I hate ranking kids! I hate it! I would never want to give a list like that to a child to look at. OMG, the pressure, the feelings of inadequacy. There are a lot of kids without these opportunities. This seems to be a list for rich kids only. I *really* don't like it. I've said my peace and am walking away.

really? Ok. I'm just not an inventor type. Can I just say that I think that this list is ridiculous. Why should we expect our children to be able to do these things? Publishing in Nature? At 17? You've got to be kidding me. I hate this list.

How is having a patent rank 7 ?!?!?

Not lost on me. I hear what you are saying. As a student I really liked being given a book, and doing the homework, and studying, and taking tests. I would have *hated* trying to 'find' myself. There was a beauty to simplicity. I went to school, ran track, did my homework, and went to sleep. I was very happy and very accomplished. My 2 boys would not have liked this approach to education, but that is why you must know your own children. I've tried to on this thread only speak to the experience of my older son. And I have tried to be honest with his struggles so people could see that it has never been all roses. One point that I was trying to make, and perhaps I pushed too hard, is that if you actually have a *goal* of an ivy, you need to look beyond APs to be competitive. Personally, I'm not a fan of APs for my kids, because they are survey classes and we like to go into deep dives instead. But the child that was me, loved survey classes, and still does. I actually am currently reading the Comparative Government AP review book, because I just love having the entire field laid out before me so I can get a wonderful birds eye view. I'm very sorry if any of my posts have made anyone feel bad. This topic is so fraught. It is so hard to have nuanced conversations, with lots of different experiences, and not step on someone's toes. All we can do is the best we can, and that clearly depends on many many factors.

We got a Wusthof knife block with 9 knives. Best gift every! Just checked the price. gulp.

I only have 2 kids, but I do tutor 8 kids for 25 hours a week, so I might be able to speak to your situation. 1) Take care of yourself so you can take care of others. You must sleep, eat well, and exercise. You *cannot* sacrifice your physical well being. You will get sick in body and sick in mind. I'm serious. You hear this a lot, but I've hit both burnout and exhaustion in my day, and it is close to impossible to come back from it (as in 18 months for me). 2) Don't multitask. Just don't do it. I know that it seems the best option when you have so much on your plate, but it is a recipe for frustration as you will always feel like you do nothing well. Instead, schedule your day so that you have one on one with each kid. You work 12 hour days, they work 6 hour days. Make sure that they are not to interrupt you while working with their sibling unless the house is on fire. 3) Be prepared. Every night you prep for the next day. Schedule in at least an hour to make sure the supplies are prepared and that you have the content knowledge in your head so that you can answer questions easily. Make sure all computer programs/videos/resources are ready to go. You don't want to spend 20 minutes doing this while your kid is waiting, or you will lose them. 4) If you are working 12 hour days, and they are working 6 hour days, then they can do the housework. Schedule it out. Get them on board. 5) Schedule one day off each day where you have no responsibilities. Leave the house. Sit out the library or a cafe. Do NOT be available for anyone. This is your time. This is required for both mental and spiritual health. 6) Once an hour (or if you are desperate, once every 30 minutes) schedule in to check that each kid is doing what they are supposed to be doing. They need accountability. You must keep on this to build proper habits. 7) Be positive. You get a lot more with the carrot than the stick. Do not get in power struggles, not with teens, not ever. Ok, that's all I got. Good Luck. Embrace the journey. 🙂

Did something new today. My younger ds is taking a DE lab science class at the university. I have shown him how to prepare for the lab ahead of time. To read it, look up anything you don't know, make sure you can do the calculations, make sure you understand how the graphs should be created, etc. This takes between 1 and 1.5 hours for a 3 hour lab. Well, last week they picked up the lab manuals for grading. Knowing they were going to do this, we scanned the following week's lab so he could read it before lab, but they then they announced that it would be a different lab, so now he didn't have the section to read and prepare. Not his fault, just bad luck. So this week because we had no lab manual, I asked him to pay attention to what it felt like to be unprepared. To notice his experience and specific things that were difficult. I told him that this was going to be an excellent experience for him, if he could use it to compare being totally prepared to totally unprepared. The key was observation and reflection. After lab we had a great debrief. He told me that he was rushed and could not read all the explanatory paragraphs. That he did not have time to ask interesting questions of the TAs to get more nuance. That he had to rely on the other kids at the table to get it done. That he felt like he basically went through the motions and learned nothing. Like nothing. My response: Excellent! Now you know why you should prepare. And best yet, he could have this experience through no fault of his own, so no guilt! I use every opportunity both good and bad to clarify executive function skills. By prepping him to notice his experience, he noticed it and now is more motivated than ever to prep each week. Observation and reflection. Every day.

I was grateful to him that he long ago gave me permission to write about him on this board -- to seek help for our struggles, and to offer advice based on our successes and failures. He and I have been in this thing together from the beginning, always collaborating to find solutions to tricky problems.

I have often told people that when I was a teacher I was a dictator. Lots of kids might have needed a facilitator, but that is not who I was. I am an ENTJ. I cannot not lead. I am way way more comfortable being out in front and directing. I had to learn this more backwards, lead-through-example, influence-slowly-over-years, collaborative approach because my older was an explosive child. Most of you are new enough to the board that you have not heard all the stories about the explosions, but they were horrible, uncontrollable, and daily. I was desperate, and bought the book, The Explosive Child, which revolutionized how I parented and over the period of 6 months stopped the explosions. The key was to never dictate. It was to always compromise ahead of time, and to not ever get into a power struggle. So I had to completely change my personality and approach to parent and teach the child I had. In the end, this approach also ended up being the only way I could help my younger, who was clever enough that by the age of barely 2, he went beyond attention seeking and power struggles, and straight into revenge against me for any perceived slight, and he had even started down the path of helplessness and inadequacy. The same parenting approach worked for this very different problem. So my collaborative style was built out of need. In the end, we all do what we hope is the best for our children. There are always many successful paths.

I modeled my approach off of some of the old timers on this board: 8filltheheart, Nan in Mass, Jenn in So Cal, Lori, Hunter, Ellie, Regentrude and so many others who showed me that I did not have to accept school-based assumptions to deliver a rigorous education. I built on the backs of giants. 🙂

deleted It was a heartbreaking conversation.

I agree. The stories shared here are just horrible to read. My kid at age 6.5 was still playing shop and counting mushrooms. I cannot imagine being surrounded by this pressure cooker lifestyle, both for me as the parent making decisions about education, or for my kids with the need to put their nose to a grindstone at a very young age to get through all the coursework. 😞

I agree with this.

Well, not exactly. He didn't do well in the IMO (3 honourable mentions, 3 years in a row). And MIT doesn't even take all the Gold medalists throughout the world. But you are right, MIT accepts very few homeschoolers, only 5 out of 1200 my son's year, and 2 of them were full time DE for all of highschool, so really just 3 (one was the cellist who played with his foot). Also keep in mind that there are many paths to MIT. Math competitions only got in about 40 of kids in out of 1200. My ds was well aware of these kids because they all knew each other from MOP, so they had ready made friends that most of the other kids did not. I

Fair.

Beats me. My ds had the equivalent of 2DE and 3AP, the rest was AoPS or homegrown. But we were going for scholarships, so I did have to write my transcript so that they would give my son weighted credit for his GPA. The decision for us was to clearly indicate on the transcript University level study in certain homegrown courses, prove it in the course descriptions and through competitions, and provide a weighted GPA for the purposes of the scholarship. His 1580 SAT score supported the mommy grades. They took everything I said at face value, and he got the scholarship. But, I think that there are people here saying that they can get free tuition at their local universities for a GPA weighted by APs only (not DE and I'm assuming not homegrown university level courses). If this is true, financially the APs may be the only option to get those types of scholarships. Personally, I would pick up and move to a different state. LOL. Because I don't want to be told what I have to teach my kids. My homeschool, my content.

This is exactly what I am trying to say. The problem is that you can't do everything. So if you want to go for the lottery of elite admissions you need to have the time to do something different and special and that means that there is less time for APs. But then you are likely to still want to have a great backup school, and it sounds like many of them are looking at APs and using them to weight your GPA. But of course you can do it all. So each family will have to make a decision on how to spend limited time, and those choices cannot maximize competitiveness for both of these two admissions processes. Personally, I'm with 8filltheheart, I'd rather march to my own drummer and let the chips fall where they may. I left the school system because I wanted to educate my children, not because I wanted to *signal* that they were educated.

From my son's experience, many of the kids that get into MIT have some sort of national competition experience -- the obvious candidates of IMO, IPhO, IChO, USAMO, robotics, etc. But then national champion in tennis, national champion in cello, etc. Or they have already published a book, or done scientific research that has been published. So that is a big chunk of them. But then there are the kids that have seen struggle, true struggle. The kid who is from Argentina and has seen her society collapse. The kid whose single mom has mental illness and has made it imperative that he go to work to support the family, and make dinner for his younger 3 siblings, and try to tutor them as well because their schools are so bad. Or the kid who comes from NM where the schools were crap and he never got past Pre Calculus because that was all that was offered but he set up an afterschool program at his school to tutor kids who were struggling, and he found the funding, and the volunteers, and made a huge difference in may kids lives. Or the kid who has only one arm, but still plays the cello with his foot. Or the girl who is blind but has overcome her disability to do incredibly well in school and even find the time to volunteer to work with others with similar difficulties. So there is a big chunk like this that shows the drive to overcome adversity. This list above are actually kids that my son knows and has told me about. From the stories he has told, there are just not a lot of kids who do a ton of AP courses and that is the way they get in. If you are serious about admissions, and that is your goal, you definitely need to look way way bigger than APs.

I think that most things are valued, really. Think about all the obscure PhD projects that people have done because they were curious, but were really not practical or useful to anyone except themselves (mine included). I think that there are a LOT of transferable skills in following a passion that won't get you anywhere in life. Remember that kid on the board who held the world record for the fastest rubik's cube? Like what was the hidden underlying 'purpose' in pursuing that skill? But, wow was that cool! Like so cool! Did it get him anything? I'm not sure, but who cares. He was keen. Who said that a passion had to be directly relevant to a job, or to an adult 'proper' hobby, or to something 'acceptable'? I just think this is going down the wrong path. Encourage your kids to do what they want. Find their passion and run with it.

There is a beauty to being your own person with no desire for outside validation. But know thy self. If you don't need outside validation, then you don't need it; but if you do, you need to find a way to share what is dear to your heart. I don't think you can have it both ways. And if we are talking about university admissions/scholarships that is a form of outside validation. Unfortunately, they only know what you tell them. My son wrote about some pretty painful topics in his essays -- things that he would rather not have shared, I think. But they had to know in order to see the man he had the potential to become.

Well, we never had a peer group, because this whole region seems to be focused on either natural led learning or the arts/humanities. I know homeschoolers who have accomplished/award winning dancers, authors, violinists, artists, but not a single student do I know who stands out in the social sciences or sciences. In fact, I don't know a single family who studies the social or natural sciences at all. And certainly not in high school. We are alone, and have been alone on our own path for 15 years. This board is where I find like minded homeschoolers. I think in the end, a student will stand out when they forge their own path. This shows autonomy, drive, focus, passion. What does taking 8 APs in a year show? Ability to put your nose to the grind stone and do what you are told. You also look just like Every. Other. Student. There is just no way to 'win' with this approach. None.

Well, I support you. 🙂I think others are just scared. Scared they will ruin their kids' chances of getting into a good school/ getting a good scholarship if they deviate from the path they know. The problem is as more and more kids take that path, you just have to do more and more to stand out. In the end it is just an impossible race. My nephew is taking EIGHT AP's this year! How do you compete with that? I sure wouldn't, and I'm not thinking he is very happy, nor does he have even an ounce of time to spend in self reflection. Instead, by forging your own path, you cannot be compared to all the others, which means you must be evaluated based on your own merits. Seems an obvious approach to stand out from the crowd.

It has been so so hard for the Freshman this year. I can only imagine how miserable it would have been to be thrown into difficult classes while working alone in your bedroom. 😞

This is just so sad. 😞 There is just so much more you can do that is deeper and more meaningful than studying mass produced coursework. I would never want to have to ratchet into that system and give up all the wonderful content we have studied, and experiences we have had. The passion of self-driven, self-designed courses is just a wonderful thing. The key is having the time to actually embrace what you are learning, to go deeper and to expand into new frontiers. More more more does not create an insightful and nuanced student.

MIT is not an Ivy, and has NO legacy admission and no sports scholarships. They are also not involved in the lawsuit against the other elites for racially biased admissions, because 40% of MIT's applications are from Asian students, and 40% of the student body is Asian. Not having legacy standing allows them to be more fair racially. The other thing that many people may not know is that MIT admits more kids from the bottom 10th percentile of socioeconomic class than any other elite school. I'm guessing that this is because they are one of the few "need blind, full need" schools. My point is, each school will have a different profile for admission, some more fair than others. Obviously, once you make the first cut, you simply go into the lottery.