This is the best article I have seen on this topic. Thank you for posting.

Is this the appropriate thread to let on that Stanford reversed its decision to eliminate a bunch of weird unpopular sports in which mostly rich white students participate? And this was after supporters of these sports vandalized the sandstone walls of the office of the president of the university. White privilege anyone?

Agreed. Why is "likability" even an issue in college admissions? Should people on the autism spectrum be judged on the basis of likability or because they are capable of high academic achievement? We have already seen likability used as a racist dog whistle.

I did my math wrong.

We school year round, with days off for vacation and camps, so probably 10 months a year * 5 days a week = 230 days.

I guess I don't really think about this as one particular trick that can only be used with these 2 numbers. I feel like it's a part of exercising the brain to think about these shortcuts and why they work. And reinforce the idea of place value.

For example, Singapore Math does explain the standard algorithms in detail, if BA doesn't suit.

I think this is an extension of a particularly American idea that one is either "good at math" or "not good at math." Whereas the Eastern idea is you are either "good at math" or "need to study more."

It's more meta than political but Influence by Robert Cialdini is a classic and very interesting.

What a loss. Those were solid classes, and let's be honest, they pretty much run themselves. (Handouts and prerecorded lectures.)

Asking for a friend, but I think they plan to circle back to it. Otherwise they will miss the rules of logarithms and graphing conics.

Do you think it's possible for a student who has taken AoPS Intro Algebra and Intro Geometry to skip Intermediate Algebra and go straight to AoPS Pre-calculus?

I really enjoyed this book. The author has a thesis, which I can't say I agree or disagree with. But he includes so many interesting tidbits of math history, it's worth it just for that. (Don't skip the appendices...they have the juiciest bits!) My favorite part is he reproduces a copy of a letter written from one monk to another in the middle ages. This monk was complaining because his teacher gave him some crazy wrong formula for the area of a triangle. (I think it included the number 7.) Anyway, he's complaining because this wrong formula is, not surprisingly, giving him the wrong answer, which demonstrates by drawing a triangle over a grid of squares. It's fairly hilarious, and I love that all these formulas that, frankly, are not all that intuitive, we so take for granted these days. It wasn't that long ago when people in the sticks didn't get the memo about triangle area.

Like others I took the SAT in 7th grade as part of TIP. I hated the Duke program I participated in. But taking the SAT in 7th grade at once reassured me that I could earn a high score in high school, while also alerting me to my lower verbal scores. The SAT was not a very stressful event in the 1980s, but having scored reasonably well in 7th grade served to completely demystify the exam.

Thank you for the news. I will stop discouraging students from taking this class. Fingers cross the course earns better reviews, and gives homeschoolers another option for AP bio.

I just found my dh's baby teeth on his nightstand. (He recently returned from a visit to my MIL.) Ew!!!

Wow. This reminds me of the approach taken by Zappos, where they pay their employees thousands of dollars to quit. The equivalent is dad (where's mom?) paying some teenager to stop dating the son/daughter. If s/he takes the money, you know they're no good.

Just FYI, I don't think PAH AP Bio has received strong reviews on this board. Look in the archives. We did not take this class. The reason I do recommend AP bio is because that's pretty much the standard for advanced students who are studying biological sciences. Few students will go beyond that level in high school. So if your student covers those topics, she can be assured that when she arrives at college, she will be at least as prepared as the majority of her competition colleagues. But she doesn't necessarily need to take a formal AP class or even take the exam as long as she has mastered the material. I like the advice of @madteaparty to go through the auditing process at the College Board. They should also provide you with some sample syllabi, and if you are keen to use Campbell's there should be a syllabus that follows that text, to help guide your student in self-study.

Similar to @8filltheheart, while I'm no fan of how education happens in the US, one advantage this country has is the opportunity for second chances. It sucks to remediate and it's exceedingly difficult...but not impossible. Sometimes even if they ask for help, they still won't follow it.

Thank you for this overview; it was helpful for my understanding. I'm a little confused by the bolded. Is there a particular journal published by Stanford itself? Or are you referring to some other journal? Was his article rejected by peer review somewhere? I always thought the peer review process was rather opaque; that is, you don't know where a paper was rejected, only where it was eventually published, further down the levels of prestige. But it does seem like a mathematics professor would have difficulty being published in an education journal unless he had taken it upon himself to run an actual study. (I think...I don't know how often these studies actually occur.)

I thought chemistry was more challenging than biology, and at my alma mater, it was chemistry that weeded out all the premeds, not biology. I would ensure she is solid on her college level chemistry so she can hit the ground running her freshman year.

I totally agree with @domestic_engineer. The grammar and practice books are terrific. We read through the main textbook over however many days it took, then spent the rest of the school year analyzing 2 sentences per day. The grammar is solid and they make it logical and easy to remember. I haven't seen anyone mention Caesar's English vocabulary. Do not skip these books! They are just lovely and as was mentioned up thread, it reveals MCT's love of literature. The Word Within the Word sequels were a disappointment by comparison. We skipped the poetics books, which I have come to regret. I now understand that an understanding of poetics can really enhance your prose writing. I wish we had stuck with it, but we were also short on time. For me the essay writing textbook did not provide enough guidance and by that time I decided to outsource teaching writing because I was just making a mess of it. I guess what I mean is if teaching writing isn't already your strength, MCT won't be much help.

If Khan Academy works for your student, why not stick with Khan Academy over the summer? (And welcome to WTM!)

Also, the cursive! It's like he never changed his handwriting since 4th grade!

Oh, do you mean "Insert Media from URL" in the lower right? I seriously never noticed that before. I'm going to try it now. What's frustrating is I can't tell if my test successful without help, since I can always see my own images! Do you see anything above? This time I did Insert Media with a copy/paste image url.