This is actually a good lesson in sunk costs, AKA don't throw good money after bad.

Just to be clear, What age will she be her senior year? I'm not certain, but a September birthday may not even be the cut off in some states. She can take a gap year simply to catch up from medical issues. If you are applying to competitive colleges with holistic admission (which I don't recommend for med school), then you can explain this honestly as having to catch up due to medical issues. If you are applying to a state school that's has a by-the-numbers admissions criteria (recommended for a committed med school applicant), then you don't even need to worry about taking an extra year. Also, you can also take another gap year after college (I did this) and take any extra premed classes at that time. And then you can apply. (It worked for me.)

How would you like it if I were deciding whether you had to spend the next year with annoying people? If you were deciding between 2 jobs, would you pick the one with the annoying coworkers? Or would that be "running away?" Life is too short. I agree with your son. The students at CC want to be there, or else they would not have made the effort to register and pay tuition and show up for class.

The reasons you describe above are the reasons I never sent my kids to regular school in the first place. If you're going to all the effort to homeschool, why sabotage yourself? My dd would completely agree with the reasons in paragraph 2. She loves her online classes, and saves in person interactions for purely social events.

It sounds like you are asking for fun electives? Do you have a dog? You might be interested in this dog behavior class. Or just browse around coursera or other mooc's and see what grabs him.

I love all of this. Good for you and your student!

I have had a few kids I tutor with BA, and I enjoy reading the characters out loud for them, even the older girls who read chapter books easily. This also allows me to force a stop at those stop signs where students are to attempt the introductory problems first before continuing to see how Ms. Q solves them. Sometimes if it isn't clear I'll include, "Lizzie says..." or point to whichever head of the two-headed beast is speaking. With my own children, I read out loud from the AoPS textbooks, from pre-algebra on, because it's easier to understand that way.

I just want to ask if you are certain this family is high income. FP is not a high paying specialty, and they could be paying back some serious med school loans. She may have been reticent about revealing personal financial info.

My dd did online essay writing with Chase Hill School. She's taking the AP Lang & Comp class at PAH and doing very well. She's also signed up for AP Lit at PAH next year.

Don't take both of them. Just take AP CS A, the Java-based OOP programming class. I'm not including credits from before high school on my high school transcript GPA. I am recording the test scores and the fact that the class was taken, but not using it for high school credit. But I'm not 100% sold on this idea.

Sometimes it's helpful to state what you see in the problem that will trigger an approach at the solution. I remember Richard Rusczyk said in a video, almost as an aside, "The bisected angle here makes us think of the angle bisector theorem..." Now whenever I see a bisected angle I try using that theorem, just to see where it gets me. I try to articulate out loud those little clues. My favorite is whenever you see right triangles inside of one another, check to make sure they aren't sharing an angle and are similar. Or, if you are looking for integer solutions and you have the product of 2 variables, consider Simon's Favorite Factoring Trick. Or, whenever I see a line tangent to a circle, I draw a radius to the point of tangency because it will form a right angle. It's like the metaphor of assembling your toolbox, and then deciding which tool to use in what situation. "Whenever I see a nail sticking out, I reach for my hammer."

You can also take the approach of learning as you go. If your ds is producing word docs, then you can introduce creating files and keeping them organized. Don't forget to teach them that you can google just about any computer (or life!) question they have. Like I recently googled "What is a router and modem and how does it work?" I learned a lot.

My dd took the PSAT one year early for practice, in 10th grade. Then she took it for reals in 11th.

While it's nice for students to be able to think for days about how to solve a problem, I don't think it's appropriate for every student. I think it's more efficient just to show them how if they give up, with a little Socratic questioning along the way. Do this before frustration sets in. I do like how you model James Tanton's approach to solving a problem: "Read the question, have an emotional reaction to it, take a deep breath, and reread the question. Have another emotional reaction." My emotional reaction usually consists of "Oh my gosh. I have NO IDEA how to solve this. I don't even know what this means. Okay, let's give this a try <or> Let's try to draw a picture <or> Let's reread the problem and try to figure this out." I wouldn't give them the "vitamins are good for you" lecture; I think they will only feel worse about themselves, IMO. Just assign the problems and if they can't solve it, don't make a big deal. Show them how it's done, and eventually they'll get the hang of it. I have a couple of freshman girls with no experience in competition math, so we started with the AMC 8. I assign one exam a week for homework. They can spend as much time as they like on the problems, whether it's 5 minutes and give up or days. (I think it's closer to the former.) Then we meet once a week, and I show them how to solve the problems they didn't get on their own. No lectures about the "value of difficulty" just, "Here's how we solve it" with a bit of Socrates thrown in. They've quickly gotten the hang of it, and I've leveled them up to AMC 10's now.

It was fun and tiring! I was impressed with how the other judges took their job seriously, and with well considered views. The kids were great, and I spent most of my time brainstorming with them how they can add to their experiments when they return next year.

This summer you could also assign an old AMC 8, maybe once a week. That way he can be on his toes and see if he has the recall for random math tools. It will also give him an intro to algebra and geometry.

MOEMS available from Amazon or the moems.org website.

Thanks, Gil!

MOEMS has a lot of problems like that. Also I just saw one like this on the AMC 8, but it involved a zoo: birds with 2 legs and 1 head, and mammals with 4 legs and 1 head.

Make sure he understand what pi actually is: the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It's cool, because no matter which circle you choose, the circle around a tomato sauce can, the circle of a hula hoop, or anything in between, if you measure around its diameter circumference it will be roughly 3 times the length of it's diameter. Try it. (That's your pi day activity right there.) I was carpooling one of my dd's friends and she was proudly reciting the digits of pi. But when I asked, she couldn't tell me what pi was. So much for regular school.

My favorite books were the Caesar's English series. The vocabulary books are really just lovely and make learning words and stems so much fun. I also liked Grammar Island and Grammar Town. I don't think your students need to be gifted in language arts to enjoy these books.

Then this is not only his loss, but a loss for our country.

Sounds like I've been overthinking this. I'll attend the judge training and do my best to be supportive and encouraging during my interviews.

In a couple of days I'll be judging middle school projects for a local county science fair. For the first time. They have posted summaries of each project for me to read in advance. Before judging I will also receive some training, and my assessments will be diluted by those of other more experienced judges. Still, I'd like to get a head start so I can do a good job. Any tips? What level of quality should I expect from students in middle school? Should they be expected to cite peer-reviewed sources? I'm finding that few of them have done any sort of literature search (not that they'd have access to an academic library). As I read through the project summaries, most of them seem to be at grade level. And a few seem to be the work of either very precocious students...or they received a bit of ...help. I don't want to do a disservice to those students who are gifted in science research and can throw around terms like "Drosophila Startle-induced Response Assay" with aplomb. Or is this just rewarding students who have highly educated and involved parents? And is there anything wrong with that? Thank you for helping me sort this all out in my mind. I want to be a fair judge.

I plan to include APs, AMCs, and SAT subject tests.