I was recently interviewed on a podcast about the AMC and some of their recent controversies. https://gettestbright.com/all-about-the-american-math-competition/ I also enjoy and recommend this podcast for information about testing, college admissions, and educational generally.

I'm not that familiar with IB, but my sense was that going to an IB school is like taking an AP class in every single subject. I don't want that for my kids. I want to reserve AP for their interests and take easier classes that don't interest them. Also, I heard that IB really isn't available to homeschoolers, so my investigation ended there.

My take is that for me personally this would have been a highly awkward question to answer, bordering on forcing me to be braggy. If one or two or three girls answered GPA and earned a positive response, I would have answered the same just to not call attention to myself and get it over with.

I had never heard of discovery based instruction before joining this board and reading a post from a parent complaining about it. I thought it was a straw man argument for homeschooling. I mean, what teacher doesn't believe in teaching? Turns out, I was wrong, and discovery is very much real. Not only is it inefficient, but when you ask students to discover things on their own, they often get it wrong the first time. And it turns out it's much, much more difficult to correct a wrong preconceived notion than it is to instruct the correct way from the start. Students often get wrong ideas because they are instructed to discover things with a fellow student who is equally a novice. It's the blind leading the blind. This prompted my deep dive into learning about current teaching practices (since my kids were always homeschooled, I had no idea what was going on). I was reading books about teaching, listening to podcasts by current teachers, reading their blogs. It's truly crazy out there. A favorite hate-listen of mine is the Math Teacher's Lounge podcast where the 2 hosts discuss their math "trauma," and how to avoid rote memorization of math facts. Me, too.

Your professor was smart. Better to wait until you have tenure before you rock the boat. Here's a professor who wasn't so smart and indeed did lose her job over grading standards. "When I accepted a tenure-track position in the economics department of Spelman College in the spring of 2021, handing out bogus grades was the last thing on my mind." "But what I found at Spelman was even more troubling: even after receiving the “normal” grade inflation, students demanded yet higher grades—and revolted when I wouldn’t go along. " "Their basic argument was that since virtually the entire class had performed poorly on the midterm, it had to be my fault, and therefore, I needed to make changes that aligned with their wishes and input. Boiled down, they had two demands: make the class easier, and promise that they would all get passing grades. "

Yeah, I don't get all the hate for the College Board. It strikes me as a reflexive anti-test sentiment that's so popular these days. In the absence of any sort of standards for what it means to study math or history or English or science in high school, the College Board does an exceptional job of filling this vacuum. Is this the fault of the College Board? The College Board can't do everything, and they certainly can't control what happens in the classrooms, but they do bend over backward to provide supporting materials to teachers. What they do execeptionally well is set a standard and measure students and teachers and schools against this standard. If not for the College Board, we would have no idea what was happening to our students. Don't shoot the messenger. And don't hate on testing.

I used the US edition of Singapore Math, and we counted satay sticks, weighed boxes of mangoes, papayas and durians, and measured how far to travel to get to Sentosa Island. I didn't use the original edition, but I guessed the difference was the inclusion of US measurements, in addition to metric.

Hi @Condessa: I'm sorry you are going through this. I suspect students overseas have easier access to the AMC contests than students in the US. My recommendation is to contact Nicole Goberdhan, who is in charge of the AMC, or maybe one of the assistants listed on the website. Sadly, this so-called "Staff Directory" I linked does not contain any actual contact information, no emails, no phone numbers. This does not bode well for the MAA as a non-profit organization based on equity and openness to the students it serves. Nonetheless, you can call the main number ask to be connected the old fashioned way. I did find myself attending an event and asked Ms. Goberdhan about access to the AMC and she noted a program she wants to start where the MAA recruits members at various universities to help with proctoring. If you are able to speak with someone, I would mention your geographic location, what you have done already to locate an AMC site, and any universities or colleges or cc's that might be near you. I'm not well-versed in political pressure, but if you happen to live in an area that is low-income or has a high population of URMs, you can then make the case for an equity issue to her. It's just so frustrating to me that a few years ago, a homeschooler with some organizational skills and access to a local library could make the AMC happen in their community, but that option is now banned. Please keep me informed of your progress; as you can see this is a little personal for me, lol.

Oh I was wrong. I think chapter 7 is when it gets real, lol. Watch out for chapter 7.

What chapter in the book is this?

I often wondered why folks on this board made such a big deal about this. The College Board does not operate some kind of police force that reads through people's transcripts searching for AP course listings that aren't formally approved. Does anyone (including admissions committees) care that you passed some meaningless audit? Do 20 year old admissions readers even know that such an audit exists? Completing the audit is useful because they have a clunky system to access their Question Bank and create nifty worksheets. It isn't the best UI, but it mostly works, and I use it to create PDFs of calculus practice problems for my students. The agents you spoke with are probably misinformed, but I doubt anyone at CB really cares anyway. ETS just laid off a bunch of people, and the College Board had layoffs a couple of years ago.

@lewelma You mentioned your son's math colleague from Wellington with whom he studied. Was this person also homeschooled? Did he stay local for college and post-college or did he also leave NZ?

Drop the class and hire someone to evaluate your son's writing.

I totally agree with EKS on this. The only I would have handled this differently is I would have been loathe to contact the professor or draw attention to myself in a negative way. MAYBE one contact just to get a feel for the personality of the professor. If the vibe from the prof is negative, then keep your head down, turn in the project and don't make waves. I think your DS has good instincts on this.

I'll try not to take that personally. 😉 Once I showed up late for class and was working through the transcript well behind everyone else. I had a question, so I used Whisper to ask something along the lines of, "I'm still catching up with the class, but could you explain why..." And I received a helpful reply and I was able to catch up, because class moves so slowly anyway. The nice thing about Whisper is you can ask a slightly OT question without worrying about it distracting other students.

I was also going to suggest a passport. Can't you make an appointment at the DMV and show up at the expected time?

I'm glad @Roadrunner mentioned the ugly campus, because I have to agree, though some of the academic buildings are nicer and newer. I think it's a great school, and nice to be a small techie campus. One caution if you have a future engineering major. They offer a major in Engineering, but that always seemed odd to me. Electrical engineering to my mind is a very different field from mechanical engineering and so on. I'm not even sure what plain vanilla "engineering" actually means. But it can't be that bad because a google search reveals is to be the most popular major on campus, so what do I know?

I'm not sure if you are asking for feedback, but I think you are on the right track. It's a good habit to work ahead in class before lecture. You should also know that many students are taking an AoPS class for example, after they've already studied geometry in their B&M school, so it's good for your student to not be discouraged. Sometimes there's a fair bit of a lag in the online lectures as the TAs are answering questions. I often wondered if my computer was frozen, but it's just a slow-moving class. Encourage your student to take advantage of the "whisper" option, even if it's off topic. Other students in the classroom won't see it, and you can use that opportunity to ask questions of the TAs in real time. I also schooled year round and loved it. We took breaks on our own schedule (same as you, for camps or traveling). If we finished algebra on Tuesday, we continued with geometry on Wednesday, eg. You never know if you'll need the extra time later on due to unforeseen schedule hiccups. You're off to a great start!

It's a good question, and it's the reason we remember the greats like Newton and Leibniz. I'm impressed people were able to come with a formal way to describe concepts such as "infinitely large" and "infinitely small" that actually result in correct usable solutions to actual problems. I certainly couldn't tell you how these great minds work!

I'm not sure what part of AoPS is not concise. I've pasted below the proof for the derivative of a polynomial. It's all of 4 lines. The AoPS calculus textbook 320 pages, much slimmer than any other standard calculus text. (Let me know if you can't view the image below.)

I've also heard anedotally that some PhD programs place larger requirements on their PhD students than others. I was chatting with a guy whose wife was earning a PhD and she chose her institution over some Ivy because the Ivy expected more hours to be spent as a TA, handling office hours, grading exams, etc. At her generally less prestigious institution, she can spend more time on her research, and graduate earlier with more papers. I'm curious if this is generally true, or an outlier?

Isn't there some proverb about repeating the same action and hoping for a different outcome? Your student already emailed and nothing changed. I'm with your husband and son. More emails won't turn a bad prof into a good one. More emails won't turn a bad class into a good one. Also your son can't expect the class to change. It will continue to be a bad class. I agree with you that he should drop it, or else prepare for an unexpected grade, possibly bad or who knows?

For my transcript I wanted to keep things simple. I had simple rules for what counted as honors (AoPS, AP, what the instructor called "honors."). I would put DE in that category unless you disagree. I didn't have more than 2 categories for weighting. It's either honors or it isn't. If you think all the DE courses are honors level, then give them that weight. If they aren't, give them a regular weight. Maybe some DE courses are more akin to an honors level than others? Then I think it's fine to decide which is which and give it the appropriate weight. I would not have 3 weights just because of the added complexity, I suspect that's pretty non-standard, and I don't anyone really cares about the nuance. I'm eager to hear what others have to say.

For fun I looked up some of my own logic exams from high school. Note the handwritten and barely legible purple mimeographed print straight from the 1980s! And yes, students who scored >90% earned a smiley face on their papers. In high school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I lived for those smiley faces.

Here are some more fun logic problem for practice if your students are having difficulty: https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/1974_AHSME_Problems/Problem_13 https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/1986_AJHSME_Problems/Problem_22 https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/1985_AJHSME_Problems/Problem_25