My high school had 50 minute classes. And each class had one 75 min. meeting once a week. We usually did presentations or testing during our long periods. For science, that is when we did our labs. The top 10% all went to competitive colleges. I like the idea of spending about an hour at a time on subjects. Even long-haul study sessions should be broken up by activity, chores, another subject. Keep the mind fresh and flexible.

I'd have to mention that I was "stunned" by my grades in sophomore chem. I had to invent an entire new way of learning things for myself. I think I expected to be "taught" by the prof. and was not (it was after all a weed-out class). I talked to chem. majors and people who had taken the class with that prof. and with other ones and came up with a pretty good idea of what and how I had to teach myself. I got help the minute I felt shaky on anything (tutoring costs per session = 1 beer + 1 green flair pen + 1 legal pad or ice cream + chocolate sauce + white paper + #1 pencil). I found some fellow older students who really understood the material well and could explain it beautifully. Dh was stunned by a course in grad. school. Remedy was me going over his old tests and papers and formulating a study plan.....Sunday afternoons by the pool were spent drilling for memorization tests. The best advice I can come up with in your dd's situation is that she reach out to the prof and others and just get to the bottom of "why" she did not do well. Then, change her study habits and thinking towards a better direction.

My comment on study habits has to do with learning "anything". I think if you go into studying something with the idea of "interacting" with it, you have a good start. For reading literature, reading out loud, answering study questions, discussing a piece in class (at any level, technical or non-technical), for STEM, thought experiments, problems. I am a "creative" type. I like to read up on a subject and then use what I've learned to "create" experiments, papers (research or creative), alternative renditions of the text. What I would like to instill in dd is that books and knowledge are not dead....they are meant to be used and played with. This may sound like "dumbing" down but, it can be harder and more complicated than memorizing and reiterating. This method requires that you "know" a subject. This may also be my X chromosomes talking????

I have similar problems with dd, 18. Must be a plague. At times like these I want to send her via FedEx to Ester Maria for a while.

My problem with the "get strict" policies are that kids will just throw up their hands and walk away from it all. (And what's an F going to do to their GPA, no college for them if that's going on a transcript!!!) I do not know how to strike a balance that will solve this problem. I like the idea of giving him responsibility that is "his". a simple, outdoor task that needs to be done that has just a small impact on everyone else in the family. Maybe instead of taking things away, positive reinforcement will work better, praise for a paper, praise for cow-organization, etc. Catch more with honey than with vinegar. For a boy, this may need to be super subtle?

Ester Maria; Your experiences sound like what a lot of my undergrad friends who were history or classics majors were doing. They worked v. hard on papers and oral presentation/exams. I could not ask my kids to do this amount of work if their lives depended on it. I do think they are lazy, they do the minimum necessary in their eyes. This is horrid for me, who had dreams of great work, great inspiration in the homeschool setting. Dd, who graduated from ps, just did what she needed to do to get a certain GPA. Other dd does not care about even that. She works enough to keep me off her back. Her favorite retort "Just so you know, they only read/do X at ps/private school/other homeschool..." This drives me crazy. We are in my school, but I will muddle through. I wonder how she will cope in college. Oldest dd was surprised by the quality of reading and writing demanded and the lack of scantron tests!!!! Youngest dd may be in for a v. rude awakening indeed.

We often have this debate in our house as one dd is a humanities major. I still think dh and I worked harder as STEM but, she has more time for extra-curricular commitments. That said, when I was doing my thesis, I used to work with fellow students in the classics library b/c I felt they worked harder, with more concentrated effort. They were definitely quieter. Most of the honors graduates in our class were humanities majors. The few STEM majors that graduated with honors were known for their impossible schedules and work loads. I was a "closet" lit. major. I found those classes to be a wonderful break from the grind of lab reports and equations. However, my dh hated his humanities classes and my roommate had to be nursed through Shakespeare in order to pass. For me, the balance was one of the real gifts of a liberal arts education.

Homeschooling for the last 2 years of high school has been super tough. If I had it to do all over again, I would have started in 8th grade to get our bearings. I am doing all Mommy courses, had to re-learn and newly learn so much. I have wound up schooling myself more than my kid!!! People looked at us oddly when we made our annoncement...like ..... "what is wrong with you? Is your kid sick? Are you joining a cult?" We just said, "No there's things we want to do that aren't possible at the ps." We ARE happy doing things this way. Now the question is will colleges feel the same way? Too scary really.

And I would add that some of those students do not really want to be there. Colleges continually press for AP and advanced coursework from applicants - We want students who have taken the most challenging curriculum offered in their school - and many students just take the most AP classes that they're allowed to by their school. Taking so many means that many of them will do sub-standard work in most of them. My dd's AP classes were the only way she could get a "quality" education in a subject. I think she would have been better off in non-AP classes, and would have learned more, had the "quality" been the same. The dd that I am homeschooling was completely adverse to this competitive nonsense. We have developed our own "quality" curriculum, advanced when possible, but always deep and thorough.

AK Mom4 - But you are in Alaska, the land of romance and beauty, we are muddling in Memphis. We will go where dd gets in and where we can afford to send her. Many other kids did this when the older dd applied (we visited 22 with her!). I do not know what this dd really needs anymore after homeschooling, I figured the 2nd semester sr. version of her will know enough about herself to make the choice. DD #1, for all our visits, decided on an ED app., got in, got $$, withdrew all her other apps. This all happened in 1 week. I wondered why we had stopped by so many of the schools on our travels (we visited most of them on the way to somewhere else). DD #2 is not DD #1 so there may be a long wait until April. But, we will persevere and go wherever at that time.

It is early, so this rambles - Should we be "requiring" math and science for kids who have no aptitude or interest? Really, wouldn't it be better to get the kids who are taking calc. and physics in order to fill some requirement into science that would really interest them, e.g. applied math for financial stuff, statistics, applied math for everyday life, everyday physics and electronics? Many of the kids I talk to have no idea why they are taking any math after Alg. 2. It's just on the college checklist that they have to take an "advanced math class". This should hold true for college as well, and does at some schools (e. g. calc. for math and engineering majors vs. calc. for liberal arts majors). It would go a long way towards decreasing class size and providing a more nurturing environment. Speaking of girls in science and their spirit of cooperation - cooperation and team work are really what gets things done. The lone scientist in the lab is a rather sad myth, labs can be fun and social and spirited places where ideas are shared and creativity is encouraged. Competitiveness should not be an option, especially in college and high school.

The dd is a Philosophy major. She enjoys the intellectual rigor that is similar to math. Dd is taking linguistics and logic now and loves them both. The classes are extremely discussion oriented so, she has her social component. She is good at math, picks things up easily, does well with computer work. I think she could bring a lot to wherever she ends up working with those talents. Her 2nd major is Art History and she will do a thesis that somehow connects the 2 subjects. Whether she will get a "job" after she graduates, we don't know. Her campus job is in the art museum and she did her first "arts internship" this summer (that's where her computer and data savviness came into play).

Scarily "should" could mean that we end up homeschooling college as well!

I am reminded of a quote that I read in one of the articles about Steve Jobs: "Genius lies at the intersection of the humanities and science". My new educational philosophy!!!

I am trying v. desperately to motivate my daughter as we plough thru Physics this year. What I would have liked to do would be to set up a kind of story line that accompanied each chapter and work out problems that contributed to the story somehow. I did not have time to plan this out but, so far I've pieced together some NASA, CSI and Miss Marple, and the "Biggest Losers" scenarios. We work through some simple problems and then, as the work becomes increasingly complex, add more wrinkles. Then, I am trying for a nice conceptual conclusion based on the thought experiments we have performed. So far, she enjoys doing the problems much more, seeing that there is a "creative" end in sight. I just finished a "work chapter" that had some intriguing fun. What I hate about this approach is that I've had to relearn some physics as well, it would have been so much easier to hand her the books with a list of problem sets due. But, such is education. I would say though that it may be that a lot of the students in the beginning science classes are just there to get through it. A pity really. In my college, we had a calc. class that was exactly the opposite (we wrote computer models for all the math). We had to demonstrate an interest in trying out this new sort of course. It was really fun and not at all tedious. Of course, there were just 9 of us and we had a fab. professor..... I experienced the "get 'er done" attitude in my own college teaching. But, every year there were a few students that were really interested. They kept me going.

Regentrude; I guess I meant "too hard" from a student's motivational stand point as in "here I am doing yet another messy org. chem. problem at 2AM but, this stuff is just so cool". That's what kept me in the game. Can there be a way to keep things fascinating? When I got to a higher level of study, I realized what all those chem. classes "meant". I developed a great love for biophysics, of all things. In order to really understand those concepts I had to rely on all that hithertofore "meaningless stuff" from inorg. and org. chem. I kind of wish we had done some problems and lessons to show how applying elementary techniques farther down the knowledge path would eventually happen. I am horrible with links - I got to the article via the Huffington Post College page.

Dd goes to one of those staid NE colleges. She had a hard transition her freshman year. She elected to live in the "cool" dorm....read non-stop partying. But, she found a way to deal, library for study, dance studio for friends, secret places on campus for prolonged bouts of deep thought. She had a single in an all-woman's dorm sophomore year. Still loud and rowdy but, fun and she got a bit more sleep. This year her dorm is kind of mid-way between the two. It is important for her to learn to deal and have fun with others on their own terms. She still is frantic about sleeping, she is a day-time person, but less put out about not getting her perfect 8 hrs. She has always been on the meal plan and is a finicky eater but, has learned to deal with that as well. I told her "Life, welcome to it!!"

There is a great article about STEM education in college in the Education Life section of the NYT today. All you veteran STEM educators and students will like this. I know my oldest dd left math for some of the reasons (she likes a social component to her academics). STEM college educators need to get more inspirational. Science should never be too hard or too boring if kids of these days are to be retained as students. I wish I had more time as a homeschool Mom to tackle these issues. I despair that dd #2 may abandon her STEM dreams. On the other hand, both my dh and I have had STEM careers and all our courses were tedious and boring. I survived b/c of the challenge and being able to find like-minded study companions. Dh is just wired that way, but he did change majors several times.

We finished 5 of 10 with 2 more to be done in the next week. Such satisfying clicking. Fingers crossed y'all!!! Then, the last 3 go out for a more civilized deadline. We will breathe and triage video 'til Thanksgiving.

Dd found some formats on line that could be used with Word. She tweaked the headings into "Dance" "Community Service" "Jobs" and "Sports" then she listed closely related items chronologically under each heading. There were some sub-heads like "choreography" and "summer programs" under dance. She tried for a clean page or page and a half. No one likes to read v. much when they look at them. There is a common app essay about an "extra curricular activity that means the most to you" or something like that to elaborate. It seems that the best idea is to keep the document flexible so it can be easily tweaked.

Just from a "quality of education" point of view, I agree with older math and chem. and physics texts being ok. And you are probably ok with older literature and writing texts. History, bio, and econ. and government have changed quite a bit. I would go newer there. I've never heard of anyone asking about how old books were. I think it depends on how much you need the newer "bells and whistles".

We went nowhere but, dd has a specific line-up of programs of study and extra-curriculars. She found 9 schools that could work. We will visit if she gets in.

I am v. embarrassed to admit that we visited nowhere with this dd. The schools she wants to go to are too far away. We are taking our chances and just applying. We read everything on the web about each one. If she gets in with some $$, we will go and look. She is v. angry about this but, all the economy stuff hit everyone (except her friends, of course), Right????

We uploaded some home school info. in the additional information section. We have an umbrella school so they did the school report and the transcript. ?????Did anyone else have a problem getting a print preview of the application????? I couldn't even see if my TE made it. We used Safari and Firefox browsers and neither would allow us to see a nice preview of the main common app. We were able to see some of the supplements. We just trust in the cybergods....who I do not really trust, but have to. We filled out a non-common-app school application...it was even more cryptic. Fingers crossed there as well. Only 5 more to go. Two for 11/15 and then the other 3 for that nice traditional date of 1/1!!!!

Congrats on your experience. Keep in touch with that hospital and the nurses you shadow. They will be valuable to you in the future. Is there a way you could volunteer in that department? Even if it is just delivering flowers to the patients. It would help you see how the whole system works.