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

We aren't GF but we love Namaste Pancake and Waffle Mix. Dh picked it up without realizing it was GF and it was a big hit.

Trinqueta is currently taking Precalc at MPOA with Daniel Maycock. It meets three times a week for an hour each time. She spends another 4 or 5 hours on homework. They're using Larson, Hostetler as the text. So far, she's really enjoyed the class and says that the pace is good for her and the teacher does a good job explaining topics. I'd recommend it.

The student has to read the story in advance. They're all in pdf format and are posted on the class page so there are no books to buy. In general, I think they do read parts of the story in class and then discuss them and they read Our Town aloud in its entirety as reader's theater because it's a play. The assignments are power point story arc charts, comprehension quizzes and short essays posted to a discussion forum. A student posts their essay and then responds to another student's essay. The posts are graded. The teacher uses the chat to ask questions that all students are expected to answer. A student can also post a question or comment in chat that the teacher will respond to orally. Trinqueta enjoyed this class a lot. She liked most of the stories they read and learned quite a bit about literary analysis. She needed about 3 to 4 hours a week outside of class time to do the reading and do the assignments.

These are all great ideas! Thanks! I pick up a shopping cart from the handicapped parking spaces on my way into a store. There's almost always one that someone couldn't put away and it's a painless way to make someone else's day easier.

Baylor accepts boatloads of TX CC credits and quite a few CLEPs: https://www.baylor.edu/registrar/index.php?id=86538 https://www.baylor.edu/irt/index.php?id=74593 There policies are similar to UT Austin and TAMU (and most other colleges in TX with the exception of Rice which is important to consider for a potential music major).

Get appropriate footwear if you want to hike at all, even the easy trail. It gets very icy. I fell and broke my wrist and had a lovely tour of the Grand Canyon Clinic and Flagstaff Orthopedics. Don't be me!

You should look at the universities that they plan to attend and see what courses would transfer. For example, Texas A&M and UT Austin (and U of Houston and Baylor and SMU...) all have course equivalency guides for TX community college classes. Even more useful is a transfer guide which tells you what classes a particular university would like potential transfer students to take at a particular CC. These transfer guides are available both on the university and the CC's web sites. This process becomes a lot more complicated if you don't know what type of university your student would like to attend. If they might go out of state to a private, highly selective school most classes won't transfer and they can take whatever is the most appealing or useful to your high school plan. Or you could take what your state universities would expect and just lose the credits if they choose a different sort of university later. That's not a huge problem if they want to attend a university for 4 years and the CC classes are affordable enough to not mind the lack of transferability.

Waco isn't palm trees and beach country although you can drive to the coast for a weekend. If you want small town, palms and beach, I'd look from Matagorda Bay south all the way to South Padre. Closer to Corpus probably means better job opportunities. If you don't mind being in a suburb, check out Galveston Island past the Sea Wall. I'd also look into the Alabama and Mississippi coasts.

ASAIK which is really only rowing, it's very normal to hire someone to help an athlete package themselves and make sure their profile has been sent to all the relevant colleges. I'd also add that I do know a TX girl who got a full ride for rugby to one of the very few colleges where that's a varsity sport instead of a club. There are not many girl rugby players and there aren't many colleges where it's a scholarship sport so the it's not common but it does happen every once in a while.

Does it really need to fit well? Obviously too small doesn't work but is too big a problem? When I lived in Venezuela, I lent out an old overcoat that I had from my Boston days. It was an XL but many of my petite friends lugged that thing with them to the US or Europe. It wasn't pretty but it was warm (and there is literally no store that sells winter gear in Caracas, you have to take a cab to a store as a first stop from the airport and buy something immediately). If you find a men's winter jacket, it will be big enough in the body and you can roll or push up the sleeves.

I'd try ebay and Craig's List. You might get lucky. Also I'd try posting on Facebook and any local boards to see if someone local can lend you a coat. (I totally feel your pain. Dh has to go to a 2 day team building event at a NH ski resort. He had to buy ski pants and a parka, long johns and water proof gloves which he will use for less than 48 hours and then will sit in our closet for the next 5-10 years until he has to go to some other outdoor winter thing in snow country. The most annoying thing is that he does have a winter coat and a puffer jacket that folds up but neither of those will work for skiing and snow shoeing.)

Hey, I resemble this remark. My left is my close up eye and my right sees distance. I used to be able to read easily with both eyes but then middle age happened. I do wear glasses to drive and now they have to be graduated lenses so that I can read in them if I need to.

This will help a lot: https://www.amazon.com/New-Math-SAT-Game-Plan/dp/1530012287/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1547469138&sr=8-3&keywords=philip+keller's+the+new+math+sat+game+plan

What terrible news Pen. I'll be thinking of you and your son.

I've always bought my sons stuff related to their current interest. This year, GW will be getting a plush Neptune because he's been collecting the whole solar system and that's what's next. Geezle will be getting a bunch of Disney Pixar Cars vehicles and some wiki stix and sharpies to add attachments and modify their paint jobs. These are the last toys he still uses. He makes videos with them as the characters. As you can see, good luck to someone sending a gift who doesn't know their current interests very well. Our distant relatives stick to gift cards or things like sweat shirts with team logos that everyone likes.