I do this too -- and the checkout clerks all re-sort it. Drives me crazy.

I thought Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was more interesting than Collapse. Might just be my odd opinion, but I kind of found Collapse to be a bit too fluffy. The chapters on Easter Island and Greenland in Collapse were ok, though. Although, thinking about it, I think his original article on Easter Island in Natural History was better. (And I think he might be a bit misinformed on some of his info in the Greenland chapters.) Also, I hear that Guns, Germs, and Steel was really just a rewrite of Plagues and Peoples, which might be an interesting read (I've so far only got through the first chapter...) OK, maybe I was wrong and it was Discover magazine where Diamond published his first Easter Island essay: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html (Although, this article is dated 1995 and I'm pretty sure I read that Easter Island article before that date.)

This is very true. I was told my daughter just couldn't write back in 1st and 2nd grade by her teachers. Her college professors don't seem to have any complaints now about her. What has worked for us: lots of reading of good literature that we found engaging (there's no point to reading things that aren't interesting because one just won't focus). Lots and lots of discussing -- both of things we've read and things we've heard on TV, in movies, etc. This is probably how my kids learned to think logically. Also, they are forming sentences all the time that are geared towards convincing people around them. And then, when my kids wrote, I made a lot of suggestions for rewrites. We actually never did ANY formal grammar. We've just picked it up from reading and talking. If for some reason one didn't find that this was enough, then formal grammar might be necessary, but I wouldn't force it on someone who was doing just fine without it. Some people just internalize it and don't need to be taught.

For math, I've found that just doing lots of problems works best both for learning material in the first place and for retention. Even copying already worked out problems is helpful. As I go through the copying process (or my child does), the steps start to make more sense. I've generally never crammed for math tests. It's not of much help for me. I just work problems until it becomes second nature. This seems to work best for my kids too. I'm taking a class right now where I'm having to memorize things for tests. I can memorize just fine and get A's, but a few hours after the test, everything I memorized is GONE. The odd thing is, if I just work with the information in some way, it sticks in my head for a long time after. This is a large part of the reason why I don't give tests to my kids. If my goal is to have them know it, tests seems like a pointless exercise. For both my kids and myself, when it comes to learning facts in history and whatnot, writing and discussing seem to be the big things that get it stuck in our brains. Strict memorizing doesn't help much.

Berkeley does. Some of those are pretty good.

I've never given tests to my kids (except the silly state mandated tests). If I needed to give a test to figure out what my kids knew and didn't know, I'd be a pretty poor teacher. Mostly, teachers need tests in classes because they don't know their students well. They can't. There are too many students. We've worried more about understanding what we're doing rather than spitting it back on a test. My older one went off to college and has pretty much aced every test she's taken there. So I don't think it's necessary to give tests before college.

That's been our experience with other Thinkwell lectures as well (haven't used geometry). If you use the Thinkwell lectures as well as another book for the problems, Thinkwell might be helpful. But even there, the lectures don't cover everything and you'll still be figuring things out from the book. But our experience with the lectures has been mostly good. You just can't depend on the problem sets.

My kids do most of the household laundry -- their own and everyone else's. Someone just does whatever happens to be there whenever they need something in particular. Well, when I say "someone" I don't include my husband. He does about 1 load a year.

Here's one example: http://home.comcast.net/~tjlm/20072008T12.html

We've used Thinkwell Calculus. It's engaging, but the problem sets really don't cover the topic well. You'd need supplementation. I don't have experience with the other one.

A lot of schools around here don't have the resources to teach Alg I in 8th grade, so the kids in those schools don't even have the option. They all seem to make it into college just fine. Do it if your child is ready. Wait if they're not. It's really not a big deal, even for kids going into math heavy fields. Colleges are perfectly happy to teach the kids calculus when they get there. They don't need to do it in high school. (Doing AlgI in 8th grade, if you follow the general sequence, gets the kids into calculus in 12th grade. Otherwise, they finish with precalc and do calc in college.)

I'm here!

We lost TV reception for a month last year -- and only noticed when we wanted to turn the TV on to see where the nearest tornado was. We're supposedly hooked up for watching broadcast TV, but don't often bother with it. But we do watch DVDs, when we have time. On our new-to-us DVD/TV that we picked out of the trash when everyone else went to digital. OTOH, friends of ours are always going on and on about how they don't have a TV -- and then posting on facebook about all the movies/TV shows they've been watching. They spend entire weekends watching all the years of one show. If that's not watching TV in its worst form ever, I don't know what is. I'm with you about these people. This does seem to be a pretty common gripe. Oh, and I watch TV at the gym, because it's on. And it's enough to convince me there's no reason to turn it on at home.

The Pimsleur Mandarin course isn't bad. You'd have to supplement with written materials at some point, but it might be a good starting point. It's kind of expensive. We've used a copy from the library. At one point, our library had it as an e-audiobook so we could just download it. Some libraries might still have that. As you were saying, it might be nice to start with an audio only course so as not to be so confused by how pinyin looks like it "should" be pronounced. But that's an issue with any written language. We used to pronounce written Spanish like English, but we've gotten a lot better with repetition. This book has a nice layout with large print for learning characters: http://www.amazon.com/First-100-Chinese-Characters-Simplified/dp/0804838305 However, it doesn't actually teach Chinese. It just shows how to write the characters. It comes in both a simplified and non-simplified form and I *think* that each version also shows the other (either simplified or non-simplified), but without the practice space for writing it. You might find, though, that there are sites on the web that do the same thing for free. These books have a lot of white space for practicing, so it might cost more than you're willing to pay for what they are.

My daughter lives at home. I think she gets more work done and has a better social life than if she were in the dorms. She's not so overwhelmed by the dorm scene, and she has a quiet place to study so she's more efficient. Having lived in the dorms, I think I would have done a lot better living at home. My daughter's social life is a bit too active, in fact. She's generally at school from 9AM to 9PM. She got involved in theater and that has given her a good friend group to hang out with. It also keeps her very busy. I would tend to recommend living at home if the commute isn't too much and you get along with your family. It's not just the money saved, it can be a more focused way to get through college.

My daughter got 100% of tuition, but only because we get an employee discount. Without that, she would have got 63% of tuition. She got about the same offer from another school she didn't go to. Room and board was never offered (but she's living at home) and nobody gave money for fees. However, she really only applied to 2 places. She might have got more if she'd sent out 10 applications. She also might have got more if she hadn't had the employee discount (the colleges knew she had that and may have wanted to spend their money on kids who didn't have that break.)

My daughter started trumpet at 7-1/2. I'm sure she didn't have all her teeth in yet. She had very late teeth. I have heard from one person who started flute early, that it messed up the joints in her hand from too much reaching for the keys. I don't know if that's really what happened, or just what she believed, but it might be worth thinking about. (As an adult, her finger joints do a look a little out of whack.) My second daughter really, really wanted to learn flute when she was 5. I got her a flute to play with, but it really was kind of frustrating for her. Instead, she played recorder for awhile (along with piano and violin). Then she took up flute at 12 -- and learned really fast. There is a flute with a curved headjoint that brings the keys closer in, so the stretch isn't as difficult -- but the keys are still the same distance apart. I think your best bet would be to try a flute and see if he "fits" it. Otherwise, if he's not going into a band program immed. but really wants something flute like (and the recorder doesn't interest him), you can get a plastic fife that Yamaha sells (I think it has recorder fingering). I've known a number of flute teachers that start their kids on those. (And others start on regular recorders.) The nice thing about starting on recorder is that it starts to teach breath control. (Although the breath use on recorder vs flute is pretty different, there's still some carryover.) But I'm not convinced a lack of permanent teeth would have a huge impact. He might learn to play one way, and then, as they grow in, he'll change his embouchure. Kids do this when they get braces too. As far as not being able to reach the end of the slide on the trombone, ehh, I wouldn't really worry about it. They do grow into it. There's only a couple notes that a kid wouldn't be able to reach. They could just play a bit sharp for awhile on those notes. If you're worried about the teeth, go to a music store and try out a trombone. See how he does with it. And in general, nobody starts on tuba until they get to high school and can borrow the tuba that the school owns. Tuba players have generally started on trumpet or trombone for a few years. All that said, though, there's no harm waiting a year or two. The older kids do tend to learn a bit faster, so they catch up to those who started younger. But if he's eager to do it now, there's no harm in starting him at this age. And it's a pretty standard age to begin.

I'm glad you're all posting your experiences with Albuterol. I don't feel like such an idiot. Both our doctor and pharmacist assured me that Albuterol did not make people jumpy and did not keep them up at night, because (so they said) Albuterol only stimulates the heart and lungs. It doesn't not stimulate the mechanism that makes you go to sleep. Therefore, it can't keep you up at night. So why was my daughter up til 5 every morning and utterly exhausted? As both pharmacist and doctor pretty much told me the same thing with the exact same words, I wonder where they were getting this line from. A pharmaceutical representative?

If your goal is just to fulfill a language requirement to get into college, I wouldn't worry about fluency. Public schools obviously don't worry about it, so it's not like a homeschool is failing relative to a a public school if the homeschool kids don't become fluent in another language. When public school kids want to learn a language, they don't do it at the local high school around here, even though the local high school offers 6 years of many languages. Instead, they do dual enrollment at a college (or do 6 months as an exchange student). Everyone at the high school knows that you don't learn a language at high school. It's a complete joke and just some credits that kids rack up on their transcript so they fulfill the requirement. These credits count for getting into college, but none of the kids actually learn much of the language beyond a few mispronounced phrases. They don't even learn to read it very well. Back when I was in high school, the schools at least turned out kids who could read, after a fashion, in the foreign language, but that seems not to be the goal anymore, at least around here. It's only about getting credits to get into college. That said, we've had pretty good luck here with using Pimsleur and Destinos for Spanish -- my kids can at least understand a certain amount of spoken Spanish. They can't really speak it, because they never get the opportunity to practice in the back and forth manner that a fluent speaker could help them with. I wouldn't limit your student to Latin just because they wouldn't have to speak it. If there's interest in another language, let them do that one instead. At least you can lay down the basics while at home. However, from our experience with college applications, Latin would have been a fine choice for college admittance. ASL would have worked too. (SOME colleges have rules against ASL or Latin to fulfill the language requirement AT college, but these two languages would still fulfill the entrance requirement at most schools.)

If you have money to burn, you might find that the Thinkwell Calculus lectures are helpful. He doesn't (as far as I can tell) do much in the way of proofs, except in a sort of hand waving fashion, but he does get at the ideas without too much of the serious math nomenclature that confuses so many kids when they first see it. This might be helpful for some kids. Or not. My daughter is finding the lectures helpful, but I still need to go to a book to get more problems and for a bit more explanation. He does seem to do a fair number of examples. However, the quiz questions following the lectures don't impress me. They seem to try to make things hard by dumping algebra intensive questions on the students from the start, which obscures the point the lecture was trying to make. Also, there are often quiz questions that have nothing to do with the lecture and never do get covered --meaning you'd have to go to a book to figure out how to do them. And it's not obvious to the student that this is what is happening. As the homeschool parent, I find I have to watch the lectures along with my daughter to see what she still needs to cover and to weed out those quiz questions that are just ridiculous. Otherwise, she would just get frustrated. But the lectures aren't bad if you're looking for an easier approach than reading through a calculus tome (you might have to go to the calc tome after the lecture, though.) Also, the Khan Academy might be helpful (it's online somewhere). My worry about Stewart (and others of that ilk) is that it's TOO comprehensive and a self learner might have trouble figuring out where to start and what's important. One of my kids used Stewart in her Calc III (after using that "lite" version I mentioned in an earlier post). She found it very difficult in Stewart to find what she needed when she needed an explanation. She kept going back to her "lite" text. She's now in the 4th semester of math (which is covering more calc topics beyond the III course among other things) and finds that she's way better prepared than all the kids who took calc only at college (some with that Stewart book). So I'm not convinced that a really rigorous, proof heavy book is really the thing for the first pass through for most students. It may work for some. Some things work for some students/teachers, some for others. But while I understand teachers wanting a complete and rigorous book, I'm not sure they always see how the kids are responding to it. Our best solution, in fact, has been to have a number of calc books around, so if something doesn't make sense in one, we can look it up in another. You can get very cheap used books that just aren't the current edition, just to use as additional resources. And whichever book you use -- you really, really need a good, complete solutions manual. I think that matters way more than which book you get, although I'd probably want to at least get a book that was recommended on the AP calc site (to avoid a book that's called "calculus" but really isn't what a regular calc course would use). And my experience with test banks for a lot of these calc books is that you might not want to bother -- a good AP prep book may give a lot better test type questions than some of those test banks, even if one is not intending to do the AP test. I don't have the specific names of the ones I've looked at, but the few I've seen were pretty unimpressive. (There may be some good ones out there.) A lot of books have review problems at the end of the chapter. You might find those are more useful for testing purposes than a test bank. Or you might use the even problems if the student has worked the odd ones (and if you have solutions for the even ones). And there's no reason why you can't give the student a problem on a test that they've seen before.

I'm still looking for good violin music that's both challenging and interesting to the student. We've been working through the Suzuki books. There actually are a fair number of interesting pieces in there. Some are dull, but I'm reluctant to skip any of them because they seem to all introduce something worthwhile. (In fact, lately I've been thinking that I'm appreciating having a really awful piece to work on my shifting because I can have it sound awful and not really care -- it wasn't a piece I wanted to learn anyway. But my shifting is improving and I don't have to worry about making a great piece sound terrible.) Other than Suzuki, my daughter and I have also been working through the pieces in Solos for Young Violinists (Barbara Barber). The title is a bit deceptive. The first book starts out with some simple pieces but it very quickly gets into harder things. The first book ends up with pieces that are about level 4-5 in the Suzuki method. There are 8 books in all, but the 2nd book is already up in grades 5-6 (using Suzuki as a guide). Suzuki seems to have mostly the old classical "chestnuts", while the Solos for Young Violinists has some things that are a little more modern (but probably still classed as classical). I'm always on the look out for more challenging pieces in the popular or folk genres. Someone suggested Gypsy Violin by Harbar. That also looks like an interesting book. You might look through the music selections at a place like Johnson String (which has cheap strings, by the way!). I got some books from there. They have both folk and classical (and jazz and probably other things). (Although some of them you might be able to get cheaper used at a place like Amazon.)

I have always found that that one person who runs the show is the one who is completely clueless about how to do the task at hand. And they will never take advice from someone who might actually know how to do it. And there is no way I could put something together with a bunch of other people staring and distracting. So, yes, this story does present a good reason to homeschool, but I don't think this proves that the high schoolers are clueless -- it's that one learns better in a quiet environment.

Just out of curiosity, what pieces are you working on right now?

Last I checked in our state, "poor" schools didn't get extra state money -- the schools that got state money were those that were "poor for their district". In other words, schools that had the most poor students in each district got extra money. There are many schools in the poorer districts that DON'T get extra state funding, even though they have more kids in poverty than the schools in the richer districts. As an example, in a richer district, a school with a 4 percent poverty rate gets extra state funding. However in a poorer district, a school with up to a 50 percent poverty rate gets NO extra funding for being a "poor" school. They have the misfortune of being in a poor district, so they deserve no extra funding even though they have way more kids in poverty than any school in the rich district.

"find that my bow hand gets sore after I play. and I just can't seem to find the resaon why. My teacher says I have good posture and that my bow hand looks great. But it tends to sting a little and then I have to wear a brace around my hand while I play. Do you know the cause for this?" That would seem like a warning sign. My piano teacher always said, if it hurts, don't do it. It could be that you just need to build up the musculature a bit more. That may just take months with your current practice schedule, not more hours per day. I've also found that going a day or two of not playing each week is a big help. When I do come back, I find I'm a bit stronger (and those icky bits that didn't work before suddenly are a bit better.) I've found that the longer I practice, the more tense I get. I spend a certain amount of my practice time just working on relaxed playing, and not even worrying about playing harder pieces. It has really paid off. Not only did I get rid of these little pain "issues", my tone improved (on both piano and violin). Another great saying I've heard: Practice makes permanent. Whatever it is you're practicing will stick. If you're practicing with tension, that's how you'll play, and your body and your playing will suffer for it. If you practice mistakes over and over because you aren't concentrating, you will learn those mistakes VERY well. I wouldn't push too hard in bumping up your practice time. The fact is, you're still fairly young. You will probably have plenty of time to put in long hours of practice once you get to college. You might want to work on playing in a relaxed manner right now, rather than striving for more and more practice hours. Another trick you might try is recording yourself and then listening to recording in a couple months. When someone first starts on an instrument, they make great strides, and they expect to continue to make such huge improvements as long as they keep practicing. But as you get better, it takes longer to improve. You don't notice it's happening and it gets frustrating. But if you can hear your playing from just a few months ago, it may convince you that you're making a lot more progress than you imagined.