We've pretty much done what the original poster suggested, except that we've always had a math book. Not a curriculum, just a book we worked through. A lot of times it was the same book the local school district was supposedly using (although we actually worked through it -- the schools usually only had one copy per classroom so it was never feasible for kids at school the actually use the book). I was always working toward the goal of having my kids be able to read, write, and be on track to get through higher math by the time they finished high school. Other than that, I didn't care too much what they decided to learn before high school. In the high school years, we've worked toward fulfilling college admissions requirements, but we still never got a real curriculum. We've just gathered textbooks for science. History and literature have been pretty much on the fly with whatever books looked interesting. My kids would never have stood for a curriculum. There's a lot of dumb stuff in purchased curricula, just like there is in school. Anyway, we've never had the money.

My 15 yr old hates that she doesn't fit in, and recognizes that it's homeschooling that has made her this way. But she doesn't want to change. She wants all the other kids to change and be as mature as she is. Every year, I've told my kids they could go back to school. Every year, they've refused.

I never kicked my kids out. They eventually drifted off to their own room in the early teen years. But they still come back and sleep with me when they're sick or upset. They're 15 and 19. They'd probably sleep with me more but they're afraid of waking me up. They share a room. Sometimes they sleep together in the same bed. Sometimes the middle of the night just gets kind of lonely. I think the thing that really convinced them to move on out was that they were going to bed so much later than me.

I didn't do any course descriptions unless they were particularly unusual. For math, I just gave the title and author of the book we used. (For science, I added a list of lab titles, but that was probably overkill.) If anyone cared, they could look up the book and see the table of contents for themselves. Truthfully, I kind of doubt anyone even looked at our descriptions. We only did course descriptions at all because a couple colleges seemed to imply they expected them, although it wasn't entirely clear. A couple colleges "lost" the transcript and course descriptions we sent. When I re-sent, I only bothered to send the one page transcript, so I'm pretty sure those colleges didn't ever see the course descriptions (unless they "found" them later). They admitted my daughter just fine without them. In any case, our course descriptions were only a couple pages long (total) because I didn't want to annoy people with a pretentious 50 page glossy binder.

I don't know about NCAA rules, but the colleges my daughter applied to didn't seem to care that we did this all the way through high school. She just picked things she wanted to read, wrote a few papers, discussed a lot, and read some analysis on sparknotes. After she had done this, we realized she could categorize the things she'd read into topics such as detective fiction, nature writing, speculative fiction, drama, ancient literature, british lit, world lit, and American lit, so we called each of these chunks by those names. You could come up with appropriate names based on what gets read. She could do a semester of British lit and then a semester of something else.

If he's already done calc, maybe he should just study for the AP test. If he's done the AB part, he could work this year toward the BC. The AP Calc test seems to be fairly acceptable to many colleges, so he'd hopefully get credit. That might be a good use of his time this year. Otherwise, if he doesn't have deficiencies in any areas, maybe he'd enjoy making up his own course. We've done archaeology, the influence of biology on history, music theory, astronomy, photography, computer animation, and a lot more foreign language than necessary. We were going to do linguistics but ran out of time.

Only one problem with that timed test obsession. When my daughter got to college she was amazed at how much time they had to take tests. They could sit for hours working on the thing. Most professors try not to pack so much on a test that the students are scrambling to get it done --unless they have some strange pedagogical ideas, or are too inexperienced to know how long it takes to answer certain questions. And my daughter who had never had deadlines at home -- not a single one -- has done just fine when presented with deadlines. She tends to finish early, while the rest of the class stays up all night to get things done the hour before it's due. Her only real problem with deadlines has been when she has lab partners who drag their feet and don't want to get things done because the deadline is not yet upon them. These are ps kids who presumably have had deadlines since kindergarten, so it doesn't seem that practicing with deadlines before college is any help.

You can do a very good biology course WITH lab without doing a single dissection. Here is the list of labs recommended for AP Bio: http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/homepage/34458.html I don't see an dissections on there (although I might be missing them). (I don't know how difficult it would be to pull off these labs at home.) Some students are really fascinated by dissections. Others don't want anything to do with them. Dissections also tend to be pricey and smelly. But you can choose to skip them and still have a perfectly acceptable class that isn't wimpy at all. I just don't have any recommendations for anything published out there.

If you're taking both Benadryl and Tylenol PM, you're getting a double dose of Benadryl. So you could just take 2 Benadryl and skip the Tylenol. But I don't know what a safe dose of Benadryl is. You might want to check that. It's more drugs, but I've had success with Unisom (doxylamine succinate). I take half a dose. I think a full one would knock me out for 24 hours. (Don't take it along with the Benadryl!) I don't sleep if I eat anything I'm allergic to -- which is just about everything these days. Or rather, I get to sleep, but then I wake up with nightmares and my heart racing. So, yes, I was up last night. And the night before...

I have yet to see a high school biology text that does the science justice. There's usually too much emphasis on dry facts and memorizing vocabulary without much fitting it all together in an understandable framework. There actually are concepts in biology, but the texts don't seem to know that. Instead, they make it so darn difficult to understand that one becomes convinced that biology is the most difficult thing ever. I haven't read Apologia, though, so I'm speaking from some kind of informed ignorance on the topic of that one in particular. I'd get a lot of videos while you figure out what you're going to do next. David Attenborough did a ton of good ones (Life of Birds, Life of Mammals, Life in Cold Blood, Life in the Undergrowth....). Another one that my husband shows to his college classes is Darwin's Dangerous Idea which does a pretty good job of covering the development of the theory of evolution (that's the video, not the book by Daniel Dennett of the same title). The rest of the Evolution series by PBS that that video is from is also pretty good. Here's an MIT lecture course that might be helpful: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-012-introduction-to-biology-fall-2004/video-lectures/ I seem to recall that these lectures may not cover every concept in detail (they may have left that to the TAs), but the professors do get excited about things, which is worth seeing.

We've used Destinos and Pimsleur. (Pimsleur seems pretty good for Spanish as Spanish spelling is so intuitive, but I'm not sure it would work for French...) Destinos has a good amount of grammar in the workbook and textbook. Pimsleur has some grammar introduction, but it's kind of on a need to know basis for the conversational skills. And Pimsleur has no writing or reading. I see that the people who did Destinos also have a new program out called Sol y Viento. I know absolutely nothing about it, but I'm intrigued. It's another video type course. We used the old Rosetta Stone for awhile but didn't find it did much for us. I don't know how the new one is.

Many texts are huge because they are giving the teacher/professor the option to pick and choose what they want to cover. It would be silly to do everything in a text. The publishers are providing lots of material because they want to sell to the most professors. Then the professors trim it down. There is nothing wrong with this. When I use a science or math text with my kids, I've generally taken most of these courses, or have worked or taught in the field, so I have a sense as to what's actually important: what skills and facts they really need to know to go on in the field, what concepts are the basis of the field. So we skip a lot of superfluous stuff, because there is really no point to trying to fill my kids heads with junk that they don't need and will never use -- if it turns out I made a mistake and they do need it eventually, we will have covered the basics thoroughly enough that they will be able to learn what they need on their own. If I didn't cut things out, my kids would be learning so much stuff that things would start to fall out of their heads. And they would have no way of knowing what was important and needed to be retained. They'd end up with a pretty deficient education as a result. I fear that may be happening with many homeschoolers who are in the "must finish the text" camp. For most classes and textbooks, it would be best to pick and choose - even if you have spent a lot on the book. You'll get a better educational "product" if the student can focus on the important concepts. If you aren't sure what to cut, I'd suggest looking around on the web for syllabi that professors have posted for their classes. If you can find one that follows your textbook and gives actual reading assignments, that would make your life easier, but even if you can't, you can generally figure out what topics are being covered and which are skipped. As a case in point, we were using Destinos for Spanish with our kids. My older daughter insisted she had to do every exercise or she wouldn't have had the full experience. I told her just to do a few per chapter. She just couldn't and insisted on doing all of them. It slowed her way down so she didn't get through as much Spanish as she could have. Then she went to take French in college -- and discovered that the professor was only assigning a couple of the book assignments per chapter. She learned French just fine. So now she advises her younger sister just to skip a lot of the assignments in the textbooks that we use at home. The extra assignments are only there so the professors can choose which they feel are most important. Really, it is ok to skip. That is the intent of many textbooks. And when it comes to many science and math textbooks, we generally don't even do any of the reading. We do the example problems and we then do problems for practice, but reading the text is generally a last resort if the student doesn't understand something. Usually the text with the example problems is plenty of explanation. (This isn't true of biology and other descriptive type sciences but for chem and physics, the important thing is being able to work the problems (unless you're into the descriptive areas of those 2 sciences).) For math, in particular, we've never done any of the reading. The reading generally just confuses the issue. In the college physics my daughter took last year, the professor actually told them he didn't want anyone reading the text. He had them get the book because it had lots of examples and good homework problems, but the actual writing was so atrocious he didn't want anyone reading it and getting confused. If he'd seen a book with a decent text, he would have had them get it, but he hadn't run across one. That's been my impression as well with a lot of science textbooks. And then there's the history textbook conundrum. If you pick one text and only use that, you will never discover that a lot of the material in it conflicts with what folks have written on the topic in other books -- this is the case even in highly respected college texts. So it's probably better to get history from a number of different sources rather than depend on one text, which makes reading one text cover to cover a bit of an impossibility in a single year.

I think the Iliad is fascinating. See if you can get the Elizabeth Vandiver lectures on it from the Teaching Company (many libraries have it). It really helps with understanding. But it is a pretty long slog. If you have limited time for Homer, The Odyssey might be more approachable. (And I think Vandiver has a series of lectures on that too.) If you don't want to read all of The Iliad (because it is really long) you might be happier with a quick retelling like Black Ships before Troy. It does the story, but won't take all year. Jane Austen is hilarious. You just have to read carefully. Her plots are embedded in a framework of romance, but that's not really the point. If you don't read carefully all you will see is the romance. You need to make a point of looking for the social satire instead. To be honest, the last couple chapters of Pride and Prejudice, which wrap up a nice happy ending, are the most boring part. The funny characters have mostly been removed from the scene, so there isn't as much of interest, but this last bit of it goes by quick. Don't avoid reading this book just because it finishes on a sappy, romantic note. Austen is an interesting comparison to Dickens -- both have fairly memorable side characters but they do them quite differently. At the same time, there's quite a bit in common. So if you're reading Dickens too, this would make a good point for discussion. And read the books before seeing any of the movie versions. We just watched the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice this weekend (why do people call it the Colin Firth version, I have to ask). I was really glad my kids had read the book first. They had a completely different concept as to how certain scenes played out (honestly, some were just plain wrong in the movie). However, I think this version did do a fairly good job with many of the minor characters.

I'd do what interests you the most. Even if Greek is harder, if you're more motivated, it may seem easier.

I'm guessing the philosophy course won't be as difficult as the book seems to imply. But if you'd rather use Spanish to fulfill the requirement, one approach would be to learn some Spanish on your own and then place out of the 1st semester. If the college does placement tests.

Google ap world history syllabus. This is what I got: http://www.google.com/search?q=ap+world+history+syllabus&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a There are a lot of resources right there.

Homemade cherry ice cream. We didn't get many cherries off our tree this year, but we're now all watching to see how much growth it puts on and dreaming about the ice cream we'll get out of it next year. And I really like green tea ice cream -- except that I discovered I'm allergic to tea. Darn.

Here.

When I see people running with their dogs, the dogs seem to be all business, loping along as if they think they're going somewhere. I don't know if it's wired into a dog's brain that moving fast means no stopping, or if the runners out there only try this with dogs that don't stop every 10 seconds. When I've been nipped by dogs when out on my own walks, it's always by dogs who are walking. The running ones hardly notice me. Yep, we do get dogs going after our ankles more than one might think. I always give dogs a wide berth, which makes some dog owners look at me weird, but I guess they don't have this problem because they've got their doggy guardian with them.

We had too much lightning. Oh, and clouds. Night before last, the kids said they saw 6-8, even with the city lights interfering.

Is that not just the class rank that you or your student filled out on the form when signing up to take the ACT? I don't know where they'd get that info from otherwise.

But if the student has already taken the AP test for bio and chem, the B physics test would be superfluous for getting college credit. I don't know of any schools that require more than 2 semesters of science from non science majors. I suspect the C physics test requires concurrent calc, but I haven't checked. The only thing the B physics test would do for a student who had already done the bio and chem tests would be to provide more evidence for admissions. But if they've already done well on the previous ones, would this really add anything?

My daughter got into college just fine with 3 high school years of Spanish, 2 college semesters of ASL, and 1 college semester of French. The ASL will fulfill all her college language requirements. My guess is that she would have been fine with just the 3 years of Spanish. She was strong in other areas, so they were willing to overlook her not having a lot more language. I suspect she would have been fine with 2 semesters of Spanish. (And if you're really strong in other areas, you might even get away with no language at all, although that's not your situation. Colleges overlook things when they see students they want. The only real problem might be at a state university where they tend to do things by the book. But do they want more than 2 years? They didn't when I was in high school.) FWIW, the ASL she took moved fairly slow, and this was at a school that prides itself on having an ASL interpreter degree, so it's not like they were some podunk school that happened to offer a year of ASL. They were using Signing Naturally and only got through about a fourth of the second book by the end of the 3rd semester (my daughter took another semester of ASL after she was admitted to college). So if you do enough ASL that you could understand the videos from that course only partway into the 2nd book, you might count that as 3 years of high school ASL without fudging. You might have only spent 2 clock years on it, but maybe you'd be more advanced than expected and could call it an intensive course. You should definitely count the ASL as a language. Even if the college you apply to doesn't count it as fulfilling the graduation requirement, they will most likely count it as a high school language. Did you check with your library to see what resources they have for Italian? If they have Pimsleur in this language, you might find that a good thing to try. I've found that when I just can't go on with a language, somehow I can with Pimsleur. It just seems like an easy way to pick up a language. The big problem with Pimsleur is that there's no reading or writing, but you do have that book you got. If your library doesn't have it, try interlibrary loan, if they have such a thing. Put it on your ipod if you have one. Or try this yahoo group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Italian/ I haven't joined, so I don't know if most of their postings are spam, but it might be useful, if only for finding a penpal. I know, you said you were sick of Italian, but you might change your mind.

But this realtor makes a ton of money. She always puts her houses on the market way higher than anyone else is selling, and still manages to sell them. So her approach isn't costing her, apparently. She is also a flipper, when the spirit moves her. (After moving into this neighborhood 15 years ago, it's been interesting to watch her career.) She's just so darn charming, she gets away with it. I'm only mentioning it as something to look out for if one is involved in buying or selling.

The later I go to bed, the earlier I wake up. I don't know how common that is, but it wouldn't do me any good to go to bed later. I'd just wake up at 2-3 and not be able to go back to sleep.