I'm not sure this will be much help but it is what we've done. Trinqueta is going to Rome for 3 weeks this summer and wanted to learn some Italian. She's taken 3 years of high school Latin and is fairly proficient in Spanish so we're not starting from scratch. I bought Italiano para hispanohablantes (this is totally worthless to you) and the Pimsleur Italian Gold Edition on ebay for $100. The Pimsleur is very good. It's on CDs so we do it in the car and it's a great way to get some oral practice with time constraints. I wouldn't pay full price but the $100 was money well spent. T is also doing about 15 or 20 minutes a day on Duolingo and is motivated to get her Golden Owl. The Pimsleur rounds out the Duolingo nicely with intensive oral practice imho. But, it's not a regular curriculum and might not line up with a standard school progression. If she wants to continue next year and eventually attempt the AP Italian exam we'll probably enroll with Cyberitalian or use an Italki professional tutor. Both of her top college choices have Italian exchange programs so she's more motivated than I expected to continue with Italian.

I think you need to make sure that whatever was biopsied was not an HPV related cancer. If it was, you'll need to be extra vigilant. In your position, I'd get a thorough STD screening and start getting the finances in order in case you need to seek a legal remedy on short notice. (((Hugs)))

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/actresses-ceos-arrested-nationwide-college-admissions-cheating-scam-142252158--abc-news-topstories.html This is completely bonkers. People bribed college admissions personnel and coaches to get their kids into Ivies and other elite schools.

She still has time to bring up her grades because finals usually count for a good chunk. Does she know about the top 6% automatic admit at UT Austin, top 10% for TAMU? That's absolutely critical for Texas. It's why kids load up on pre-AP and AP classes and grade grub for every last possible point. If she wants to go to a flagship she needs to play the game. (If the top 10% is impossible, let her know that TAMU also has an automatic admit for a 1360 SAT or 30 ACT and top 25% by the application deadline, which is not the same cut date as the top 10% rule so she'll have a bit more time to get her grades up). Here's the link to the auto admit page at TAMU. UT Austin doesn't have an auto admit by test score, they use holistic review after they fill about 80% of the class with top 6% kids. https://admissions.tamu.edu/freshman/admitted Another option is to be CAPed at UT Austin or Blinn Teamed at TAMU so that you start at another UT or Blinn and transfer if you earn a minimum GPA (about 3.25). ETA: Whoops, I thought she was going to public high school because of another post of yours about harassment. If she's homeschooled, her GPA freshman year doesn't matter much. Her dual enrollment grades and test scores are what she'll be judged by much more than any homebrew grades. The TAMU SAT and ACT scores apply to homeschoolers and you can check the stats for transfers from you local CC. For Lone Star, it's something like 2500 kids/year to TAMU and U of H and 800 to UT Austin. Plus thousands more to SHSU, SFA, etc. She is not done because she lollygagged first semester freshman year. She can build a very nice transcript in the next three years and go wherever she wants.

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Seven-Killings-Novel/dp/1594633940 A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James I also loved Oscar Wao so I'll second that pick.

We were still living in Venezuela when I started posting on these boards. At first I used my real name but eventually most people started picking screen names as the Internet developed and I went with the truly very uncreative chiguirre. I literally picked the most emblematic Venezuelan animal that isn't downright ugly (apologies to the rabipelado). Back in the day, my avatar was the cover picture of Capyboppy but, like Garga, I had to switch to a web commons picture and voila...

We've traveled quite a bit with GW and Geezle. We've always been treated kindly. I think that it helps that GW has an obvious intellectual disability and usually travels with a carry-on full of stuffed animals. TSA agents are satisfied with him saying his nickname. Now, of course, he travels with a passport because he's a legal adult and has to provide a photo ID but even when he was younger we never had an issue.

You might want to take a look at Excelsior Academy. https://excelsiorclasses.com/courses/ They're a bunch of ex Landry Academy teachers. Debbie Stokes is the instructor and she got consistently good reviews when she was with Landry. They use Science Shepherd. I know that Landry's bio was definitely YE so it's likely that Excelsior is too.

I wanted to put this in a more global perspective. Outside of North America, it's very common for people to live at home while they go to university. They become fully functional adults.

MPOA's class teaches the complete Holt textbook including evolution but with the occasional comment about how wonderfully God works through evolution. Trinqueta had Kristin Peterson who is a very good teacher. In general, MPOA is a Christian school but it doesn't have a fundamentalist statement of faith. They're more like a Catholic or Episcopal school than a BJU or Abeka school.

Doesn't A&P usually have Bio as a prerequisite?

If you need a place to go and explore and find your passion, CC is a good choice. Or at least, our local CC is a good choice, you'll have to really check yours out because quality and offerings vary. My dd is dual enrolling in the core curriculum courses that are required at all TX public colleges. She's had a lot of interesting options for fulfilling her requirements. There is an honors program that emphasizes research, there are experience based learning options, there are a lot of clubs and organizations and there's a lot of tutoring available. There are even study abroad summer programs. All at low, low prices so if you do decide to change your major and suddenly have to do three semesters of calculus and two each of chem and physics, you're not stuck paying tens of thousands extra for an additional year. I've been pleasantly surprised at the academic level of my dd's classes. The major difference I've noticed is the quantity of graded homework and small assignments versus my college experience of 2 exams and a paper. But, it seems that's happening at 4 year schools too so it's not an indication of treating CC students as less capable, it's just a change in technological possibilities. You can get a lot out of CC if you take advantage of all the opportunities it offers.

I read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Zucked this week. They were eye-opening verging on scream-inducing. If you only have time for one, Zucked is more accessible to a non-academic audience.

We had to have our foundation reinforced. In Houston, we have concrete slab but to fix subsidence they dig down and put in piers. I used the yellow pages to generate a list of 4 contractors and then called a recommendation from Angie's List at dh's request. Three of the 4 local guys came out and took measurements. One charged double the other two. He got eliminated. The Angie's List dudes didn't bother to take measurements and wanted slightly more than the local expensive guy. For the final two, I checked references to pick the winner. He did the job in two days with a crew of 10 guys for $8000. We haven't had any further problems 4 years out. Good luck on the home repair adventure!

Crud! I was hoping that the dozens of ticky tacky little assignments was a CC thing. So far it's been manageable for Trinqueta because she's only taken one class at a time but I can see how easily all the little stuff and the inconsistent weekly deadlines could become a huge issue with 4 or 5 classes.

OP, this bit is strictly for your nerves, not your ds's: Q-drop is Apr 15. You've got lots of time to get things sorted out before you all have to make a decision. I'd encourage your ds to use all the study help that's available. You're completely correct about the huge amount of help that colleges have available. I hope that you can convince him to try it out while you're there this weekend. I'd also read over his syllabi carefully. What are the rules for turning HW in late? Could he scrape some points up still? Are exams curved? Is there test prep available? Maybe you could convince him that attending the study support sessions is just another obligation of the class and have him plan it in his schedule? Hugs and Good Luck!

Actually, some of that 5x4 count as electives. Usually schools require 4 units of English and social studies, 3 or 4 of math, 3 of science and 2 of foreign language as a minimum. Most kids get either 6 or 7 or even 8 classes per year with the extras being things like choir, gym, art, typing, etc. DE classes usually count as a whole high school credit per semester course. It's relatively easy to rack up a lot of credits if you use DE or do summer courses. If you do 4 years of each of the 5 main subjects with some AP and/or DE, you'll have a competitive transcript.

I bet they do offer it as "Composition". My ordinary public high school offered it as a semester elective or as a year long class with Speech for juniors and seniors. Memoria Press Online Academy separates their Comp classes from their Lit classes. They use their series of Classical Composition which is a 9 level study of classical rhetoric along the lines of what Calbear posted about Schole: https://www.memoriapress.com/curriculum/writing-and-english-grammar/ The high school comp classes do several levels in a year . Comp 1 goes through Level 4: Refutation and Confirmation. Comp 2 covers Levels 5 and 6. Comp 3 does the rest. The classes involve writing a weekly composition that starts as a paragraph and works up to 800 words or so in Comp 2. They aren't standard 5 paragraph essays, they're exercises that practice specific writing skills. They sound a little odd imho, but T says the exercises have helped her writing immensely. The topics they write on don't involve a lot of research beyond reading a wiki about the topic you're supposed to praise or attack if you don't know enough about it from general knowledge. The books and live classes go through a series of steps to produce the weekly exercise. T has found that it's easiest to rewatch the lesson with the book, pause at the end of each section and write her assignment. This takes about 4 hours a week outside of class time and is the only homework they have. MPOA also offers lit based classes that include more typical writing assignments about the works they've read. Students post 500 word posts to forum about topics drawn from the reading assignments and then respond to another student's post in a couple of paragraphs. They write longer essays a couple of times. There is far less writing than the Comp classes because they also need to read and prepare short presentations on chapters or characters each week. MPOA can be an English heavy program if you take both Comp and Lit each year. I don't think every student needs this much time on reading and writing if that's not where their interests lay. For a more math/science oriented student, I'd pick either Comp or Lit and call it good. Even MPOA only requires 5 English credits to finish their diploma program.

I apparently learned a completely different version of Prohibition. In my Pittsburgh area high school, we learned it as the Volstead Act and that it was an anti-Catholic policy. (My area was largely populated by the descendants of Italian, Polish, German and assorted Slavic immigrant groups. It was largely Catholic.) Here's a Politico piece that touches on this issue in the portion that discusses Al Smith v. William McAdoo at the 1924 Democratic convention: Yet he quickly became the preferred candidate of a loose coalition that included delegates from the rural South and West, supporters of prohibition and the Klan. The pairing of the first two groups made sense: rural Southerners and Westerners tended to be staunch evangelical Protestants and to endorse the prohibition enacted by the Eighteenth Amendment. These delegates had plenty of cause to oppose the nomination of Al Smith, the archetypal big-city “wet.” https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/when-america-hated-catholics-213177

I think DO Geometry and Brave Writer are excellent choices for your situation. I'd look into Homeschool Spanish Academy to continue that. They do a placement test and the lessons are 1:1 so she'll just pick up where she places. They do break down their grammar lessons into high school years so it's easy to transcript.

Trinqueta is going to do UDallas' Summer Latin in Rome program. She's very excited and has already made quite a bit of progress on Duolingo's Italian lessons. I'm glad that we managed to get all the parts of the application in by their early application deadline and got the 5% discount. There's still a bit of paperwork to have notarized so that she can travel without a parent, but most of the stuff that's my responsibility is taken care of. https://udallas.edu/travel/

Trinqueta took that class with Mrs. Bontrager at Landry Academy several years ago. I agree with bluebonnetgirl's review.

I just signed up for T's junior year classes at MPOA: Chemistry Latin III: Cicero Material Logic/Classical Rhetoric The Divine Comedy Austen & Shakespeare She'll take Calc and either American history or government at the CC. She was admitted to UDallas' Summer Latin Program so she'll be doing a reading class with them in Rome this summer. She's so excited!

My daughter is enrolled in their online diploma program. It hasn't seemed too workbooky to us, but the online classes are different than the homebrew ones to a certain extent. Their literature classes, Short Story and Novel, don't line up with their home packages and we've only used their higher level math classes which are not yet available as home study, so our experience may be different than yours would be. DD's most workbook focused classes are Logic and Classics. They're also the classes that could be done in middle school but are required to graduate. They are more focused on learning facts than in formulating and articulating a point of view. That's fine for us because Novel and Composition do require a lot of writing and thinking about how to express yourself. In a home setting, you'd have to sit down and discuss them quite a bit, they wouldn't be self teaching classes at all even though Comp has a workbook that the student uses constantly to guide their essays. Precalc and Physics follow the books and don't have any MP materials at all. Latin is also completely based on Henle II: Caesar with no MP materials. Hmm, to be honest, the high school classes start to move away from using their own materials and start to use outside textbooks more. The courses that use their own materials use them in a non-workbooky way. They're soft cover books, but they're asking more in depth questions or guiding more in depth processes that you'll find easier to work with using a word processor than writing in a book. I think that would hold true for home study as well. I do know they sell videos of some of their courses and I'd look into using those if possible especially for any area you fell less comfortable teaching.

If affordability is a major concern, I'd check out UT Austin and U of Houston. They both have classics programs and they're in-state. If you think he might not get in to UT Austin directly, I'd check out the CAP program. Students do a year at another UT campus (UTD is not included, but Arlington is) and then transfer automatically if they make the minimum GPA. They're both huge, but the Classics departments will be small and they both offer living arrangements that might work for him, UofH Honors housing and UT Austin's Jefferson Scholars living learning community. Houston links: https://www.uh.edu/class/mcl/classics/about/ http://www.uh.edu/honors/ UT Austin links: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/ http://housing.utexas.edu/future/living-learning-communities