Athenaze might be a possibility. I know it has a lot of reading.

I agree with the others. If he's having that much trouble, he might be better off having a little vacation from math. Or pick up something else that's mathy but not so advanced. Maybe some game type things would be nice? You could do some statistics -- although not the heavy duty type that leads to the AP test. Or study something like genetics or chemistry or electronics or drafting instead (you could call it applied math). Or just spend some time learning how to use a graphing calculator. Just seeing the functions graphed out might be enlightening. I've seen this too -- kids will be going along great and look like they're going to finish the whole math sequence way early, and then they just crash. We took some time off, regrouped, ignored math for a semester or so, and came back just fine. (My daughter is now a physics major, with 3 semesters of calc and a year of college physics before she ever started as a freshman, but there was a year or two there where not much happened in math.)

It looks like she's already done precalc/trig. If it were my kid, I'd just have her keep going. There's no reason to retake precalc in college unless your daughter is weak in math. It doesn't sound like she is. There's also no reason to wait on calculus (unless, again, she's weak in that area). Just start on the calculus, this year or next. She can take the AP exam if she gets far enough into it. If not, a lot of colleges (but not all) have a placement exam. Or, she could learn calculus once at home and then repeat it in college. For some kids, that may be an advantage. For others, it may be better to just forge ahead. Some colleges want the students to have a semester of calc before they start physics, so going in with at least one semester can speed up the sequence. Other colleges have them take it concurrently, so it wouldn't speed things up, but might allow her to take other classes. I'd start calc this year or next and just see how she does. If it's overwhelming, wait. If she's doing fine with it, there was no reason to wait and you should just keep going. Although I really feel it's a good idea to make sure you do trig and precalc before launching into calculus (seems there has been some advice to the contrary recently), I don't see any reason to hold off on calculus until college if the student seems to be ready. Why wait and forget material? Some kids may need some more maturation, but a lot of them who have done well in math so far don't need to hold back. You and your daughter will need to decide based on her circumstances.

In the winter, all us girls wear pants. Twenty below? I'm not messing with skirts. If a dress is required, one could wear sweats for the trip and take them off when getting to church. That's what girls used to do when schools still required dresses (although maybe they were wearing pants underneath.) I'm not a big fan of nylons or tights (at least not the thin, nylon kind). As one friend of mine put it, nylons are a wonder fabric. Hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

We did biology with both my kids when they were 13, but we didn't use Apologia. We used a conglomeration of other materials. I don't think they really got the biochemistry, but they hadn't had chemistry yet. When my older daughter went back to review bio for a test she had to take, she picked up the biochem a lot more easily. She was older and had had chem, but I don't know which of those was responsible. From what I've heard of Apologia, though, it's a lot of memorizing, which isn't really what biology is all about. (But I'm speaking from hearsay.) If that's the case, I would think Apologia would be hard no matter what age you did it at.

http://www.navigatinglife.org/historybusters/id47.html This website supposedly has 1000 historically accurate films. But you have to check for appropriateness. Some are even beyond me, and I'm pretty open. We've never managed to get through a Ken Burns documentary. They're not just slow, they're repetitive. There must have been other photos, other music, etc from those time periods that could have been used. And the civil war one tended to be a lot of battle strategy, which just did not interest us. There wasn't enough analysis of historical events for us. We just tried to get through an Ansel Adams documentary, done by Ric Burns. Couldn't finish that one either. We were hoping for info on photographic techniques, history of the Sierra Club or Yosemite or San Francisco ... actually almost anything. We've watched 2 documentaries on John Adams. One was really good. The other was kind of so-so. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one was which. But if you get one and it's boring, you might try to search out a second one to see if it's the more interesting one. (Liberty! and the Ben Franklin PBS series were both good.) Michael Woods does some ok documentaries, although a few of them do get too much into just watching him walk around in his all terrain outfit. David Attenborough has done some very nice nature videos. (Although the ones he's only the narrator on aren't as good. Look for the ones where he appears on camera. He had more hand in the making of those and they come off better.) There's a nice video on the cichlids of Africa called The Jewel of the Rift (I think). I haven't watched it yet, but I've heard Hummingbirds:Magic in the Air is interesting. A few others are: Einstein's Big Idea (although I wish they'd spent more time on the science and less on his wreck of a personal life) Darwin's Dangerous Idea (and the other PBS videos that were part of this series) and there was a series PBS did on the discovery of basic physics principles which I wish I could remember and find again (if anyone knows what it is, fill me in! I know Faraday was covered. I think also Maxwell and Meitner and a few others.)

Look what I just saw: Antihistamine use linked to extra pounds: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Antihistamine+linked+extra+pounds/3442334/story.html This study only looked at prescription antihistamines, and it's pretty cautious about saying that it's a "link", not a "cause" (as far as anyone can tell). However, if you google weight gain antihistamine, a whole lot of sites come up linking the two anecdotally. It's not just prescription antihistamines that people have seen this with. The question is, can I go off my antihistamines and still have a life?

If over half don't join the military, does that mean that almost half do? I suspect a lot less than half of the population in general goes into the military. This would mean that you are suggesting that, even if not ALL of the JROTC members join the military, a much larger percentage of them do (compared to the average in the population). Which just proves the point of the poster who suggested this in the first place. I don't think the posted article told us much about why there might have been differences in admission rates for various groups. It's not clear if the original study even tried. I haven't seen evidence one way or the other. And was it a difference in admissions or applications? 4-H, FFA, and JROTC students may just not have been interested in those particular schools. Also, we don't know if the study even looked at Ivy League schools. They kept the names of the schools secret. And I would suspect that FFA members might be more likely to go into ag or ag related fields. Note that I'm saying more LIKELY, not that most of them do. Just a slight bias in that direction could result in fewer FFA applications to non-ag schools than one would expect if the applications were random. (And assuming that the schools looked at in the study were non-ag schools -- which we still don't know.) In this discussion, there seems to be a confusion between population averages and "what I've known my kids or my neighbor's kids to have done". There can be a big difference between the two observations, which is why statistics were invented. (By the way, I was in the FFA, and I didn't go into agriculture -- so based on my limited experience, I'd say no one in the FFA goes into agriculture, but that could hardly be true.)

You even did school today! Wow, I'm impressed. I would have sent the kids off with instructions to be quiet. In fact, that is what I did earlier this summer, and all I had was a run of the mill UTI. (For which I took sleeping pills in addition to pain pills, just so I wouldn't suffer so much.) I did have a kidney infection just after my second kid was born. I picked it up in the hospital and they had to try several antibiotics before finding one that worked. It was awful.

The Private Life of Plants -- video by David Attenborough. Also, I found the description of Betsy in Betsy Was a Junior putting together her year long botany project on the night before the due date to be rather amusing. (If you are at all into Betsy-Tacy.) It's only one chapter and you wouldn't learn any botany from it.

My mother gave my two teen girls see through night gowns, which were too small. I mean seriously, who even makes see through night gowns for 10 and 12 year olds? And who buys them? --other than my mom, I mean. Sure, if we were shooting a dirty movie starring my kids, I could see it, but what was she thinking???? I have to say, my kids were so relieved when they discovered they didn't fit. I still have them, though. My first inclination was to throw them out in disgust, but before I got around to it, we needed a bit of racy lingerie for a play -- the nuns in the Sound of Music discover these flimsy bits in Maria's luggage just before she's married -- and they were perfect. So thanks, Mom, after all. I believe she must have got them on clearance or at a rummage sale after someone else bought them on clearance. (They still had the orange clearance tags attached.) I can't imagine why they'd be on clearance. However, this does remind me of the present my aunt got my sister and me one Christmas -- matching lacy underwear with interesting see through bits. The worst present my husband ever got me was diapers.

The first few chapters of Wheelock are fairly easy. After that it gets harder. But if you start with the slow track and decide to catch up with the fast track, it is actually doable. I found the 38 Latin Stories to be a nice addition. The Wheelock sentences are kind of dry, so it was nice to have something that was actually readable. I got a bit disillusioned with Wheelock, though. I dropped out somewhere after about halfway through. The problem was that the book got less and less explanatory and I found I was just guessing about the translations. Also, there were some sentences that seemed pretty ambiguous in meaning. I've gone to another book -- Cambridge Latin. I'm liking this better as there is a lot more practice that makes sense to me. OTOH, I've found that what I did in Wheelock has been a big help.

I don't have the recipe but my mom makes persimmon cookies.

I'm guessing some kind of lepidopteran egg mass that hatched out. Some kind of moth maybe?

Around here just about everyone gets cut from soccer. Even seniors who have been star players on the team for several years and are planning on getting recruited by colleges. A coach gets a new idea and decides to go with a different set of players. And then a couple girls we know actually made the varsity team. They were so thrilled. But they spent the entire season sitting on the bench. They'd have been better off on the junior varsity team, but the coach didn't allow them to have that option. I think there's too much emphasis on soccer in the earlier years and then no follow through with keeping teams up for the high school kids. It's a great sport. There are lots of kids who want to play, and not enough spots. And there's too much emphasis on winning in our area. I'm less than thrilled with the way things are often handled. I kind of thought high school was a time for kids to work on improving both mind and body, but the soccer teams and coaches seem to only worry about winning and are all too eager to keep kids off their teams. My daughter gave up on soccer and went to cross country. It was a lot more supportive atmosphere, and a lot more fun. She loved soccer, and could have continued to play on a low level team, but the high school coaches were just, well, stinky, to be honest. They weren't interested in coaching anyone, just collecting a paycheck. She then went to Ultimate Frisbee, which was also a lot of fun and pretty supportive, but with a lot of excellent players to make things challenging.

In theory, this is what the AP exam covers: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/biology/topic.html In actuality, though, most classes don't get through everything, and that is why you can get a lot wrong on AP tests and still get a 5. They make the test so it can be taken by students who have taken a wide variety of courses that may focus on different things. However, you don't have to learn all this stuff from Campbell, even if you are taking the AP test. You can go for the more fundamental stuff more deeply in Campbell and then do some quick and dirty learn-for-the-test with a prep book at the end and pick up all the pieces you didn't get to. Also, the stuff at the end of the list tends to be the easiest to learn quickly. But if you aren't doing the AP test, sure, cut it down. That's a whopper of a book full of lots of detail. It would be better to have a full understanding of some things than a superficial understanding of everything. FWIW, the AP Bio test seems to fulfill about a one semester non majors course at a lot of colleges. Campbell tends to be a full year majors course text. I suspect this means the AP test is a bit superficial, but I wouldn't know what to suggest cutting (but a good prep book will give you a very good idea of what the student needs to know). The sample AP test on the web strikes me as being pretty easy compared to what I would consider to be a decent test in a decent majors college bio course. Actually, I've taught non majors bio and the AP test seems somewhat easy in comparison to that course. So, no, in theory you shouldn't have to cover everything in Campbell, but (repeating myself) it's hard to know what to cut. It would be bits and pieces out of each chapter rather a lot of full chapters.

Why? Because I have very little influence over what happens in other countries. I may not have very much here in the US either, but at least here I can vote and speak out against lunacy. Not only that, but if we don't speak out against hate, we may very well end up with a country where it is acceptable to kill people because we don't happen to like the way they do things, even if at the moment it's just a little book burning. That's why. And why is that you seem to think that people in the US who speak out against the hate filled messages here, don't find these atrocities in other countries reprehensible as well? By the way, you might want to watch this Olbermann piece if you want a bit of perspective: http://www.politicususa.com/en/olbermann-ground-zero-mosque Although this is about the mosque in NY issue (which he points out isn't even a mosque), he also reports on a bombing incident at a mosque in FL: http://www.aolnews.com/crime/article/fbi-finds-pipe-bomb-used-in-blast-at-fla-mosque/19475001 Why did this bomb not kill everyone inside? Apparently because the bomber was an idiot. But the next one may not be an idiot, and then you will have an article about people getting killed in mosques right here in the US that you can post. Citing killings in Christian churches in other countries won't be such a convincing argument then (if it ever was). Use it while you can, I guess.

What's the reason for memorizing it? Although a lot of chemists might know where a lot of the elements go, I don't hear about them actually sitting down and memorizing. It just comes with time.

We've been all over, time wise. It doesn't seem to have hampered understanding at all. In fact, I think there are some benefits to it as the kids have gotten tired of doing one period for too long a time. It also allows revisiting a time period when the student finally gets the wherewithal to read some of the more difficult works. I know the WTM does this in a 4 year cycle, but I'm talking about doing it on a smaller scale. Often, what my kids couldn't read at the beginning of a year, they're capable of reading by the end, or by the next year.

But I would have been home in bed. I would have let my husband take them and party all night long. Why bring them home when they're just going to be up til all hours anyway? But I wouldn't have found the parent who decided not to come over the bedtime issue to be offensive. She knows what she can and can't handle. It's her call.

There are a lot of movie possibilities here: http://www.navigatinglife.org/historybusters/id47.html They aren't geography per se, but a lot of them gave us a good feel for the culture of certain areas of the world at various times. Some of these movies are pretty R rated, though, so you'll have to use your judgment.

I don't know, but if you figure out a way around this, let me know so I can apply the successful technique to my 15 yr old daughter. (Who, by the way, can write circles around just about everyone -- it's writing lit analysis that stumps her -- she'll write an absolutely hilarious, well written, and devastatingly true critique of a character's behavior, but it won't be written in "acceptable" format nor be much of a literary analysis paper.) Come to think of it, my college freshman had this same problem when she was still in high school. I didn't really figure out how to fix it then, but by senior year she seemed able to pull something acceptable together. I can't tell you how many "how to write an essay" websites I've shown my kids. Sometimes they read them, if I'm lucky. Then they tell me they didn't understand them. One thing that might work is just having them read a lot of the type of essays they're supposed to write. There's kind of a rhythm to them. Maybe they just need to get that into their heads. sparknotes has a lot of these examples -- and some of them aren't even written all that well. Maybe rewriting one of the bad ones would be instructive. But it's not peculiar to your son and he will either grow out of it, or find a perfectly successful path through life that doesn't require him to write those sort of essays. I only ever wrote ONE of them in my entire college career and that was only because I was interested enough in English lit to take a class that wasn't required.

I find it helpful to go to a place like sparknotes after I've read the book and thought about it on my own. Then I see what I was "supposed" to get out of it. I often disagree, but it's nice to see what others thought. Is it deep enough? I think you can only go as deep into literature as you're ready for. A high school student is doing well to be able to read and understand a work and have some opinions on it that they can support. If they can write about this in a composition, then they've pretty much fulfilled anything that could be expected out of them. I doubt any college is going to expect more than that. I found How to Read Literature Like a Professor to be an interesting read on this topic. My recollection of high school lit was a lot less than you've described, and I was in the honors/AP classes. We read a few things (really, not that many), listened to what the teacher had to say about interpretation, and wrote a few literary analysis papers that mostly parroted what the teacher told us to think. That was about it. I don't remember any discussion of historical context or even much talk of literary terms and devices. I'd guess what you're doing exceeds that. These days, I hear that lit classes at the local high school also may include having the student write a paper on the history occurring at the time of the novel's writing. They might do one of these "context" papers and then a lit analysis paper, and something else that qualifies as writing but is neither one of these two. And that will be it for the year. I do try to get my kids to write more than that, but I don't stress too much as I can see we're not "behind" what the ps kids are doing.

At one point, we were using the Reader's Digest How Nature Works for 9th grade biology. I was more interested in having a book my kid would understand than one that was rigorous. I was just so frustrated by the nonsensical textbooks that I had to give up on them. I was a lot more interested in my kid learning concepts than random vocabulary.

Oh, and my husband the college professor just pointed out that the several homeschool students they've had in the department have been stellar students: responsible, on time with assignments, etc etc -- unlike many of the other students. I would guess it's just a personality thing. Some people are just good with deadlines and timed tests. Some aren't. It wouldn't matter if the latter had 13 years of practice at dealing with these things, they'd still be a bit flaky unless they decided to change. And there are undoubtedly hs kids who are flaky like this when they get to college. The only difference is, there are so few hs kids that professors make their opinions about ALL hs kids based on very few data points. It reminds me of my SIL who claims she HAD to go to school for 13 years or she never would have been able to get out of bed for her 8 AM job as an adult. Seriously? It took 13 years to train her to do this? (This was her best reason against homeschooling.)