So many times in my life I've wanted to say "I told you so" to someone who has power over me. So I keep it to myself. And I save it for the WTM forum! 😊

I think it's fine at this age. Being able to communicate through math is a good skill to have, but not necessary at this age. With my math olympiad students (4th-8th grade), I will scribe at the whiteboard as they describe their solutions. If they forget some vocabulary, I will suggest it for them. I think helps with their public speaking and helps reinforce vocabulary. So if they are trying to calculate 4^3, I'll ask them how they did it. First I write 4^3 = on the white board. If the student says "4x4 = 16" then I will write 4^3 = 4 x 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = and then he says, "and 16 x 4 is...hmmm...8x8 is easier so ... 64" 4^3 = 4 x 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = 8 x 2 x 4 = 8 x 8 = 64 and I'll make a point of saying "So you rewrote 16 as 8x2? And now we replace 2x4 with 8?" ostensibly so the other students will understand how he solved it. I often underline numbers that are being replaced. I think it's good practice, but I don't expect my students to be perfect at it, especially orally. It really helps to see it on paper, because the student can say, "Replace the 16 with 8x2" and it makes sense.

I don't have a kid like this so grain of salt. Can you get him involved in "serious" issues? Something like helping the underserved or the environment, or tackling big problems? Maybe something like that will give him a direction for his energies and perhaps sober him up? And I don't mean to imply he needs to change, but maybe understanding the problems of the world will encourage him to become a more thoughtful person?

FYI, I used our Happy Light when I was waking up early in order to avoid jet lag on a long trip East. My goal was to fool my body into thinking the sun was rising earlier by shining it on my face at 4am while drinking coffee and watching YouTube. I think it worked because I didn't have any of those horrible sleep-all day-long jet lat episodes.

I'm wondering why you aren't "doing the 'register your syllabus' thing". It's free, doesn't take much time, and it unlocks a lot of practice tests and other study materials. Also, just by initiating the process, you have access to a few pre-approved syllabi, which can help you get started, even if you never officially receive approval as a teacher. My dd also took AP chem in 9th grade and did fine, though she took the PAH class.

Oh, I just LOVE that last question: "...instruction setting and schedule, frequency of interaction with instructors and fellow students..." Like I'm really going to create some big spreadsheet of meaningless numbers. ("Let's see, in the 3rd week of October I interacted with my peeps for 3 hours, but the 4th week of October it was 7 hours on a skype chat about some meme...") Seriously? And what if my student has a friend in 2 of her classes and they meet for one hour? Does that count for both classes? And did my daughter actually keep track of her "frequency of interaction?" (Answer: no.) In reality, everything that was important what included in the course descriptions and a more readable format. I also had to scratch my head about being a member of a homeschooler association. Is this relevant in some states? In California, joining the local homeschooling associations may give you access to an email list or maybe allows you to attend a conference, but it hardly seems worth asking about. What exactly does an admissions officer do with this information. Admissions officer: "Hm, I do like this homeschooled candidate, but I see she's not a member of a homeschooler association. Definite red flag." or is it the reverse: Admissions officer: "Hm, I do like this homeschooled candidate, but I see she's a member of a homeschooler association. Definite red flag."

I also love @Lori D.'s post. I'm no expert, but I thought the decimation of native peoples was caused primarily by exposure to diseases for which they had no immunity, though it didn't help that whites provided blankets infected with smallpox to native peoples. For a big picture approach to history, possibly answering the question: Why didn't native americans cross the Atlantic and subjugate white Europeans? I recommend reading Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. While it doesn't exonerate past atrocities, it does answer a lot of questions of why things are they way they are.

I'm also one who uses the definition of exponents to rewrite an expression as multiplication. As many times as it takes, sometimes months. I find that it's when the student wants to rush to the answer without thinking that mistakes are made.

We had a similar test taking situation with temperature. It was winter, but to save money the school doesn't turn on HVAC on the weekends, even for test takers. The students who attended the school had the heads up and brought warm drinks, but we had no idea. And this was on top of that, that they turned me away at the door, even though my dd wasn't in high school. (She was taking SAT for talent search.) And THEN as I was driving away, they nearly turned away her and a bunch of other underage students because they didn't have IDs. (IDs aren't required for younger test takers, but it took some convincing by these youngsters before they were allowed to test.) I had no idea what was happening, that these young kids needed to stand up for themselves and about the cold, until pick up. Needless to say we didn't return to that high school.

I put down 1 of 1. For outside enrollment, I requested transcripts sent directly to my daughter, electronically as a pdf. Then I appended them into one big pdf document and then uploaded that separately from my own transcript, which includes all her classes, including the enrollment ones. Later, after my daughter chose her college to enroll, I had official transcripts from CC sent directly to just that one college.

Thank you, @Mom2mthj and @Lisa in the UP of MI. I added those schools to the list.

I guess in the civilian world, when you retire, there isn't really any formal ceremony. Maybe people take you out to lunch or go out for drinks on your last day. Of course it would be different in the military, but I had never thought about it. I hope dh brings back pictures!

DH has been invited to a retirement ceremony for a friend who is a colonel is the US Air Force. He apparently taught flying (?), and the ceremony will be at Luke AFB in Arizona. Neither of us has had much exposure to the military. I won't be attending, but I'm curious what will likely occur. Just curious. Thanks! 🙂

We stopped using Microsoft products, and switched to Google's cloud services for spreadsheets, documents, and slides. For spreadsheets, we used data that was readily available and somewhat interesting. For example, when they returned home after trick or treating, I had them enter the numbers of each type of candy and taught them how to create a chart. Once you teach them how to calculate the sum of something (=sum(a1:a20) ), then point out the other myriad formulas and how you can see what the arguments are and in what order. After that, my lesson was, if you don't know how to do something, google it. Or use their internal help option to figure out how to use their formulas. They used google docs for writing their papers, stories, and other fun stuff. Google Slides came up when they needed to prepare a presentation for Technovation. In short, we mostly unschooled the basic software applications, introducing them as they were needed.

Mine was one page. When things started to look cluttered, I moved less critical info (stuff that isn't in Lori's list above) to the School Profile.

I was thinking of this thread the other day when DH was showing me the Facebook feed of a friend who earned his PhD in CS along with DH. It was unintentionally hilarious. After earning his PhD, he went on to found 2 companies. His third company creates synthetic diamonds. And apparently, when you are CEO of a synthetic diamond company, you spend a lot of time with supermodels and rappers. (Presumably because you hand carry your wares when you are loaning them to a Kardashian or similar.) So I suppose you can tell your student if he or she wants to hang with supermodels, rappers or Kardashians, then getting a PhD in CS is the way to do it.

This doesn't answer your question at all, but I also suggest she might want to TA or assist the co-op teachers in the younger student's classes. That way she can stay involved in something that has been so positive for her.

I agree with @HeighHo and @mathnerd to get any solid middle school textbook and study from that. Did the teacher provide a syllabus? You can also try to study the topics using websites and youtube videos.

Someone on a FB group attended a college admissions conference and posted this slide of an ideal school profile:

No need to be scared. You are in good shape if you are reading about this so early. In your position, I would use this counselor letter hack: Everyone once in a while a teacher or supervisor or any adultish person will send you an email or other correspondence about your student. Look out for things like "Hi, mlktwins: I just wanted to let you know I'm just so pleased with Beyonce. She's been very helpful on the class discussion boards..." or "Beyonce went the extra mile for me today at rehearsal. When another student tore her costume, she stayed late to repair it." or something like that. And ask your student to forward stuff like that to you. "Beyonce, thank you for taking care of that irate customer today. You maintained your professionalism and calmed him down, and he just called me to tell me how helpful you were." If you don't have stuff like that, then you can solicit them. I used some of these quotes as a sort of scaffold for my counselor letter. So I might write something like: Beyonce is also generous with younger students. On the robotics team, she created a orientation program for younger students so they could get up to speed on technical skills. Mr. Roboto, her coach, told me in a email her sophomore year, "Because of Beyonce's work with the freshman, we are more prepared than ever for the season. I wish I had more students like Beyonce." It's kind of a way to sneak in extra LoRs, and also back up your own assessment of your student.

That's a good question. Ask your student to invite you as his/her school counselor, using your usual email address. You can also ask the CA help desk; they are very responsive, usually providing a response within a few hours. Tell them you already have a CA account as a teacher, and now you are acting as a counselor for another student.

The Common App has separate fields for each of these documents.

My homeschool profile was very different from my counselor letter. I used actual school profiles from actual BM schools as a guide. We included our reasons for homeschooling, our grading scale, the demographics of our community, a list and description of our "eduational partners," that is, things like cc, PAH and SOHS, and graduation requirements. Our counselor letter was solely about our student. One thing that helped was to incorporate quotes from adults and teachers who had written to me or to her. I included those quotes in the letter, and then added additional anecdotes to support the statement. It's kind of a way to sneak in an extra LoR.

We aren't unschoolers, and we are also learning for mastery. My students were not doing independent learning at that age. Like 8, I am at their side, working along side them, no tests, no homework. We work together and learn together. I suppose you could say we were modeling appropriate learning behavior together, including studying the wrong answers to the problem sets. One activity that might have helped with note-taking was volumes 2 and 3 of BFSU for science. He recommends keeping a science notebook. We took that to mean that after a lesson was learned, I had my student sit at the table with me at the white board. I'd ask a question from the unit, and she'd answer. While she's describing some scientific principle, I scribed it on the whiteboard, correcting any misconceptions. Then she copied that into her notebook. I know some kids are able to study independently at a young age, but that wasn't the case in our family. I embraced the direct teaching that homeschooling enables in elementary and middle school and outsourced very little at that age.

Functions are really hard to wrap your head around. Even AoPS covers functions in 2 different textbooks: Intermediate Algebra and Precalculus. Even the discussion of shifting functions left/right, up/down, stretching/shrinking, and reflecting is presented twice in AoPS because it can be counter-intuitive. Is she stuck on the fact that y = f(x + k) is a leftward shift of the graph y = f(x)? She may need to work through some problems slowly to see why this is the case.