I imagine she'll have to take physics in college for a nursing degree. She might really appreciate having had an exposure to physics before having to take it in college. She could do a "light" conceptual or algebra based physics just to get the ideas down. However, the idea of getting college chem out of the way with an AP test is appealing as well. But you need to check to be sure if that's even an option. At colleges around here, you need to get a 5 on the test to get out of the full year of chem. If you only get a 4, you get out of the first semester, and then get thrown into the 2nd semester rusty on chem skills. A 3 gets you nothing. And lots of kids I know who took the chem test got a 3. It's not the easiest AP test. A 5 is certainly possible, but will require a lot of work. If she's interested in nursing, I wouldn't do earth science just because it won't prepare her as much for the science she'll need later. I'd either do physics or advanced chem, but I wouldn't necessarily plan to skip college chem. (Maybe just take the AP test to see what happens, but don't stress about what she gets.) If she has to do chem a 3rd time, she'll really have it down and it shouldn't be too hard. (If it is hard the 3rd time around, just think how much harder it would have been if she hadn't had chem twice already.) FWIW, I went into college as a physics major without any physics in high school at all. Nobody much cared. (I even got into MIT, although I couldn't go there because of finances.) I just took physics when I got to college. I think most science professors feel that a good basis in math is more important than exactly which sciences you took in high school. So it probably doesn't make a huge difference what your daughter does as long as the classes she's doing are rigorous and she has her math down.

Cambridge is fun, goes fairly slowly, and gives lots of reading practice. I found Wheelock's to be a slog, but very thorough (although it gets a bit incomprehensible in some of the later chapters). You could do both, although you could start with Cambridge alone and have a fair amount to do for quite some time. You might want to think about something other than Wheelock. It has been the standard for quite some time, so there are lots of people out there who learned Latin from it and feel you should never use anything else, but I have wondered if there are newer and better options. I know that the two colleges near us switched from Wheelock to Ecce Romani and Latin for a New Millennium. Wheelock's isn't out of print, so I assume they found this worked better for them. I haven't used either myself, so I can't comment. There is an email list group that does Wheelock's together: http://www.quasillum.com/study/latinstudy.php They've also gone through a few other texts. That would probably be a better place to ask which Latin program to use. You'll get more opinions there, many from people who have taught with various books. (You need to sign up for the list to ask anything or to get involved in the groups.) Another great place to ask Latin questions is the Cambridge yahoo group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CambridgeLatin/?yguid=333082698 They also talk a lot about other books and methods and are happy to answer questions. From this WTM forum, I think you'll mostly hear that Wheelock is the be all and end all. It might be interesting to hear some other opinions at these other sites. Cambridge worked well with my kids. Wheelock's did not. I also found that, for myself, the information I picked up from Cambridge stuck in my head a lot better than anything I learned in Wheelock. However, if you do go with Wheelock, there is a small book called 38 Latin Stories that are written to go along with the lessons. They're useful for reading practice. I didn't find I needed an extra grammar book with Wheelock's. I just learned English grammar right along with the Latin as I went.

I started with Destinos as a beginner without a teacher. I went very slow and used both the textbook and the workbook( along with both the video and audio tapes). I did ok, although I couldn't have had a conversation to save my life. (I could read and understand, though.) If you just watch the video, it isn't enough, but there are plenty of supporting materials. I used Pimsleur to finally get some "conversation" in. Destinos doesn't really do that for you. If you, as the teacher, know Spanish, I think it would probably work fine, but you'll want to schedule in some conversational Spanish. Some colleges use it as a single year course -- so it's suggested it's a 2 year high school course, but I think that's a bit ambitious. One of my kids did about 1/2 of Destinos and 1/2 of Pimsleur, and then placed into the 4th semester of college Spanish, so that may tell you something about how much it covers.

Illegal immigrants do pay into the SS system (assuming they have a job that requires a SSN -- which many do, they just use fake numbers). However, if they're using a fake number, they're not going to be able to get the money back out in benefits. So illegal immigration could potentially do a lot to prop up the system.

It's disappeared from the CPB/Annenberg site. I'd just got to having the time to do German, and it's GONE. Anybody know if it went somewhere else? The site the Annenberg site directs me to doesn't seem to have any info that I can find.

http://german.about.com/library/quiz/blqz_start.htm I haven't tried these.

My general sense is that "homeschool" is more acceptable in homeschool circles than "home school". However, I don't know what people outside homeschooling think. "I home school my kids" used as a verb does look a little weird and choppy. I've lately started to see "home-school" in newspapers and such. That looks really wrong. I don't know that there's any consensus, although I kind of figure that those of us who are actually doing the homeschooling ought to get to choose how to spell it. On the transcript I did, I think there was only one instance of "homeschool". It was in the title: "Official Homeschool Transcript for...." Otherwise, I didn't use it. I did say that some courses were "done at home", but I used that phrase pretty minimally (and only to distinguish from courses that were done at a college). I never heard complaints. My daughter got into the colleges she applied to.

Pimsleur worked a lot better for us than Rosetta Stone for learning to speak. We haven't tried Visual Link (because our library has Pimsleur but not VLS). Destinos works well for improving listening. The text also covers reading and some grammar. (I can't remember now if all the grammar is in the text. It might be. Although it's also possible some of it spills over into the workbooks.) Here are the free videos: http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html You might find that there are a lot of grammar resources at the library. The same people who did Destinos also put out Sol y Viento, but I'm having trouble figuring out how this is a beginning course: http://www.google.com/search?q=sol+y+viento&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=sol+y+viento&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=7yO&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivsbo&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=jr2YTPFThYGUB_ifvVc&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=3&ved=0CC0QqwQwAg&fp=6f32b8af52b7e0b8

I'm allergic to cats, dogs, mice, rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs, that I know of. Given that, we've never tried hamsters or gerbils. Our entire family is allergic to cats, and my husband, at least, to guinea pigs so we haven't wanted to risk it. We have fish. Although they can cause mold to grow in the house if you have too many of them, which is another allergen.

I get mostly vegetables, with a few fruits when they're not expensive. Eggs, meat, butter etc I get from the co-op because the price at the farmer's market (from the same farm) is more expensive than the co-op. I don't generally buy baked goods because we tend to like the ones we make ourselves a lot better. I'm picky about who I buy from because some of the vendors seem to be buying stuff from the local grocery store, marking it up, and selling it at the farmer's market. So I generally just buy from folks I've dealt with before as I've already gone to the trouble of figuring out if they're being underhanded. I try to get chemical free produce (no one there has an organic label, it's too expensive to get). I'd never buy crafts. We've got way too many crafters at home here.

That's the thing -- I asked her to be specific and she just said she didn't know. Just had never seen it before. She strikes me as rather young. She said she'd "ask around" at her office. So far I haven't heard from her. I think she expects I'll just show up for another colonoscopy, where she can tell me that Dr. so-and-so told her it was nothing after all. But our insurance is not going to pay for the 2nd one. I'm not real thrilled about paying for a 2nd one unless it's really absolutely necessary. I do get the feeling that most doctors don't consider cost AT ALL.

My daughter used Signing Naturally in the first 2 semesters of her college ASL class (which should be about 2 years of high school). They only got partway through the first book. However, they also did more in class that wasn't in the book. (And I wouldn't recommend Signing Naturally unless you have a teacher.) We had gone through You Can Sign (with the Bravo family and Billy Seago) before she started ASL I. They didn't let her place into ASL II, but they really should have, as she knew everything going on in the ASL I course just from watching those videos. So, the You Can Sign videos seem to cover about one semester of college (one year of high school). They're easy to use. We learned a lot from them without any help. The Signing Naturally books and videos would cover more, but they are difficult to learn from on your own. There is no glossary in the books, which puts the self learner at a significant disadvantage. This is a pretty good site: http://www.aslpro.com/cgi-bin/aslpro/aslpro.cgi It might lead to others that are useful as well. All the colleges near us are accepting ASL, not only for admissions, but also to fulfill the college language requirement. Even 5 years ago, this may not have been true, so if people here think colleges don't accept ASL it might only mean that their info isn't current. You should check with the colleges you're interested in. And, yes, ASL does have a grammar and a culture.

And since the topic's come up, maybe there's someone here who has an opinion on my odd case? I had a colonoscopy done last week. The doctor found nothing, except for a bulgy area up at the top of the large intestine. She did a biopsy. It came back completely negative. She then insisted I have a CAT scan (this is why I avoid doctors. Things just snowball out of control.). The CAT scan showed, well, nothing. The doctor reading the CAT scan was of the opinion that that bulgy thing was just a bit larger than normal fold in the intestine. OK, so I'm feeling all right about that, but the original doctor now insists that I have to have another colonoscopy in 3 months "just in case". I cannot figure out why. She can't explain it to me. She just found it "odd" and wants to look at it again. She's got her office calling me up and bugging me to make another appointment. I'm inclined to ignore her and put this off for another 5-10 years as would be recommended if she'd found nothing (which I think she found). But am I being stupid? Does this ring a bell with *anyone* as cause for alarm? Or is this doctor just afraid of being sued if she doesn't do enough? I'm finding absolutely nothing in googling.

This: http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-colon-cancer-screen-20100913,0,3928734.story seemed to me to be a more evenhanded discussion of this controversy. There does seem to be some doubt as to whether the whole colonoscopy is really necessary. It seems the sigmoidoscopy might be just as good, but there isn't yet a lot of evidence.

It was only the prep that bothered me -- the not eating for 24 hours. The procedure itself wasn't really that bad. There was some pain from them putting in the gas, but really, I've had a lot worse gas pains than that. (Food intolerances are way worse than that procedure -- speaking from experience, here.) However, I didn't find the bathroom visits to be all that terrible. I got a book to read but never got very far in it. I just wasn't in the bathroom that much. I only had to get up a couple times in the night. You probably will need something to soothe the area. It was suggested that I use vaseline, but I couldn't find it when I finally discovered I needed it. I ended up using a little unscented hand lotion on toilet paper. My husband got to feeling really weird when he was doing it, until he thought to have some chicken broth. That really helped him. The juice just wasn't enough to keep him going. I learned from his experience and had a lot of broth on hand. You do have to expect that you aren't going to accomplish much while you're doing the prep. Afterwards, I went right out and had a McDonald's Angus 1/3 burger with no problem.

If you can find a physics text with worked out solutions to the problems, you may find physics a lot easier to do. But if you do Conceptual Physics, just having the answers might be enough, if the student (or the parent?) is strong in math. My daughter was doing ok with Hewitt's Conceptual Physics as long as she had me and my other daughter helping her. (Part of our problem was that we don't have the answers in our edition, so someone else needed to check her work.) But in this very old book (it's like 3rd edition, or so), while the examples were mostly useful, the text that went with them was just plain confusing. I don't know if that's been fixed in later versions. I'd also want to be sure I had the answers in the back (to at least some of the problems). We've started with Thinkwell for chemistry. It seems ok. (We're using the AP lectures. I don't know what the "standard" one is like and I haven't seen the physics ones.) I have only 2 complaints. One is that the quizzes are sometimes confusing. Some questions have more than one right answer. Some have no right answer. Some contradict what was said in the lecture. And there aren't enough additional problems to work. (Although I could just be missing them.) We've had to go to another text to get enough problems (we're using Zumdahl, with a full solutions manual). I have not been overly impressed with the Teaching Company science courses. I haven't seen the physics one specifically, though. We tried the astronomy one and couple others. They seemed a bit dumbed down. Hewitt's Conceptual Physics, in contrast, isn't really dumbed down, it's just physics without calculus. The Teaching Company tapes were dumbed down to the point where I didn't even get it (and I have several science degrees). Can you get the Teaching Company course from your library? They are really expensive. you might want to see them first. Also, I discovered that the astronomy guy who lectures for Teaching Company is at Berkeley, and his lectures are online. It's virtually the same course, but free: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978334 If you hunt around the Berkeley site, you might also find a physics course that will work for you. Although, I agree, that the MIT one is really nice. The only problem I have with it is that it's sometimes really hard to read what's on the board. My older tried that one and gave up because I would have to sit with her and write out the equations so she could see them (since I already knew what they were supposed to be). The MIT one is calc based (I think?) so you might find one at Berkeley that is only algebra based. Still, there may be problems with reading the board.

Some kids are ready for Alg I early, others aren't, but it takes a perceptive parent or teacher to know the difference. The middle school near us finally started offering Alg I in 8th grade. Problem was, few of the kids were ready for it. The kids ended up mostly failing. The teacher got blamed. The fact that there were several troublemakers in the class who spent the whole of class time making fun of the teacher (perhaps because they didn't want to admit they didn't get algebra?) was not considered to be part of the problem. The troublemakers' parents still blame the teacher. This was 4 years ago. Last night I was at a party where some of these kids were *still* complaining about this teacher. And the parents were there still backing up the story that it was the teacher's fault. And telling us that is why their children still don't get math. Arg. OK, sorry for that aside. Last night's party kind of got to me. Back on topic -- in a few years, who's really going to care whether someone took calculus in high school or not? I do think it's worthwhile for some kids to move along in math at a fast pace. If their minds work that way, it's probably better not to bore them and make them hate math. But that doesn't mean a fast pace is better for everyone else. And the physics dept where I work is much more interested in getting kids who have a solid foundation. Calculus in high school might impress them, but only if it turns out the student really did learn it. They do accept calc credits (from AP or dual enrollment), but they assume most everyone will take Calc in college, and that's perfectly acceptable. On the transcript question if alg I is done before high school: My daughter did do Alg I early, before high school. I put it on her transcript, but I didn't assign credits for it. It was under a section titled "courses completed before high school" or some such thing (I put some of her foreign language there too, but that was it). Actually, she'd done Alg I, Alg II, and Geometry before high school and I thought just putting on pre-calc and calculus (even if it was 3 years of calc for a total of 4 years of high school math) might raise some eyebrows. I've known a fair number of kids who got into selective schools without calc in high school. They either didn't do Alg I in 8th, or they stepped out of the math sequence before getting to calc, or they decided to take stat because they thought it would be easier. Colleges don't really fixate on one thing. They look at the whole package.

I think you have to be "sponsored" by someone currently in the high school network. It may be you need more than one other person saying you're legit. For college networks, I think you need an email address from that college. FWIW, my daughter was getting friend requests from someone who claimed they were homeschooled (this being the explanation for why he wasn't in a high school network), but his whole page looked fishy. And he was only friending girls. And a lot of the girls were accepting his request because they thought *maybe* he was friends with someone they knew. So I could maybe see how fb (if they were paying attention, which I'm not convinced they are) might be concerned about people posing as high school kids who are claiming to be homeschooled. It does look like it might be an avenue for weirdos to get in and start finding info about kids.

Oh, we also have a big dead hairy spider in a dusty spider web hanging right over our doorbell. I thought about cleaning it up, until I realized it might have some deterrent effect. Folks we know just knock anyway. I'll answer knocks. It's the doorbell I tend to avoid.

And if you go to a different doctor, you may hear a different recommendation. They all seem to be getting info from different sources/studies. It may be that some doctors are more up on the current research while others are relying on what was being recommended 5 years ago. It seems to be changing fast. What I wonder about is whether ultrasound or thermography are actually safer. In order to visualize something inside the body, you have to blast high energy something or other in to get a picture. Radiation is a problem because the high energy can blast apart DNA. (Although, most of the time, your DNA repair mechanisms put things back together.) If some other imaging technique is just as high energy, would it have the same effect on DNA? Or are these other techniques safer because they can get away with less energy to get a picture? And is there any research on what DCIS does if not treated? Are there people with diagnosed DCIS who leave it untreated? Or is it always just removed as soon as it's found? If so, we may have no hard evidence that it's worth taking out. It might just sit there. Seems I'm hearing now (?) that some prostate cancers are better just left alone. Some grow so slowly that it's worse to fool with them than just leave them alone.

You could just buy an electronic tuner and sing into it. Most of them will tell you how sharp or flat you are (as well as what note you're nearest to). They're supposed to be for instruments, but the ones I have work fine for voice as well.

The mammogram vs not mammogram science still, unfortunately, looks a little iffy to me on both sides. One has to remember that most money is going into proving that mammograms are better than BSE and make decisions accordingly. Mammograms MAY be beneficial, or they might be worse than just leaving well enough alone. I think it's really difficult to tell at this point and we're all making the decision in the dark. I haven't yet had a mammogram, although I do consider it every year. My midwife is kind of on the fence about it. She's willing to let me not do it and not bother me about it. But she has been VERY bothersome about me having a colonoscopy to check for cancer. First, there's no radiation involved, and 2nd, colonoscopy can be preventive in that small suspicious polyps can just be cut out at the time of screening. So I get the feeling from her that she is also not entirely convinced that mammograms are all they're cracked up to be. Still, she's only one person (although she's one person who's probably seen more in her practice than I see in my daily life). But I'm VERY diligent about self examination. Even if one decides not to do a mammogram, don't give up on the monthly self-exam. The women I've known with somewhat aggressive breast cancer have all found them with self-exams (sometimes within a month or two of a mammogram). The women I know who have had lumps found with mammography have all had not very aggressive cancers (it's not that they were early -- they were the type that didn't grow fast). But personal anecdotes are not statistical evidence. Unfortunately, there are a lot of holes one can pick in the statistics that are published, which is why I'm a bit leery of mammograms. (This is the down side of being of statistician, I'm afraid.)

We just don't answer to door if it's pairs of people wearing suits. They leave their tracts and move on.

I thought he lived at the end, but I honestly kind of hated the book. My two kids, independently, also hated the book. We all kept our opinions to ourselves until we'd all finished, so it wasn't that we were influencing each other. It just seemed like the book was trying so hard to be deep but really wasn't deep at all. Mostly it just struck us as being pretentious without a lot to say. And it's way too heavy for the intended audience. But we felt the same way about The Dark is Rising and Watership Down. Except that Watership Down has provided us with endless hours of giggling entertainment. I rather doubt it was meant to be funny. My kids still haven't tried Lord of the Rings. I wonder if they'll have the same reaction to that. And I have to add: Bridge to Terabithia. Worst book of all time, according to my eldest. I was pretty disappointed in it too. I think one can handle death in juvenile literature, but, really, there has to be MORE to the book to make it work. My youngest has never picked it up. (Actually, the younger one only got around to reading The Giver because she was asked to give an opinion on whether our drama group should put it on as a play. She was definitely against it. Actually, I'm just not a big fan of Lois Lowry, period. We did do Number the Stars as a play. Everyone loved it. I thought it made the whole Nazi experience look like a fun summer vacation. I just don't feel that those events should be "sweetened" up just so kids can appreciate them. If they're too dark for kids, just wait until they're older to seriously bring them up. Otherwise, one runs the risk of making atrocities like that look like less than they really are.)

The numbers Zenni Optical asks for are the prescription (which you should have from the doctor) and the pupillary distance (PD). By law (in the US, at least), you can get the PD from the place where you just got glasses. The doctor may also have measured it. You can measure it yourself by holding a ruler up to the eyes and measuring the pupil distance (I think it's center to center. It may say somewhere on the Zenni Optical site). There are a lot of numbers associated with each frame. They measure the size of the frame and the lenses. To be on the safe side. I measured my current glasses and got frames that were similar in dimensions. My reading glasses (one of which is a progressive lens) are all from Zenni Optical. They're fine. If you get the cheapest frames possible, they will probably be a little, well, cheap. And floppy. My husband has a pair of progressive lens glasses that he wears as his main glasses. He's had them 2 years and never complained about them. The ones I got didn't really sit on my face right. The nose piece had to be widened just a touch to get them to ride a little farther down on my nose. We just did it carefully and slowly. If they're bifocal/progressive lenses, they do need to sit in the right spot, but that seems to be a matter only of adjusting the nose piece, which is fairly easy to do. If you had a teenage who is very fashion conscious, Zenni might not be the best option, but for a kid who loses lots of glasses, they would work out well, generally. The only problem is that you can't try on the frames to see if they will feel ok. With single vision glasses, though, they're generally so cheap that it can be worth the gamble. When I bought mine, the cheapest frames ran about 8 dollars, 5 dollars shipping (the lenses are just included in the frame price if they're single vision). 13 dollars is generally a better price than one can get in a store. They were lightweight plastic with polished edges (no extra cost).