Right now they are saying the best option for tests is a writer, but my ds really wants to be independent. He earned 72 level 2 and 3 excellence credits last year because he was given the time he needed to do the work. Put him under time pressure, and there is no way he can succeed. I also can't see how a writer for math would be very fast, especially if you make a mistake and need someone to cross out something and then put in something, etc. He has to be able to write the math on his own, and using an equation editor I doubt would be faster than handwriting. He is very good with keyboard shortcuts, but using a mouse to click on special math characters on a ribbon would be incredibly frustrating to him.

DS is taking a single class at Vic this term and next term, with full time enrollment planned for Canterbury next year. We are working with the Disability office (yes, still Disability at Vic) and have gotten so much help. However, the guy we are working with has said 10% extra is all you can get which he told us was true at all the universities, so I'm very glad to hear that he might be able to get 50% extra. It would be very sad to say no more math ever because he just writes/types too slowly. The Disability office at Vic did give us a sheet that listed Latex as an option to work with, but I didn't ask it if was available for tests. I'm guessing it will be word, so I'll have him look at it. I would like to get his speed up this year, so that he is ready next year to work at speed.

If my boy with dysgraphia ever wants to take a math course at university, he will need to be able to type up his answers at speed on a timed one hour test. He could hand write it in about 2.5 hours, but they only give him 10 extra minutes for an hour long test. So basically, if he can't type at speed, he won't be able to do another math class, ever. So, he would have to be able to type in Latex as fast as you would write a timed test. So very very fast. He cannot code, because he has dysgraphia, and those two things don't go together. However, he is very good at keyboard shortcuts, so I figured that it was really the same. How many hours would he have to commit to be able type as fast as fast writing? 20? 100?

How long does it take learn LaTex that you could be fast enough that you could use it on a timed test. My younger boy has dysgraphia and we are considering this option, but I'm concerned it will take too long to learn to be crazy fast.

No thermostats here in NZ. People heat a room when they are in it and turn off the heat when they leave. When my older boy got to college, he kept telling us stories about having to study under his covers, and then as fall turned to winter, told us about his room being quite literally freezing as in about 35 degrees. I kept saying 'there must be something wrong with your heat! *Please* talk to maintenance!" But he wouldn't because he didn't want to make a fuss. Finally, a friend came in his room in JANUARY in BOSTON, and said 'OMG, your room is freezing, do you mind if I turn your heat on.' That is when my son learned about thermostats. 🙂

Yup. So here is what they found last night. It is the UK strain. The genome testing does not link it to the Quarantine facilities, so it has not escaped. The sewage testing of Auckland has found no evidence of Covid, so it is not in the community. The options: It has come from a transit passenger (I assume using NZ to get to the islands and not staying in quarantine here.) or it could be from AirNZ crew, and they are now comparing the genomes for that group. The are assuming person to person contact, but won't rule out it being carried on laundry. They are giving themselves 3 days to sort it out with the city locked down (all people who can work from home, must). They are testing huge swaths of Auckland, especially the workplaces and high school of the family. They will decide on Wednesday next steps depending on what they find. We are not really affected here in Wellington, but we did all get a verbal alert on our phones last night. We were all sitting on the sofa and all our phones went off. It was pretty funny because they were out of sync and the message was about a minute long giving instructions.

Our turn. Auckland is moving into level 3 lockdown for 3 days (schools closed, all people who can work from home should, and road closures so no one can leave). Rest of country at 100 person gathering limit. All due to 1 family with 3 cases. Because we only have imported cases (about 20 per week), all cases are genome tested. So we will know by tomorrow, where this family got it.

This was going to be my advice. I used to get chilblains my feet were so cold. Now I wear socks and fluffy slippers all the time, even in summer. I never let my feet get even slightly cold because it is so hard to warm them up.

NZ seems to be doing better in this regard. I wonder how our quarantine is different from yours to be more effective. My understanding is that both countries have about the same number of returning travelers every week, so it is not that Australia has more people so more opportunity for escape. So far we have only had one extra lockdown (August, Auckland) since Covid was eradicated here 11 May.

I've just started with a new calculus student who is very far behind with lots and lots of gaps. We were working on factoring and quadratic equations. And I asked him why he switch the sign at the end. He had no idea. "No one ever told me why, they just said to do it." This appears to be true with every question I ask him. 😞 Lucky for me, he is an incredibly fast learning and has just been very very badly taught over many years.

I so remember the frustration of trying to fit homeschooling into all those little boxes that never seem to fit. For recommendations my son was required to have a STEM, humanities, and counselor rec. Counselor: Me. My goal was to demonstrate that my ds had taken advantage of every opportunity available to him. I focused on why he did each activity he did and what I thought he had gained from it. I also discussed that he had used homeschooling as a way to direct his own learning, showing him as focused and proactive. STEM teacher: His chemistry teacher was in the hospital with chemo, so she was out. And with that exception, my son is completely self taught in math and physics. We ended up using the 23 year old kid who traveled with the team to Hong Kong for the IMO. This kid had never taught my son, and had never written a letter or recommendation so asked what he should write! We suggested writing about ds's maturity and being able to handle himself under pressure. So this rec that was supposed to talk about his academic capability in STEM, didn't. Humanities: We were very lucky that ds had a writing coach who was willing to write one. But here in NZ, there is what is known as tall poppy syndrome, so people don't brag. She point blank asked me if she needed to give him the top mark (part of the application was a tick list). Gulp. I said yes. Extra: The teacher that knew the most about my ds was his violin teacher who had been teaching him for 6 years. So we got an extra rec from him that focused on maturity, commitment, persistence, etc. DS did get a top scholarship to CM with these recs.

When I get questions like this, I say "Great question! Let's investigate." Then we play around with how something might work. We go completely off the script of any curriculum. We get rulers, blocks, protractors, measuring cups, or just old fashioned pencil and paper. By using the word 'investigate' at least once a week over many years, my students and my kids have come to understand that mathematics can be 1) fun, 2) more than memorizing what the book says, 3) an opportunity to explore a question and find an answer through many methods. For my students who are in school, this has been a shocking revelation.

I know, right! I guess I'm not shocked that I had no idea. How would I unless he told me, and how would he know that what he was experiencing was unusual and worth mentioning? But wow, does it explain why the typing was so hard to get going.

Bumping this to keep it alive.

Bumping this because it was a super cool thread!

Yup. That is me. Lots of trial and error projects over here. You should have seen the kite project we did! I've just bumped my threads on scientific inquiry/investigations on the logic board and the general board. They are long and detailed, and show the week by week progression we made trying to answer these questions.

Glad that was helpful. It was actually this subforum that helped me understand what to do with my boy back when I was making decisions 5.5 years ago. There are some incredibly kind and knowledgeable women here. And I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

Post #2. This one was about how to maintain a positive attitude and motivation in both you and your child. Also written when my child was aroudn 15.5, so 1.5 years ago: Question someone asked me: you and your son have put in tremendous effort to achieve these targets in a positive way. Whenever I make any such effort to remediate my son's (9 year old) skills, I face huge protests from him. He would gladly work on it for the first few days or weeks. Gradually he throws tantrums and arguments. He finishes the task with a lot of complaints or bad behaviour that I eventually give up. As you mentioned, it is hard work for both teacher and student. Have you faced any such troubles with your DS while continuing with a task for over several years? How do you maintain your student's motivation and attention for such long periods of time. Most importantly, how do you not lose your patience and up your motivation levels? Can you please share some of your strategies? My response: Yes, I have definitely struggled with motivation and with being very discouraged, and yes, I so has my ds. But I think in the end we feel like we are in this together, and we remind each other that bad attitude is not ok. He reminds me as much as I remind him. The most important thing I think I did was to let his strengths run. This approach convinced him that he had skills and talent. So all the stuff I talked about in my previous post was only a small part of his day. We did high-end math orally; he read difficult science books every day; he learned to play the violin; I scribed for him his amazing stories; and his dad read and discussed complex books on numerous topics. Most days he felt like a smart, accomplished kid who had the world in front of him. For the remediation part, I did everything I could to make him feel empowered. I found techniques to try, but I encouraged him to decide what was working and what was not. We focused on metacognition - how does he learn, how can he use his skills to shore up his weaknesses, how long should he work, when can he identify that he is becoming less effective, how can he use the Charlotte Mason habit of "The Way of the Will" - if you don't like a thought, then change it. He was empowered. Everyday. And on days that he could just not do something, we just didn't do it. But we always made a plan to do it later. When he mentioned his older brother and wondered why he had things so good, we would discuss the idea that you cannot be some hybrid person - the best of you and the best of him. You are either ALL your brother or you are yourself. Do you really want all the negatives that your brother has in order to get the positives? The answer was always no. So we focused on him being him. We celebrated what he offered the world that others can't. He has so much charisma that I made sure that he was in lots of activities with lots of positive interactions every day, just check out my siggy. And these activities were not in academics, so he was focusing on *life* not academics, focusing on what he was good at. Basically, I've made sure that his life is 90% positive and uplifting, and 10% remediation and long, difficult, sometimes discouraging work. I also followed his lead on what he needed, and in the end he needed *me*. For a long time, he could not do *anything* on his own. I think there just was a fear of failure, but also simply the inability to write. So for all remediation work, we did it together. I never assigned him something to do on his own that would be hard, because he just wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it. He could write his math, but I had to sit with him. He could read his books, but I had to sit with him. I had to do the dictation, I had to scribe, I had to help him outline. I had to hold his hand all the time. I read posts from people saying 'what can your 9 year do independently?' And I laugh, because only at 13 could my ds play the violin and read his science independently, every single other thing he needed me for. Luckily for me, I only had two children. So I worked 4 hours with my younger before doing 3 hours with my older, then tutoring for 2 hours. If I had had many kids, I'm not sure how this would have played out. People talk about helicopter parenting, and doing too much for a child so they don't become independent. But I have decided those people can just stick their comments where the sun don't shine, because they don't know me and they don't know my kid. As for me, I very much have felt that every day I have to put on my big-girl panties and get the job done. I have found the last 4 years very difficult and draining. But when I signed up to homeschool, I signed up to work. I despised tying-dictation as much as he loved it. And every morning, I would get my cup of tea and my chocolate, and find it in myself to tolerate 30 minutes of correcting word for word his spelling. I just did it because I had to, and I put a smile on my face and joy in my voice no matter what I was feeling inside. And luckily for me I read posts early on from some of the old timers on this board who discussed how kids pick up speed in high school, and how a 13 year old is a very different learner from a 17 year old, which helped me trust that he would pick up speed as he matured. I focused on keeping track of the very small improvements that I saw over the months. It is easy to lose track of incremental change when you have a project that you have broken down into 1000 pieces for 1000 days. Can you actually see 1/1000th of an improvement each day? Well, I tried to. And whatever I saw that was positive step forward each day, I would tell my ds to let him see his improvement, to help him believe in himself and in the work we were doing. I kept a journal with ideas and success stories, reviewed every term what we had accomplished, and then made a plan for the next term to build on our successes. Once a year, I would make a huge list of everything we had done, so although the daily improvements were small and often hard to see, the annual improvements were huge. When I got blue, I would remember how far we had come the previous year, and trust that my incremental daily program would produce similar results in the current year. Some days, I kept myself going by thinking about the boy my son would have been had he attended school. The boy who would have failed everything, who would think he was stupid, who likely would have dropped out by now. This is the alternative reality that existed for my son, and I remind myself that it is through my hard work and dedication that it is a fate he avoided.

I'm so glad my post was helpful. I have written before on solutions and will copy here. I wrote this up when he was 15.5, so 1.5 years ago. A bit of repetition from before in the first section, but the second section on solutions is what I think you are looking for. Read it, and then ask me some questions to help me trigger my memory. 🙂 I did not know that younger ds had dysgraphia until about the age of 11. Before that I think I was just scaffolding so much that I simply couldn't see it. I finally had him tested at age 12. His dysgraphia falls into 5 categories: 1) Spelling: When ds was first learning to spell in primary school, I didn't realize he had dysgraphia. Because I had already used SWR with my older, I used it with my younger to made sure that his phonological skills were excellent, that he knew every single letter combination, that he knew every single rule for adding endings. All of this was like the back of his hand. SWR is a powerful program. But younger ds could still not spell. What was lacking was automation. So after 3 years of SWR, we tried 7 other spelling programs! Clearly, my head was end the sand, as I never even considered getting him tested. At the age of 12, he was still sounding every single word out. The problem was automation. I think 'cat' and write 'cat' without thinking, this was not true for him for any word except 'the.' And while sounding out every single word, he would completely loose what he was trying to say in his writing. He would also spell the same word three different ways in the same paragraph, all of which followed the rules he had learned so were valid combinations. And he still struggled with recognizing that words he was using in speech were a base word with an ending. So "hiding" was just one thing, not the word 'hide' with the ending 'ing' that he would know the rules for. So if you asked him to add an ending to a word, he could, but if you spoke a word that already had an ending, he would not know how to spell it because he could not see that there was a base word inside it. 2) Punctuation: In addition, at the age of 12, he still had no sense of what a sentence was so was completely unable to add periods let alone commas. We had done grammar with MCT and another program whose name I forget, but he still could not identify a subject or even a verb unless it was an exercise in a textbook. And his language was so complex that it was not easy to show him in his own writing, but practicing punctuating simpler writing never translated into his own because his structure was way more advanced. 3) Physical handwriting: Even today at age 15, he can write numbers, but cannot write words. Basically, his brain is not automating the creation of letters. So an 'o' is an a-stop as he calls it. A's are automated, so to make an 'o' he has to make an a, and then remember to stop the motion to make an 'o'. But interestingly, his brain is fine to make a zero, it is not an a-stop, even though it is the same exact shape. Most of his letters are a combination of 2 strokes that he must recall. Once again, nothing is automated. This means that to physically write a word, not only must he sound it out, he also must recall how to form each letter. Currently at the age of 15.5 he can write very legible handwriting at a top speed of 9 words per minute. 4) Organizing ideas: He has always had beautiful adult-level creative writing, but his report and argumentation writing was impossibly difficult for him. We used IEW for a while, hoping that it would help him with the basics of structure, but he just couldn't implement any system. He couldn't seem to get his thoughts into a set structure. He couldn't remember that he needed an intro sentence and then supporting points and then a conclusion. It wasn't that sentences were jumbled or unclear -- as I said, he has adult-level style with participle phrases, clauses, noun absolutes, advanced vocabulary etc. And if he was on a 'roll', he could produce amazing non-fiction writing. But if ever he was uncertain what to write, he had nothing to fall back on. He could not get anything down. The web of ideas could not be structured into linear form through intellectual effort or outlining. Either he had intuition and flow, or he could write absolutely nothing. There was nothing in the middle. 5) coding mental math into written form: explained in previous post. My solutions: 1) At the age of 11, we decided to do a big push with handwritten work for a full year. The goal was to increase speed. I dictated to him sentences that he had written in previous work. We set timers, we charted progress, we celebrated every small success..... This was an absolute waste of time. He never picked up speed, there was no way to rush him, his spelling did not improve, and all it did was create stress. At the age of 12, we decided to abandon handwriting with the exception of math, and I only wished I had done it sooner. During that year, he had concurrently learned to touch type, but because he could not spell any of the words, he could not go faster than 10 words per minute. People would tell me that spell check would be his friend, but he still had to get the general idea of spelling 'helicopter' for spell check to recognize it. He still had to sound out every. single. word. Words like cat, with, boy... let alone all the big words. He could type 30 words a minute if he was copying, but only 10 if he was having to spell the words. 2) At the age of 12, we abandoned all spelling programs (we had tried about 8 by that time) and switched to typing dictation. I had considered Speech to Text at that point, but my ds and I decided together that we were not ready to go that way as a permanent solution. The goal of typing dictation (as we called it) was to automate the basic words. This dictation was not SWB's dictation where the kid is supposed to hold the sentence in her head; nor was is studied dictation like Spelling Wisdom (which we also tried). The goal of our dictation was automation of spelling. We started to 'Cat in the Hat' because he still could not spell the top 100 words. I would dictate a phrase of like 3-5 words, (I kept to the language groupings to help him begin to hear them), and as he typed I would correct word for word. During this time, I taught him 'think-to-spell' where you purposely mispronounce a word so that the spelling becomes regular (he knew all the rules); we created sounds for all schwas in words; I would help with spelling by simply breaking the words into syllables; I would remind him of basic ending rules, etc. Not a lecture, just as we went with a few words as possible so I didn't break the flow. We worked like this for 30 minutes per day 5 days a week, 45 weeks a year, for 3 years. He loved it. Go figure. Basically, I came to believe that he just needed to put spelling in context of writing, and that he needed immediate feedback when the word was spelling wrong, and that he just needed to do this for many many sentences. Over the years, we slowly moved up the book level to Frog and Toad, then older readers, then Narnia, then other fantasy novels he liked. By the second year, I started punctuation study. I would tell him after a clause "add a comma because its an introductory clause." I would use official grammar words, and not make a lecture, just something quick. But over and over and over. What had been lacking in spelling was automation, and what had been lacking in punctuation was both real world application and drill drill drill. This process worked! It worked beyond all my expectations. And best of all, he loved it. During these years of typing dictation, we also trialed every possible combination to help him organize his ideas (#4 above). We tried a dictaphone, mind-mapping, list making, speech-to-text. We tried me scribing; we tried me scribing only every other paragraph; we tried him verbally saying what he wanted to say 3 times before writing; we tried funny speed games "why is this item the 'best'"; we tried easy topics; we tried hard topics; we tried research; we tried studying other writing; we tried outlining other writing; we tried Ben Franklin's approach of rewrites. We we tried Every. Single. Thing. I could think of. And I just felt like we got nowhere. It was very discouraging for me, although I was very encouraging to him and he never knew that I thought we were spinning our wheels. We were making progress, but it was very very slow. 3) At the age of 15, we quit the typing dictation because I felt that we had made very good progress. He was typing now at about 25 words a minute, he was spelling 80% of words correctly even in difficult books, and could mostly punctuate complex sentences. This was huge given where we started from!! And best of all, ds was feeling good about himself and the progress he had made. Thus, we moved full focus into writing his own content. We started this new focus 6 months ago. Because he is interested in being a geographer and studying complex issues, he wants to be able to research and write up creative solutions to complex problems. He has a goal, and this has been very motivating. We decided to go after deep complex topics with high interest and work with engaging questions which required research and processing and organizing. This seems like a backwards approach, going for difficult writing projects when we had had little success with organizing ideas, but the high interest was the key to the motivation. I figured we would get further with lots of scaffolding for hard projects, than focusing on independence for easy projects. I will admit, however, that I was nervous about taking this approach, because I knew it would be difficult to tell how much of the work was his work vs mine. Now 6 months later, he has written 3 research papers: 1) The causes and consequences of the 2004 Tsunami in Ache Indonesia from a cultural and environmental point of view. 2) An analysis of why the population demographic transitions of Maori vs Europeans in NZ were so different over the past 180 years. 3) the cultural and environmental causes and consequences of the 55-year Wataki Dam Scheme in the South Island. It is hard for me to overstate the success we have had with these 3 projects. Massive massive success. It is as if the three years from 12-15 where we separated out all the skills and worked on them individually, have all come together in a cohesive whole. All those years of working on organizing his ideas that felt like a waste of time, were not. It was seeping in, just not showing up because he could not yet write it all down. I am still scaffolding, and I still have to sit next to him sometimes when he writes, and I have scribed for him a few paragraphs in these reports when he is just too tired but wants to keep the momentum up. However, the scaffolding required for the last paper has been way less than the first paper. And with 2.5 years to go until graduation, I feel that we are finally on track. I will still be remediating and accomodating, but now we are doing this *at level* rather than years behind. 4) The future: we will continue with these large-scale, high-interest projects. I will continue to be highly involved with the research, outlining, writing, and editing -- strongly scaffolding where needed, but slowly ever so slowly backing off and encouraging independence. At this point, we are going to start 2 new ventures into the world of dysgraphia: 1) trying to write up chemistry and physics explanations which he will need to do for his national exams. Scientific explanations are a different type of writing, with different language that he has to learn, but I think he is ready. 2) We are going to actually try to get him to physically write again. He has been writing his math all this time, so his hand is reasonably strong. We are going to start by drilling letters (we did this the other day with lots of giggles given he is 15), and we are going to see if he can write a sentence each day, and see where this leads us. No pressure, but he wants to try. Now, I know I have written a book here. I have done it for two reasons. 1) once I got going I really wanted to document our path as I have never written it all out before. 2) I am hoping to give you a realistic vision of what remediating dysgraphia looks like over the long haul. There is no way around it, dysgraphia is a bitch and impacts all aspects of a child's education. Remediating it is long hard work for both teacher and student, but it can be done in a way that is positive and good for a child's self-esteem. I have never regretted the time and effort I have put into this project. And I had a friend just yesterday say to me that it is amazing that ds is so proud of himself, that he doesn't feel stupid, and that I never discuss him in a negative way. DS does not mind me talking about his dysgraphia because he feels it is a part of who he is, and overcoming its is a testament to his hard persistent work over many many years. I also want you to know that you will likely make many wrong turns, and that you will be wandering in the dark, wondering if your approach is the most optimal. This is just the nature of the beast. As I tried to show, there were things that I did that I shouldn't have done, and there were things that at the time seemed to make no difference, but then later were shown to be incredibly helpful. Good luck to you and your ds. Slow and steady wins the race.

We started a 'best of the board' thread when the new board was created. But I bet most of them are locked. I should go track down all the threads I want unlocked and bump them while the lock feature is off! It looks like you get around 4 years of no responses before they are locked.

Yup, my suitcase was so full! Lori bumped that thread a few months ago, which got me thinking about these. So I tracked them down and they were locked to further comments because they were so old, so I couldn't bump them. I was so sad. 😞 But then I needed to access them this weekend to show a new homeschooler, and for some reason they were no longer locked! So I thought, now is the time. Bump them while the lock is off!

I haven't read the replies, but thought I would share our experience. I've so been here with the exact same problems at the exact same age. At 12, my son could not type and could not spell the top 100 words. He did not understand how language went together in phrases and sentences, and his thoughts (though deep) were completely unstructured. Now, at 17.5 he is completely functional. To remediate, we: 1) Abandoned handwriting and put all focus to typing 2) He learned to touch type while looking at text, so there was not expectation of spelling. This took 6 months of 30 minutes a day to get him to 20 words a minute while looking at a text he was copying. This was unexpectedly slow progress from my point of view, and only this week did he tell me that it has to do with his synesthesia - one hand is yellow, and one is blue, and all the letters are different colors that don't always align with the yellow/blue hands. 😲 3) After he could type, we started spelling dictation with Cat in the Hat. 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, year round, for 2.5 years. I dictated, he typed, and I corrected his spelling word for word. He knew the rules, but could not implement them while concurrently typing, nor could he remember which option to use ee, ea, ei for example. Nothing was automated. Nothing. Not even 'cat' after the first pass on typing out the entire book. We did it twice before moving to Frog and Toad. I also dealt with the mechanics of language in this way by reading one sentence. Then dictating only a phrase at a time so he could start to hear how sentences are phrases that are combined. 2.5 years. That is a LOT of hours of one on one instruction. 4) We did big, fun investigation and writing projects for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, year round, for 5.5. years. This was NOT independent work. I worked with him to teach him to research, take notes, organize his ideas, write papers. At first he dictated papers to me -- this was for the first 2.5 years when he was still learning to type. I had to work and work and work to get him to remember to put in an introductory sentence for each paragraph. And even when he could remember to do it, he had no idea how to do it. We are talking 5 years to master even this one skill, let alone all the others. Then in the next 3 years once he could type and spell, we continued to work on the structuring of thoughts every single day, but now I would get him more involved with typing them himself. He and I would take turns typing a sentence, then a paragraph, then every other day. For the first year, he had to use a dictaphone to get the thoughts out and then type them. So 5.5 full years to get him to structure his thoughts, and 3 years to get thoughts and typing interwoven into one. This was also a LOT of hours of one on one instruction. I have written a lot about this, and have collected all my posts if you want me to post them here all in one place. It has been a long journey, and not an easy one. I hope you and your son can find a path that will work for him.

My son has dysgraphia and is taking a single university class this year to try to sort out exactly these types of issues. Disability services has an amazing guy who is going to help my boy work through the options over the term. I'll post as he trials the different possibilities.

Same here. My ds did his NZ national complex numbers exam and calculus exam without a graphics calculator. I had no idea that this was an issue until I started tutoring these exams and realized that there were a LOT of short cuts he could have used with a calculator, and that the timing of the exams was assuming you would have one. He had to work *very* fast. But now at university, he is not allowed a calculator of any kind for his math and physics exams. They do all the long multiplication and long division by hand, in addition to all the other required math. And the professors do not always give tidy or easy numbers to work with!

We did this with Physics. My older boy did it over 3 years. Mechanic and EM year 1, Wave and Modern year 2, and the 3 big labs in year 3. I just listed it on his transcript in the year he finished it.