I was wondering if that was an issue.

We only used the textbooks. The grammar books are terrific and my kids were solid after that the 4 Level Sentence Analysis in the Practice books. I also have lots of love for Caesar's English, which is a beautiful approach to vocabulary. Word Within the Word was a disappointment by comparison. We dropped the poetry curriculum for time, but I wish we hadn't. I did not fully appreciate how poetics can enhance all of your writing, and I wish we'd kept it up.

I only accept payment for my tutoring services using Zelle. I don't accept Venmo or Paypal, not because of the OP's issue, though it is alarming, but because they take a part of the transaction when it's in exchange for goods and services.

I agree with @hjffkj . I stopped using paypal and Venmo not because of the tax issue but because they take a portion of the transaction when it's in exchange for goods and services. Now I only accept Zelle or a straight up old fashioned check. But I do always report my income. I just put a big =SUM() in my spreadsheet and tell our tax preparer how much I made that year.

Each MOEMS exam has one geometry problem and they are just perfect for an elementary student. https://www.amazon.com/Contest-Problems-Division-Richard-Kalman/dp/1882144120/

I'm not familiar with DO, but I agree with the others that it's not crazy and definitely doable, with AP stats being the lighter course. I have some AP stats materials from a defunct provider if you want to message me directly.

PBK is a great honor. You should put it on your resume as well. (I never qualified, sigh.)

The ham radio exam pulls a subset of questions from a larger question pool that is freely available. Like a lot licensing exams, the material it tests is related/adjacent to actually operating a ham radio, but not really. I downloaded a free app to my phone which contains the question bank, so I could review all of them. Then I attended a half day certification class with the exam at the end. During the class, they instructed us to read through the question bank and read the correct answer. When you take the exam, they seriously instructed us to let our hands instinctively choose the right answer. Don't overthink it, in fact, don't think about it at all. It was funny and weird, but it works. It also helped that I was familiar with circuit design symbols, which earned me a few free points. Weirdly, after I got my certification I only used a ham radio once. It was partly bucket list, partly aspirational.

Argh. This is perennial problem for me on these boards. I will try again: My point with these images is when I was first learning the unit circle, I would draw them in the margins, sometimes with (x,y) coordinates and eventually just little tick marks. It only takes a few seconds and I was doing this during a timed exam. Then eventually I could just picture them in my head. I think it wouldn't hurt to have your student regularly complete a blank unit circle until s/he can be fairly automatic. I never did that because I was using it in my homework.

Often I have difficulty inserting images into these posts. I can see them and others do not, so LMK if you can't see them and I'll try to remember the workaround. Here's an early trig exam, where we were first introduced to radians and conversions. Notice that we are only tested on multiples of 30 and 45 degrees. I include these other images to show that I am often sketching unit circles in the margins to remind myself what they correspond to.

One should memorize that a whole circle is radians. After that you can derive everything else. At first you need to think very hard what a given radian corresponds to in degrees. But then with experience solving lots of problems, they become automatic. Eventually students will know the multiples of and the multiples of . Learn how to calculate the equivalent of negative degrees and degrees greater than . I'll share an exam I took when I was in high school in another post.

I would take my medical advice from a math textbook. If some out of date formula is used for some math problem I don't generally sweat it. I may google it and have a laugh. I would be wary of any biological formulas from any math textbook, except insofar as the math is concerned.

I don't think it's cheating. I would look at the diagram in the solution manual and try to understand why it is correct. Then let a day or two elapse and attempt the same problem again. See if you can improve translating words into drawings.

Ah, ASCII art! You don't see that very much anymore. So it looks like this so-called "mound" is actually a hill? Because it looks like it's actually taller than the flagpole itself, that is, . Remind me not to use Dolciani.

I have STEM kids. We did: 9th grade: AP chem 10th grade: AP bio 11th grade: AP physics C 12th grade: some other physics. heat and light?

Boy, AoPS is way easier than this. The most complicated flag pole problem you'll see in AoPS is something like 2 flagpoles of different sizes and you know their shadow lengths. Or maybe a couple of flag poles and you need to figure out how far apart they are and it could be cloudy or sunny, who knows. I don't even know what the "angle of elevation" of the sun even means. I'm guessing since it's a mound shape, then the cone is inverted so that the point of the cone coincides with the base of the flagpole? But yeah, how big is this mound? Typically I picture a flagpole with a mound of maybe a few inches just to stabilize it, while the flagpole is 10 feet tall. If it were close to noon maybe I could see a really short shadow.

Here you go. It's probably even more difficult during the pandemic, but may be easier next year?

I think the difference is I attended an R1 school in the 1980s, where the professors were definitely not interested in developing something called a "department-wide pacing guideline" let alone teaching. I suspect teachers of remedial college classes like precalculus are more focused on making sure their students were learning. For us it was sink or swim.

Thanks for posting this, @Emily ZL. I feel like I dodged a bullet because BA hadn't been published when my kids were in elementary and we used Singapore before switching to AoPS PreA. The transition was seamless, and Singapore was straightforward, just the facts, ma'am, math. I wonder now how we would have fared with BA, and I'm really glad we chose our path.

I remember Richard Rusczyk describing his time as an undergraduate at Princeton. He would attempt to study a semester's worth of material in the first few weeks. He wouldn't always understand everything with 100% clarity, particularly the hardest material at the end. But because he had an early exposure to it, by the end of the semester he was learning it for the second time, and that made a big difference. Also, don't college professors often spend a greater part of the time on the easy stuff at the beginning of the term, then rush through the most difficult material at the end?

@Arcadia makes a good point about the online application. What you might want to do, @WTM is pretend you are homeschooled student applying to UC and see exactly what they ask for in terms of coursework. This may change of course by the time your student is ready to apply.

First I encourage you to join CA Homeschool College Seekers FB group, even if you don't like FB. There are several college consultants who stay up to date on everything. It's only been a few years and already my experience is out of date. I did a quick search and found a post (not mine) dated from April last year with this info. I do not personally endorse this info, because the situation was very different when my kids applied. Even now there's a chance it could already be out of date.

BA had not been published when we started homeschooling, so we started off with Singapore for elementary math. We did Singapore 4 days a week, and on Wednesdays I had my students complete a MOEMS contest at home. Since the AoPS problem sets often contain contest problems, this was a good way to prepare in elementary.

It is a challenging class, but taking calculus prior won't prepare you for NT. They are completely different topics.

I agree, it was a super-hard class. It was made more difficult by the fact that there is no textbook. I was despairing that I was learning very little each week, but now I find, a couple years later, that I'm reaching for those skills with my current problems. It's funny how you don't really think you are learning, when in fact you are.