What are some good options for some type of payment card (credit card, debit card? some type of prepaid card?) for a high school student who is spending the summer away from home and doesn't want to carry a bunch of cash? Thank you!

This reminds me that several big state schools offer an honors school-within-a-school option that can be attractive to high achieving students. They may get a separate residence, priority registration, some ability to skip lower level classes, greater attention from faculty, opportunities for research, and more flexibility, depending on the program. I imagine some honors programs may not be all that, but it's worth researching.

I regret studying French. I grew up in the midwest and had no idea there were so many Spanish speakers in this country! I'm still waiting for all those French-speaking immigrants to cross our borders so I can talk to them, lol! But if your dd wants to study it, you should let her.

I had also never heard that "public ivy" specifically refers only to UVA. In my mind, public ivy means prestigious for a public school; schools that attract significant numbers of students from out of state. Like Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, ... and UVA, among others.

Yes, this was true for DH and me. I attended an easy peasy public high school where As were given to anyone who made the least effort in classes that ranged in difficulty from super easy to moderately difficult. We sent plenty of students to state U's, but also lots of kids went to tippy top and nearly tippy top schools as well. DH's private high school was really tough. Like head and shoulders above anything from my school. The courses were advanced and taught by monks with PhDs and they gave out As only very rarely. DH was the only one who traveled out of state to a name school. I was pretty shocked that those kids were not attending the kind of colleges my friends from my high school were attending. As an alum, some faculty asked him what they could do to get more of their students into name schools. Hi answer: "Grade inflation."

Ugh. The fact of the matter is the US mints many, many high quality PhDs, many more than can be absorbed by all the academic positions available for them. So what you see is these amazing researchers from tippy top universities are taking academic positions at schools you may not have heard of. This a great opportunity for a motivated student at a no name school to work along side these highly trained researchers and do some amazing things. Better still, you may have less competition for research positions if your fellow students aren't all obsessive competitive types like you might find at a tippy top school. (This last statement is just conjecture on my part. Certainly there are many ambitious students at no name universities and laid back types at the top schools.) And I take issue with the phrase "a state not known for its academics." How is an entire state characterized this way? If there exists a university or college in this state, then there are professors who work there. They have families and children who are interested in academics. Every state has physicians. MBAs. Engineers. Accountants. (Wear your state U sweatshirt with pride!)

I like the idea of redoing PreA with AoPS. Spot check by having him do the problems or exercises for each chapter section. (No need to do the end of chapter challenge problems unless he wants to.) If gets those without a problem, then move on. If he's missing problems or exercises, then take the time to drill down and repeat the lesson using AoPS or any other textbook until he's solid. It might be an easier sell for him if you explain that AoPS is much tougher than his previous curriculum.

We have a high school nearby that offers an IB option, but not every student at the school takes that route. Maybe there are a lot of students attending this particular school who are not IB?

Thanks for posting this. It's interesting how the Calc BC students selected themselves for success, over 60% receiving 4s and 5s. I imagine if they aren't feeling very strong, they are opting for AB.

Woot! Can we pin this? I don't want to lose it! And I had no idea Khan offered AP prep. Thank you for the heads up.

Interesting. I hadn't given much thought to the AP exam readers. Is each exam graded twice? Who are the readers?

I'm curious because we haven't taken online AoPS for a regular class. (Just extras like AMC/MathCounts Prep.) When we work through the books, I have my kids at least attempt every problem: the Exercises, Review Problems, and Challenge Problems. I'm wondering out of all the problems assigned in the book, how many of them are assigned to students taking the online classes? If not all are assigned, do your students do them anyway? Do the problem sets differ from the problems in the textbook? At home, we cover one chapter section per day, then spend 1-3 days on Review Problems and 1-3 days on Challenge Problems. How does this pace compare to the online classes?

If you don't mind spending the money and plan to continue homeschooling, consider buying a subscription to My Homeschool Transcripts. We can create transcripts for as many students as we want, unlimited times. I've already used it many times as the kids have applied to camps, jobs, and different schools. You can enter in course descriptions, extracurriculars and test scores which makes it useful to record keeping too. I like not having to worry about formatting, just enter in the data and it spits out your pdf. (No affiliation; just a happy customer.)

And unfair. It just isn't fair to make a kid walk around among strangers asking for work.

Yeah, that's pretty appalling. What would happen if he showed up anyway on Friday or Monday? Is no one working there? Can he start wandering around and trying to meet someone friendly and in need of help? Or maybe he can email professors individually about his situation and see if they have space for him. He can just explain what happened and how he's really interested in their work and wants to help out. It won't be easy, but it's worth a try to save his summer.

My dd is going part time and she just received her schedule. Both classes meet at 6:30pm or 7:45pm! She has evening rehearsals, so needless to say she's requesting a different section. Fortunately, she has other options for both her classes, online and locally if it doesn't work out.

Being graduated from high school may give your student priority registration for classes which may be important if they are over subscribed. Some cc's have automatic transfer agreements to 4 year universities, so in some cases it may be easier to be admitted as a transfer from cc than as a freshman. (Harvard is not in this category, but your local state u may be.) Your question is best directed to other homeschoolers in your community as these rules vary from state to state and school to school.

Blue Pelican looks like a good way to spend the summer. Have homeschoolers had any luck obtaining an answer key?

We have not taken the AoPS geometry class, because those online classes in general are too fast-paced for my kids. Not to scare you, but some of the students may have already taken geometry at their B&M schools prior to taking this class for further challenge. Having said that, I think the most difficult chapter is the one one triangles where you work with properties of the incenter, circumcenter, and all those cevians in chapter 7. It gets confusing. With my 2nd child, I made sure to review what was already learned before moving on to the next topic, so that everything was in context. I'm not sure if chapter 7 is something you can just jump into without the previous chapters, but if possible, I'd take a look at it. You should be able to quickly derive what happens when the angle bisectors intersect versus when the medians intersect, versus when the altitudes intersect, what it all means and why. My advice for this summer is to just start working ahead through the book. And keep working ahead as much as possible during the year. Buy yourself as much time as possible so your student will have extra time (and extra experience) to work on those harder problems.

It can be difficult with financial aid which is so terribly capricious and complicated and fraught with errors. I'm linking to a sad article about a gal, first in family to attend college, who had her financial aid award unilaterally changed without her knowledge. It's a long, sad article, so I'm reproducing the relevant bit here: By counting money the family did not have, Emory not only increased the amount it expected Angelica to pay in addition to her financial aid. It also disqualified her from most of the school’s touted program of debt relief. Under the Emory Advantage plan the school replaces loans with grants for families making less than $50,000 a year. Moving Angelica just over the threshold placed her in a less-generous tier and forced her to borrow an additional $15,000 before she could qualify. The mistake will add years to her repayment plan. She discovered what had happened only recently, after allowing a reporter to review her file with Emory officials. “There was no other income coming in,†she said. “I can’t believe that they would do that and not say anything to us. That seems completely unfair.†Emory officials said they had to rely on the information Angelica provided and that they will not make retroactive adjustments. “The method that was used in her case was very standard methodology,†said J. Lynn Zimmerman, the senior vice provost who oversees financial aid. “I think that what’s unusual is that she really didn’t advocate for herself or ask for any kind of review. If she or her mother would have provided any additional information it would have triggered a conversation.†Unaware she had any basis for complaint, Angelica found a campus job she loved, repairing library books. It seems universities expect parents to be shepherding their kids through financial decisions that frankly are beyond the capacity of most full-time students to comprehend.

:iagree: Often it isn't so much how impressive a student's work is, so much as how impressive it sounds to a third party who wasn't there, i.e., the interviewer. There's also the potential for a good story about perseverance here. It would be cool if his 9 hour internship turned which was initially disappointing turned into a full blown cool opportunity by the end of the summer. That would also impress interviewers. Job recruiters don't really want to hear from people who were disappointed in their jobs and quit after 1 week. I'm inclined to not give up yet, but it'd difficult to say without specifics on his job.

Could you describe the internship in more detail. I'm trying to get at whether this is a high quality placement with a lot of potential for learning and prestige. Is he to be involved with research or is he washing test tubes in a lab? It sounds like it's unpaid, so what's stopping him from hanging around and working more hours than scheduled? Is he on a college campus? Could he look into working in another lab in the same department? With more details, we could help you evaluate how worthwhile this placement is, or whether he should bail. Taking on an intern and giving them a high quality experience is a lot of work for the supervisor. If an intern is paid, then you can just put them to work doing scut work, but if they are unpaid (in money), you want to "pay" them with a solid learning experience, which is harder to do. Having said that, it happens all the time. With the whole summer ahead of him, there is the potential for him to carve out something for himself as he gets familiar with the research going on. (This doesn't negate the fact that he was offered FT work this summer and they reneged; I don't mean to offer excuses for them.)

Is there any reason to not begin an Edhesive subscription to study AP computer science now? Does it expire? We school year round, and I'd to have her get a head start and introduce her to Java. Thanks!

Let alone a student who is the first in family to attend college. "Helicopter parent" ought to be a badge of honor. But that doesn't generate clicks or sell books and magazines.

Yeah, and when I read DP, there was some part that did not reassure me at all. I think it was the analysis of Animal Farm, where the big secret is that the horses were the intelligentsia, and they didn't do anything to stop the dictatorship when they had the chance. I just felt like you need a translation of the book just to read the book. But then, if you come away thinking Animal Farm is a book about animals, aren't you missing the whole point of the novel? But does anyone ever read AF and spontaneously think, "Ah yes, this represents the political situation in Russia at the time..." or some such. Having said that, it's quite easy to look things up on Wikipedia to get some GBK, as you aptly call it. (Go easy on me here. I'm really a math/science type. Literature is just not my forte.)