Thanks, everyone. I believe I have a much clearer understanding. WTM is wonderful!

I've gotten my kids from K to middle & high school without joining, and I consider myself to be a fairly well-informed homeschooling parent (largely thanks to these boards). But I do have the occasional freak out about college admissions. I've heard some good things about their college counseling, but their price is steep: $120 annual membership fee. What do I need to know about HSLDA? Has anyone taken advantage of their services: college counseling, legal, or anything else. Was it worth the price? Thanks!

A valuable homeschooling group uses Facebook to host online discussions. I'm one of those people who hates to miss a single message. I do not like the way you have a topic and then replies, but then there are cascading recursive replies within replies that aren't always visible, and you need to click a link to make them visible, only to find that I've already seen that one. Or I click a "more..." link and it opens the message in a new tab. I love the WTM boards because I receive my new topics digest every day which piles up nicely in a separate folder. Then I can page down and page down the new topics and click on ones I want to read, and subscribe to those that I want to follows. Easy peasy and I never miss an update. How can I manage FB so I can efficiently check for new messages, and not miss interesting discussions while wasting my time sorting through old messages I've already read? Ideally, I'd like to check in with this group once or twice a week.

Another reason one could be rejected when one is numerically in the top quartile, aside from rejecting the essay: A school could have 3 or 4 other applicants who essentially look like you. Or maybe 30. They may all have a similar story: Homeschooled girl from New York who plays oboe and golf and wants to major in political science. For some of these reach schools, they may not want 3 homeschooled oboe-playing future poli sci majors. They'll pick one more or less randomly and move on. That's an unlikely example, but I think we can all come up with stereotypical applicant types who fit into a category. Another related reason: Stanford is already up to here with CS majors, while their humanities departments are dying on the vine. What do you think Stanford is going to say when they get an application from a man from South Dakota, with a love for English literature? How many applicants will fit that category? ETA: I want to conclude that sometimes it isn't personal. That is, it isn't always about the quality of the essay.

Wonderful news!

True, true. In my zeal to share an anecdote, I didn't consider how relevant it was to the OP. He wasn't even a homeschooler, for gosh sakes, at least as far as I know. And you are correct that it could have been a matter of choice to attend cc rather than for lack of academic credentials. I don't want to do a disservice to OP by painting an overly optimistic picture.

Oh, I don't know. He may just be out of practice. AoPS prealgebra doesn't really reinforce the sort of computation skills like the one you mentioned. And all those decimals and zeros...yuck. Have you tried suggesting he rewrite the numbers in scientific notation and then proceeding with the multiplication? Or better yet, a modified scientific notation: 0.024 * 0.0042 = 24 *10^(-3) and 42 * 10^(-4). But even then you are still stuck with multiplying 24 and 42 and that's no fun, unless you use the distributive property. I guess my point is, if he's been doing AoPS and plans to continue with AoPS, those types of computation skills become less practiced. They are still good skills to have in your hip pocket and worth having down pat, but IMO it's no need to be so hard on them.

I agree with laying low. Mentally ill men this age are prone to violence and the availability of guns creates the potential for tragedy. $500 is a small price to pay to get your son away from a potentially dangerous situation. I hope he gets the psychiatric help he needs, and we won't be reading about him in the papers.

I was chatting with a surgeon on the admissions committee of a prestigious (top 5) med school, who told me how impressed he was with an applicant who had attended cc for a couple of years before transferring to state U. The student showed maturity in saving money and getting a superior education with smaller class sizes and caring teachers. Now, admission to med school is easy-peasy compared to admission to vet school, so this may not apply to your situation.

I think colleges do care about honors classes insofar as they elevate (inflate?) GPAs. Stanford recently announced their admission decisions and notably included this bit: "More than 80 percent of them have a high school grade point average of 4.0 or above..." It behooves us to call an honors course an honors course.

We call AoPS as honors because it goes above and beyond what you'd find in a regular math course. OTOH, many of our other classes are not particularly honors-y, so those don't get that designation.

I hear ya. It's like working hard versus working smart. Either path gets you there. Amended to add: The very best students manage to do both.

Colleges also don't want to jeopardize the statistics of their classes (average SAT score, average GPA, etc.) by admitting legacies with below-average stats. And I would think schools don't want to have the reputation of being a legacy-favoring school versus one which is more meritocratic.

WSJ book review: A few weeks ago, Citigroup rolled out its latest big idea: An open floor plan at headquarters. Soon no Citi employee—not even executives—will have a door to hide behind at the company’s digs in downtown Manhattan. Most bankers will be evicted from a dedicated desk. This newspaper ran a photo of CEO Michael Corbat posing among the ruins of demolished walls. He might have reconsidered if he had read Cal Newport’s engaging and substantive new book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.†Mr. Newport acknowledges the good intentions behind open offices: They are meant to encourage serendipity and teamwork. But he argues that burdening workers with perpetual distractions constitutes “an absurd attack on concentration†that creates “an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously.†Sure, there’s collaboration—not least the unspoken camaraderie among coworkers who have shared in the cringe-inducing experience of hearing a colleague castigate her spouse over the phone. Mr. Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is the unusual academic who will sully himself with matters as practical as: How can a talented employee rack up the rarefied and acute skills—writing, coding, scouring the latest mergers and acquisitions—that make someone indispensable? His answer? Expanding your capacity for “deep work,†ruthlessly weeding out distractions and regularly carving out stretches of time to sharpen abilities. Mr. Newport explains why honing an ability to concentrate can yield enormous professional payouts. Then he lays out rules for becoming one such rare bird. Most corporate workers, Mr. Newport argues, don’t have clear feedback about how to spend their time. As a result, employees use “busyness as a proxy for productivity,†which Mr. Newport describes aptly as “doing lots of stuff in a visible mannerâ€â€”blasting out emails, for instance, or holding meetings on superficial progress on some project. This presents an opening for people who are willing to tame these distractions, not allowing “the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule.†Such individuals cut down anything that could be outsourced “to a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training,†and create rituals of delving into “the wildly important goal†of their trade, whether solving complicated proofs, producing copy for a newspaper or churning out concertos. No job is excused as too mundane for his approach, even in industries that value, say, rapid customer-service responses. “You don’t need a rarified job; you instead need a rarified approach to your work.†The book’s best example is the Pulitzer Prize winning Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro, known for working on a meticulous schedule in his Manhattan office dressed in a coat and tie “so that he never forgets when he sits down with his research that he is going to work,†as one profile of Mr. Caro put it. He sets parameters for stacking his notebooks—most recent interviews sit atop the pile—and has a strict policy against subjecting his wife, Ina, a fellow historian, to after-hours dinner table chatter about Johnson. Advertisement Mr. Newport published some 20 peer-reviewed papers over three years while teaching classes and polishing off this book—and he doesn’t work past 5:30 p.m. Here’s how: When he’s working, he fires up every available neuron. Every project is assigned a time during the day, with paperwork, emails and other tedium lumped into installments. He argues that you should never surf the Web for mental breaks, or for entertainment in the evenings. Such browsing destroys the ability to concentrate. Then there’s the relentless crush of email slamming inboxes day and night. Even if your boss expects you to respond to notes promptly, Mr. Newport offers strategies for slashing time on Outlook, where value for the company is seldom if ever created. Here’s one great tip: Don’t answer a missive “if nothing really good will happen if you respond and nothing really bad will happen if you don’t.†When dashing off emails, try to bring the thread to a swift, positive end. Instead of chatting about maybe meeting for coffee, offer three possible times and add that someone’s choice will serve as confirmation. As for Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and so on: Ditch them. He isn’t preening that social media ruins society, but contending that it’s all “a lightweight whimsy, one more unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you.†Mr. Newport recommends a 30-day social-media fast, and here’s the kicker: Go dark without announcing that you’re cutting the habit. You may be surprised how few of your “friends†miss your hot take on the latest Trump brouhaha. One quibble with Mr. Newport’s book is its bid to be relevant. The opening discusses why working deeply is critical in what he calls “the new economy,†which is mowing over low-skilled workers and benefiting people who own capital. For one, history seldom plays out so neatly. Ironically enough, the reason his insights are worthwhile is because its philosophy doesn’t have an expiration date. Also grating is the steady cascade of anecdotes about today’s always exalted Big Thinkers—data cruncher Nate Silver, writers Malcolm Gladwell and Jonathan Franzen, among others. In one redolent interview, readers meet a “sustainable farmer†who eschews basic concepts like economies of scale in agriculture but is supposed to teach us about opportunity cost. Mr. Newport has the high-quality problem of being more incisive than most of the people he interviews. “Deep Work†accomplishes two considerable tasks: One is putting out a wealth of concrete practices for the ambitious, without relying on gauzy clichés. The second is that Mr. Newport resists the corporate groupthink of constant connectivity without seeming like a curmudgeon. In fact, his proposals—for instance, allowing yourself to be bored, even if it involves the novel experience of standing in a line with no smartphone—are enticing, a hint that he’s on to something with a mantra he quotes that a life of unbridled focus “is the best kind there is.â€

I don't know much about admission to vet school, except what I read from other homeschoolers on the internet who are applying. It sounds like with vet school admissions, your students needs to have extensive experience working with animals, say, as an intern before they apply. I think being a homeschooler makes it easier to schedule these opportunities around your school work and go much deeper and further in your exposure to animals.

Cal Newport writes about relaxed students (not unschoolers or even homeschoolers necessarily, but it can still apply) getting admitted to reach schools. He argues that students who grind their way through 10 APs and half a dozen extracurriculars aren't doing themselves any favors when it comes to college admissions. Read some of his books; you'll see how they fit in nicely with an unschooling/relaxed philosophy.

You can also think about it demographically. Every year, new legacies are minted. Many of them have babies. Many of them want some of their children to attend their alma mater. Is there room for all of these legacy admits? That expensive private school could have hurt as much as helped her. If many other students at her same school were also applying to the same college, and they were all high achieving, overly qualified applicants, the college is still unlikely to admit them all, if only because they need some diversity in their freshman class. I was checking schools that are in the 9% admit range. They include: Brown, U Penn, Cal Tech, and U Chicago. These are all really tough schools, and there are no guarantees for the majority of applicants. We should keep our emotions in check when we evaluate colleges. Colleges provide a service for which we pay dearly, and it behooves us to consider the cost/benefit rationally. Too bad for your friend's daughter. I hope she finds another college that will propel her into a rewarding adulthood. ETA: I forgot to ask if your friend's name is on any of the buildings on campus? That is a legacy priority.

Is it terribly rude or wrong to sign up for the same AP test at 2 different locations? It seems like given the troubles some students have had with last-minute cancellations it would behoove us to have a back up just in case. If they are planning to offer the exam anyway, and yours is just one more student, it shouldn't make much of a difference to them if you back out at the last minute, no?

Thank you, Calming Tea! I'm going to save this post. I didn't realize option 2 existed. What is your definition of doing "very well on the SAT?" Does the applicant need to walk on water, as they say? Regarding option 3, don't certain community college classes meet an a-g requirement? Can the options be mixed for different subjects? Like a student could take a one year approved history class AND take an SAT subject test in Spanish? ETA: It looks like already answered in option 1, but could you confirm anyhow? This is a major concern for us now. Thank you!

Ann Landers and Mike Royko! Those were the days!

I do feel like people use social media effectively to self-promote in their careers. It helps with networking, and there is value in keeping in touch with friends and loved ones. I think I read somewhere that people who stay in touch with old school mates are healthier and happier than those who are cut off. Having said that, I do agree that we need to be careful to prioritize what is the best use of our time. So-called deep work enables us to truly improve ourselves or make us more valuable in the marketplace. Janice, do you have any particular goals in mind when you think about deep work? I would like to establish myself as competition math tutor. I'm okay at the elementary and middle school level, but would love to have competence at higher levels. I'd love to be one of those people who can complete an AMC 12 with no problem. I'd love to be able to solve some AIME problems. We'll see.

It sounds like FB is really working for you in terms of keeping close to your far flung family. Here's how I used it. I would page down, page down, page down through vacation photos, photos of entrees, provocative political posts, etc., made by people I didn't know all that well, but I went to high school with, and am generally vaguely curious about. I spent so much time in this very unproductive endeavor. It basically took up time that I normally would spend reading books. There are a few people I like on FB, but I haven't really missed out all that much. I think I'm FB friends with just too many people at this point, and I need to cull the list. But it was just easier in the near term to stop completely. Now I'm thinking that the WTM forums are taking to much time. I don't want to give them up completely because I get so much valuable information, but I need to discipline the time I spend here.

Lol, here it is: What Works What Doesn't. I'm sorry I don't remember the book with the extra fluff.

I hear ya. I'm one of those people who preferred the TV version of Wizard of Oz to the book. Not. even. close. Don't tell anyone, but I read all 7 of those freakin' Harry Pottery books, and it was all lost on me. I read them anticipating that my kids would love them like everyone else's kids. Turns out, they have no interest in HP. What a waste of time! Somewhere on these boards, someone recommended a book on study skills. I looked it up on Amazon, and someone in the reviews linked to a 6 page article that summed up the entire book. That saved me lots of time! (Almost making up for Harry Potter.) I read aloud to the kids at mealtimes, and our most entertaining reads are non fiction. Wow. You really spoke for me here.

I'm not exactly sure how a student will curry favor with admissions by mentioning other students who attended other events. Is it a good thing or a bad thing if you attend another scholarship event? Why? And how would that even come up in conversation? In any case, I would suggest her to stay away from the petty back stabbing or gossip or whatever else is going on and take the high road. Focus on reiterating her accomplishments and her enthusiasm for the program to which she is applying. If the subject of other applicants should come up, speak of them positively about them if vaguely. Don't dis other candidates. It only makes you look bad.