' worth of reading and writing/discussion) A few such books read deeply and well-understood will serve better than trying to read a lot. So within reason, feel free to pick and choose as suits your family's preferences. The amount of time taken depends on how fast oldest reads and writes. as well as exactly how much credit you want to give. I'd recommend trying to alter the number of books to fit the amount of work you want (at least for the first few books), rather than predetermining a number of books and trying to guess how long this will take. A useful exercise might be to give your child a short prose Great Book and see how long it takes them to read a section of it. You can then extrapolate from this to decide how much reading appears to make sense. (Remember to allow enough time to demonstrate understanding, be that in writing or orally, and a whole credit is usually 120-180 hours, depending on how important the subject is compared to the others your student is studying). There's no minimum number of essays/writings, although given that it's likely to provide at least some of the literature part of your English credit as well as history/social sciences, you'll definitely want to include some. The important things are to ensure oldest is engaging with each book in a meaningful way, and is gradually improving their understanding and academic skills. For each book, choose a particular thing to focus on. This will help you reduce the length of writing/discussion needed to show understanding. It's OK to set questions based on the elements of books you do understand, and it's also OK to ask the student to discuss the book with someone else who enjoys that book (in the case of Great Books that are enjoyed by other people you know - if all else fails, see if a student who recently studied a book you find challenging would accept payment to discuss the book with your child via videoconferencing, email, post, phone or in person).

I got a 93% average on my first 3 exams (both of the Biology ones and the first one about Water). If my coursework was getting that sort of grade, I'd be well on target for a Distinction (the highest grade this course carries), but they're not, and I'm not. A high-level Pass* looks increasingly likely. * - Fail is the only other result given for these modules. If for some reason I wanted that Fail on my transcript at this point, I'd have to either forget to submit the final coursework item altogether - that's an automatic zero - or average 14% on every remaining item of coursework and every remaining exam. The two optional modules I planned to do (about AI and computer audio) have been completed and were awarded 100%. I am currently seeking further challenges. The highlight of the course so far in 2024 was doing a scientific experiment at a friend's house (the friend enjoyed being a "lab assistant"). Unfortunately I'm not allowed to share what that experiment was due to coursework rules, because it would have made a good science experiment for a homeschool science lab (some of you might even have done the experiment before). I've got a Plan A and a Plan B for how to progress after this course. The Plan B is is being considered due to certain complications that have developed on this course, combined with a new opportunity to finish my intended degree that might have a more useful module combination than the proposed final year plan for the Plan A pathway. If I do Plan B, there's three different points at which I could opt into it, so no hurry to make a decision, but this will inform some of the optional studies I plan to do.

Also consider passing on a quick, sympathetically-worded message to the university's IT department. "Possible technical issues" can be a wonderful social lubricant because it means that the computer or "the person-computer interface" can take the blame, rather than the prof directly. Plus if the prof is having genuine technical issues (or IT skill issues), the IT department will be able to discreetly arrange for additional training for the prof to avoid a repeat.

Toastmasters have to be 18+. However, many (perhaps most) Toastmasters groups allow under-18s* to be guests and potentially also to join as "gavellers". They have fewer rights with their membership than Toastmasters (i.e. regular members) do, but they are allowed to attend and speak (within certain rules that may vary by group). The best way is to go as a guest and talk to the membership secretary about your situation. If you see a "Gavel Club" in your research, this is a Toastmasters group specifically aimed at particular gavellers (for example, a group of Girl Guide teenagers with perhaps a facilitating adult or two could form a Gavel Club). * - A few Toastmasters groups are effectively 18+, be that due to the group being aimed at advanced Toastmasters (gavellers are not allowed to do advanced courses, but can do the youth programs) or due to being scheduled at times when the members expect children to be in school (in the latter case, a homeschooler would have a strong case to have an exception made for their child).