Thank you!

Liping Ma's Knowing and Teaching Mathematics. It looks like they have a new edition.

I'm so happy to see so many fans of Brooklyn 99 here. I just finished a weeks-long binge watch of the entire series. It was my happy place. Coolcoolcoolcoolcool.

That's interesting; I didn't know the class ever filled. (My daughter joined the class one month into the school year.) I just checked and you can still complete an application, but that's not a guarantee there's still space.

My kids didn't do a lot of self-teaching in middle school until I hired a writing tutor. Since they were meeting 1:1 it was on them to do their assignments every week. Otherwise they weren't really capable at that age to do much self-study. But it all kicked into gear in 9th grade.

AP chemistry taught by Mr. Moskaluk at PA Homeschoolers is excellent. You'll see many old posts about him on these boards. My dd earned a 5 her freshman year and enjoyed the class.

We school year round. We only cancel or shorten school days for: vacations/travel, Dad is off of work, homeschool field trips or other activities, day camps, etc. Otherwise, summer looks like any other school day. My kids complained once or twice, but it was like that from the start so they were mostly used to it. If you are like me, then you get stressed out over missing a single day of school, even for an educational field trip, so having those extra instructional days helps me be a more relaxed homeschoolers. Also, you never know when something unfortunate will happen, such as illness or family emergency. As you pointed out, it helps avoid summer slump, and prevents boredom.

I'm curious too about what he needs to know. You don't need calculus for discrete math. What I liked about the course and the lecture in particular was that it doesn't shy away from the math. So he'll get a solid understanding of why RSA works. It's pretty cool actually. This is a great explanation.

(My DH wrote this.)

I'm not familiar with cryptography, except I watched a lecture by Arthur Benjamin RSM RSA cryptography in a Great Courses class. If that's what he's stuck on, this is an excellent explanation. If he needs to learn about mods, that's pretty straightforward, and in fact, makes solving problems very easy. He could probably self study that in a short period of time.

Our philosophy is that self-driven academic excellence, an understanding of the world (scientific, cultural, political), and a generous community-minded spirit will combine to produce an individual with the aptitude and determination to make a positive contribution to society. We value a respect for science and scientific thinking as a path to knowledge, a love of learning, an admiration for clear communication and persuasion, an innovative entrepreneurial spirit, and a desire to give back.

I didn't, we gave it up in middle school, just due to time and other priorities. But I regret that decision, and wish we had continued. I'm actually thinking about buying them myself just to improve my own writing.

Don't miss the Caesar's English vocabulary books. They are truly one of a kind when it comes to vocab.

I'm taking the online AoPS Intermediate C&P class to prepare for any students I may be tutoring. I went through the textbook a few years ago with one of my daughters, but I'm rusty, and I don't think I got everything 100%.

The MCT poetry books are really lovely.

Sheet Music Plus

This has been going on a long time, but it was often labeled by the choice euphemism. When I was an undergrad, you would often hear stories of students who started off as premed or studying to be an engineer, but then "deciding it wasn't for them" or "falling in love" with some humanities class. Now I'm sure that's true for many students, but I also wonder how many of them were actually unprepared for their chosen field. Come to think of it, is there really anything wrong with the status quo? It's been true for a long time that there are many more people who fancy themselves doctors than there are spaces available at med schools. We have a pretty good system that selects the best of this lot, IMO.

The cost could be a lost reputation of the university. If students are dropping out of the class, future applicants may suspect their peers will be unprepared, or perhaps the school itself is rough on it's PhD students. It cuts both ways. How many wealthy legacy applicants can a university admit, before its reputation suffers, and it becomes known as the school for dumb rich kids?

This discussion reminds me of how just within the last month I wanted to come up with a motivation for my oceans loving student to study matrices and I stumbled on these lecture notes for an Oceanography class: https://www.slideserve.com/krystal/laboratory-in-oceanography-data-and-methods It begins with a review of matrices and vectors. My message to my student was that I didn't expect her to remember and use Cramer's Rule or calculate a determinant for the rest of her life. But if she does continue to study oceans, she will have had some exposure to the topic, so she won't need to learn it completely from scratch. I do think some students take a more aggressive approach to studying and learning. I remember Richard Rusczyk of AoPS recounting his time as a student at Princeton. He said he would study the entire semester's worth of material in the first couple of weeks, when his schedule was lighter. Usually the most challenging material is served at the end of a class, so by the time the end of the semester rolls around, he wasn't learning it for the first time. I just signed up for an AoPS class myself, and even though the first lecture hasn't started yet, there is a student who is already over halfway through the book and asking questions on the discussion board. He's certainly getting his money's worth from the class, plus he's the kind of guy I would hire in a heartbeat...for pretty much anything. My point is, there are just people out there who are super aggressive (that's the only word I can think of to describe it) about their learning.

Thank you, @Lecka and @Arcadia for setting me straight on this point. I completely failed to see this point of view when I read the article.

Mostly Stanford, but I'm open to any solutions to any problems discussed here.

Do you think the math faculty was under pressure to admit more women to the PhD program? How can we do better? (I also have a neighbor whose daughter was just admitted to the UC Berkeley math PhD program from Wellesley undergrad.)

Yeah, IMO gold medal winner means you are clearly qualified. And that is interesting info about the other 2 students who failed out. What was their level of preparation?

Another relevant quote: Adebagbo grew up in Boston, and went to a school where only 26 students were part of her graduating class. She does not put her high school at fault for her difficult transition at Stanford. “There’s only so much you can expect from a fairly new school,” she said. “So I think a lot of my anger [is] toward Stanford — you knew who I was when you accepted me. You knew the kind of high school I went to. You knew the environment I was coming from.” I think students harbor affection for their alma maters, and it's difficult to direct criticism where it deserves to be placed.