Hi: Those of you who have taken AP Calc at PAH, can you describe the format? Are their videos, or is it mostly studying from the text? How responsive is Gilleran to student questions? I'm glad to hear that PAH is a great option.

Yes, that had been our plan until dd's friend described it as not so great. I'm going to do more research on SOHS too, but it doesn't look promising.

Both. My older daughter joined the class late...in January. We took the free option, and didn't purchase the additional materials. But later she told me she wished I had. So that's what I'm doing this year with my younger daughter. For your money you get additional quizzes and worksheet, which I like to provide to her for more practice, but it's definitely optional, especially if you have a student who is strong in CS. HTH.

In looking at the pinned math thread (Thank you, Quark!) it looks like my dd's options are: Online courses for AP calculus BC: Johns Hopkins CTY PA Homeschoolers AoPS Has anyone taken these classes lately and have a review? Am I missing any online classes that cover BC?

I know the feeling! I feel like I'm teaching them to swim by throwing them into the deep end, but you really can't learn without doing.

I graduated a few students from my MC team last year, and added 2 girls in 8th grade and 2 boys in 6th grade. The 8th graders were both taking pre-calculus, so I was optimistic about having some strong math students on the team. So I gave the students a placement test to see who would be the top four students to participate in Team Round, and my 2 new 6th graders earned scores well above the 8th graders. I believe the difference is that my 8th grade gals were recently pulled from regular school to homeschool and did not have much problem solving experience. Their learning was accelerated, but not necessarily deep. In contrast, both 6th grade boys had experience with math competitions in elementary school and were both homeschooled. My sense is that many students in regular schools don't get the opportunity to participate in math competitions. It calls to mind my own first experience with math competition, which didn't happen until 9th grade. It took 2 years of flailing on the AHSMEs (and monthly practice AHSMEs) before I gained the confidence to solve harder problems. I'm lucky that taking the AHSME was pretty much required in my math classes, so I had no choice but to keep participating despite months of disappointing scores. I'm keeping my fingers cross for these 8th grade girls, that they stick with it and improve this year.

I'm going to guess without looking on Wikipedia. Do they have lots of ("pletho") teeth ("dontid")?

There are a lot of NOVA videos about insect behavior. Check your library.

I don't survey my parents because I'm not interested in their opinions. I coach a MathCounts team, and I put a lot of time into it, and I have my own way of running it. There are things I wish I could do differently, but I don't have time right now to make that upgrade. But overall, I'm happy with how I run things, and since I charge only a nominal fee, I don't feel the obligation to change. I also manage to get just enough students each year to field a team. Once my kids are graduated, I may just be a MathCounts coach for hire. In that case, I'll be more amenable to how everyone else wants things run.

I would learn some Python. That way you learn all the actual coding without the yucky Java stuff. My kids worked through the first half of Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, and you'll get a lot of great exposure before next year. Also, consider the edhesive AP CS course.

Meh. Their top 10 is the same as everyone else's top 10, just in a different order.

A funny coincidence happened yesterday. As I was reading the Sunday NYT, my dd15 announced she wanted some advice on a paper she was writing but wanted to check the honor code to see if such help was allowed. After some scrutinizing, and she asked about a particular sentence, and I suggested a word to substitute for a phrase, making the sentence just a bit smoother. Not a few minutes later, I turned to a lovely article by Ruth Bader Ginsberg with stories from her career and advice for others. I stopped at this bit about her good fortune in having a supportive husband: "Marty coached me through the birth of our son, he was the first reader and critic of articles, speeches and briefs I drafted, and he was at my side constantly, in and out of the hospital, during two long bouts with cancer. And I betray no secret in reporting that, without him, I would not have gained a seat on the Supreme Court." (It isn't clear which of Marty's actions had greater impact: helping her at home or helping her professionally.) So my ethics question is whether in school as in life it is okay to have a family member be a "first reader and critic" of pieces someone has written, whether's it's essays for classes or college admissions?

My dd took AP chemistry as a freshman, and is now taking AP bio, which is a good thing because the prerequisite for this particular course was chemistry. She will take AP physics next year because she needs to have calculus at least concurrently as a prerequisite.

I thought it is interesting that in the signatures of AoPS posts you'll often seen their goals for various competitions, as well as their actual scores. I was wondering if I had heard that people accomplish more when they set a concrete goal for themselves?

Lovely post, Janice. I hadn't noticed the high resale price, since I ordered a copy from the library. Now I can steal several copies and sell them on Amazon. :leaving: (Just kidding. I was just looking for an excuse to use the sneaky emoji.) The only big revelation I received from calculus was a derivation of the volume of a sphere, which we had been deploying for years without justification.

Thanks, everyone! These are some really great ideas. Dd is now considering taking the SAT Level 2 math in a few months. I had also forgotten that she's already taking AP statistics, and dd is considering taking a CS class, or starting on the AoPS calculus textbook so she can get a bit more AoPS before switching to what will probably be another textbook for AP calc. I'm also very interested in the books recommended by Janice. Who can resist a Hitchhiker's Guide? I'll try to convince her to do discrete math her senior year.

I was wondering whether the growth in administration was due to providing additional services such as to first generation college students or to accommodate students with disabilities, in which case I would welcome that.

Oh, yeah, I had forgotten about how bizarre the S Korea system was. They spend all afternoon and evening at private cram school, study all night, then show up to useless public school so they can sleep all day. Why bother going to school at all if it's just to sleep? What a waste.

We school year round, so except for online classes, we start and finish whenever we start and finish. So it looks like we will finish AoPS PreCalculus by December. The plan is for dd15 to take AP calculus next year with an online course, starting in the fall. Since she hasn't had discrete math, I was thinking about starting her on AoPS Intermediate C&P. But I know she (ever the planner) will want to do what she can to prepare for AP Calc BC. (She has a good handle on PreCalc, solving all but the Putnam, IMO, and similar problems, lol.) What are your ideas for math for the rest of the school year and possibly the summer?

I'm seeing this more of an issue of labor and budget. It's no surprise that when budgets for public colleges are cut, and tenured professors are untouchable, and high demand for classes, low paid, poorly treated adjuncts are the way to go. At CC, students are paying far less than the cost of their education, and no one wants to pay higher taxes to support these institutions because they can't get by on tuition alone. The icing on the cake is the growth of administration at the expense of teaching faculty. "Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase."

I just received the inaugural WSJ list of the top schools. They make a big deal about their methodology and why it was superior to certain unnamed (but probably USNWR) rankings, and how different they were. All that, and it was the same damned schools that you see in USNWR but in a slightly different order. This ivy higher that ivy, this engineering school higher than that engineering school. I thumbed through the hundreds of schools on the list. I looked at the 4 schools tied for #226. How is this supposed to help me? Someone really needs to rank schools by major as determined by undergraduates.

"God created the integers. The rest of the work of man." --Leo Kronecker

I listened to an audiobook version some years ago. My takeaway from Finland was that we need to close 80% of the teacher training schools in the US. Make it hard to be a teacher, not the department of last resort for failed business majors. The other thing I learned was that students in US schools make a lot of posters. Who knew?

We're still using it, but it's been really tough. The last few books have a lot of Putnam and IMO problems. They make the AIME problems look easy! I can about halfway through the solutions before giving up. Still, we just reached an easy chapter (complex numbers is mostly review), so we press on. But next year she'll switch to a regular AP calc class to get the job done.

This distinction between (1) finding the key insight (say locating similar triangles that are hidden away) that allows you to solve a difficult math problem and then (2) executing the algorithm to actually find the answer. My math professor would offer up the key insight and then announce, "And the rest you can do with your spine." Meaning executing the algorithm required only lower brain functions. Yes, when someone shows you that the two triangles are similar, the rest is easy. It's finding those damn triangles, or even knowing to look for them, that shows good problem solving skills.