Good thinking! I'll do the same.

Wow, AP Music does sound above and beyond the usual AP exam. Good luck to her! I also feel lucky to have a nearby high school that opens its doors to local homeschoolers, about 10 of us this year taking various exams. It seems like someone else has paved the way for me, because it all seemed like standard operating procedure, so here's a big thank you to whichever homeschooling parent paved the way and to all the students who behaved well enough that we continue to have a good reputation among people in regular schools!

Okay, I'll take a stab at this. Are you familiar and having been using MCT materials up to now? So WWW is fairly different from CE, and I don't really like it as well as the CE series. Since I just bought another copy of WWW1 I can tell you that the TM has the word and stem lists, the incongrous essays on Greek life, the Mystery Questions, Spelling Tests (?), and the Tests. The TM does not have the example sentences, "Ideas" (which we started skipping) and Analogies (which we also skip). So I would say that yes you can get away with just the TM. The WWW series is kinda meh in my opinion, but I plan to use it anyway, then move on to Wordly Wise. I didn't care for the other books, so I gave them all away.

Another up-vote for Critical Thinking. We enjoyed Mind Benders a lot.

If you are concerned about retention, you can throw your student an old MathCounts or AMC8 every once in a while to keep his skills sharp. The MC exams come in different difficulties (school--> chapter--> state--> national) so you can match to his problem solving skills. If he's already doing AoPS, you can probably skip to chapter level exams. Check the exams to see that he is retaining the algebra concepts and review as needed. (Again if he's doing AoPS successfully, he should have no probems.) The above exams will also introduce him to some concepts in geometry, number theory, and counting which will pave the way for future AoPS texts. Good luck!

Maybe I'm not in a very good mood this morning, but that kind of remark makes me mad. Insulting and unnecessary.

I think you have a lovely relationship with your dd. I would only be concerned IF her texting with you occurs at the expense of interacting with her friends IRL. My dd had a friend like that, and it was annoying. The girls would be out at the mall or something and chatting, while one girl would be staring at her phone, texting her mom, ignoring the other girls. I have no idea if this is the situation with your dd though. In any case, your friend should MYOB. (It would never occur to me to lecture this girl's mother.)

My kids were younger (7th and 8th grade when they worked through geometry), so I would work through the problems together and they would do the exercises on their own. Even now with my older dd in 9th grade and just starting precalculus, she prefers that we work through the problems together. Certainly, if your student is a more independent learner, you can leave him to read and learn on his own. If they have trouble interpreting the solutions, we'd review the solutions together. We spend one day per section, and then 2-3 days on review problems and another 2-3 days on challenge problems. Some sections are short and my kids get a break, sometimes they are long. If the section is really long, we divide it up over 2 days. Because the online classes are too fast paced for my kids, they would mainly take the fun "extra" classes like MathCounts and AMC prep, counting, or whatever their friends were taking.

I just returned home from picking up dd's from SAT subjects tests. Both were in different classrooms, and there was 40 minutes between when the first room was dismissed and the last. dd1's room was in a mad rush to bubble in their info as the instructor speedily read the instructions. dd2's instructor went at a snail's pace and wouldn't dismiss any student until she had scrutinized their ticket to make sure they weren't signed up for a second test. dd1 was dismissed with a simple, "If you are only taking 1 test, you may leave." She also accidentally called time 7 minutes early, before students reminded her. It seems that proctors don't use timers and are happy to time using the clock on the wall. Both students had issues with another proctor entering the classroom during the test period and chattily whispering with the proctor in charge. Can't something like that wait? Otherwise, we're happy with the comfortably heated classrooms, quietly respectful students, and the flexibility of getting our results relatively quickly before deciding whether to retake in June.

There are in fact many colleges with many open positions for students. You and I could open up a college and enroll students, collect government guaranteed loans from marginal students, and make a quick buck. In fact, someone did just that, only worse. They enrolled students in a non-existent college! (The students were foreign so they paid cash.) The stories you hear are about competitive colleges with mostly excellent reputations. Those are competitive. Then there are the thousands of others you haven't heard of that are struggling to fill their classrooms.

Private colleges with a marginal reputations are competing for students to pay tuition so they can pay their bills. No matter how bad the student, students loans are guaranteed by the government. Wikipedia explains this better than I do: "Some critics of financial aid claim that, because schools are assured of receiving their fees no matter what happens to their students, they have felt free to raise their fees to very high levels, to accept students of inadequate academic ability, and to produce too many graduates in some fields of study." Private colleges are free to lower their standards to whatever they choose. (I am not criticizing financial aid here except insofar as private and for profit colleges exploit students for financial gain.) Public community colleges exist to provide a service to the public at large, often underserved students who may be returning to school as adults to retrain for a new economy. They may require some remediation because of inadequate education, or simply because it's been many years since high school. I think the general complaint on this thread is that students who are newly graduated from high school should not require remediation, or at least not so many of them.

:iagree: You can save time and money by doing the old problems at home. Use Volume 2 or Volume 3 of the old exam books.

re: AP Chem, dd tells me there was a bit of an online kerfuffle about an FRQ involving a Lewis dot structure with resonant bonds. Apparently there is an active discussion about the exam on Reddit, including the MCs, which she tells me aren't supposed to be discussed, ever.

If you want to fill in more material, you can check out the options for electronics and raspberrry pi in my signature.

No, I felt bad that I had prompted you to purchase a book that you didn't otherwise want. His blog is very interesting, and he makes excellent points. YMMV, because plenty of students mentioned in this thread did not follow his advice and are quite successful.

Wow. I just pulled my copy from the shelf, and I sure did get that one wrong. So I tried to figure out where I came up with patently wrong information and I found the reason. He actually advocates for this on his blog, not his book. I hope you still find the book interesting.

I like PP's ideas. You can also draw an equilateral triangle with it's base and height marked: b and h or maybe use actual numbers. Then draw another triangle with the same base and the same height, but move the apex of the triangle a little to the the right. Draw another triangle, same base and height, but with the apex a little more to the right. Like this or this. To reinforce, whenever you are solving an area problem, always begin by writing A = 1/2 b * h. Always. I also like to make a little subscripted image of a tiny triangle right after the A, to further indicate this is the formula for the area of a triangle. Then under that (lining up the equal signs) replace b and h with the actual numbers. So it looks something like this: b=3 h=4 A = 1/2 b * h = 1/2 3 * 4 = 6 Parallelograms have a nicely similar formula to the area of a triangle. In fact, one can think of a parallelogram as a generic rectangle, with parallel sides but without the right angles. You can similarly draw parallelograms with equal areas, same bases and same heights. Like this.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I just printed out 50 pages (fortunately front/back, so only 25 pieces of paper) from a Wikipedia article. I can't read 50 pp. on a screen.

Some colleges require a certain number (maybe 2-3) SAT subject tests. I figure it's better to have your bases covered. Unlike an AP exam which is long and difficult, an SAT subject test is only an hour and all multiple choice. It's a quick add on.

Do you use the SS placement tests? I had my kids take them at regular intervals. They were always so pleased to be able to skip a bunch of lists at a time.

If you want the math concepts to stick long-term, I recommend you take a look at the MOEMS exam books. Each test has 5 questions on a variety of different areas. If it covers the materials she has been studying, it may serve to prompt her to remember different topics.

Dd14 is took the AP chem test yesterday and will be taking the SAT chemistry subject test on Saturday. PAH class prepares you for both, and she's feeling pretty confident about it. Dd13 had been taking the WTMA biology class, but then dropped it halfway through because the papers were too much for her. But she was told that the class would prepare you for the SAT bio subject test, so we signed up for next week. It turns out that the course does not cover organ systems, so we'll actually need another month to study up on those. So now she's also signed up for the June exam also. She'll probably take the exam this week for practice. Now I'm wondering whether she should be taking it at all, since she'll probably take AP bio in another couple of years. Ugh. It hadn't been on our radar at all until it was brought up in class, so now she's cramming for it. Oh well, we'll see.

Aren't those kids cute!

:iagree: What do your kids enjoy? If it's knitting, host a weekly knitting circle for homeschooled kids. Hire a teacher for an art class or a fun math class or something at your home. You'll find students who share interests with your kids, and eventually you'll identify families who share your outlook. It isn't easy, but sometimes you just need to put yourself out there. Like Lori said, we parents *love* it when someone else organizes a fun or educational event for our kids!

We used a passport for a photo ID, but I'm thinking now is a good time to get her set up with a DMV photo ID. As I was spying on her, she and the proctor were thumbing through the book looking for her name.