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NittanyJen

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Everything posted by NittanyJen

  1. Yes, you can get formal accommodations in college. You probably don’t need a 504 to get testing accommodations as a homeschooler, but under the new rules, it won’t hurt. Many kids get testing accommodations without one. The accommodations in the 504 for high school do not necessarily follow him to college, because: 1) college responsibilities to students are different (in college, the keyword is allowing the student to access the curriculum, not making anything equal). 2) student needs are very different between high school and college. They can even vary from one course to the next. One major myth you may run into, so I’ll dispel it now: it’s easier to get into college with a 504 than an IEP. This is completely false. Admissions should have zero knowledge of either status, unless the student tells them. The College Board does not disclose the use of accommodations to colleges, either.
  2. Indeed. I was not speaking hypothetically. However, I am not inclined to give details, for the sake of the individual’s privacy— these boards are not private. There is also a very helpful Facebook group run by Elizabeth Hamblett that has a wealth of info provided by college disability office professionals: https://www.facebook.com/groups/337012037088722/?ref=share
  3. There is an online portal, but it’s not linked to the main College Board account. Sadly I no longer recall the url.
  4. It is not necessary to have an IEP or a 504 to get accommodations through the College Board. You should expect to need current testing from a qualified individual to document the need for the accommodations, and it may help to keep a record of how the student is currently using similar accommodations in the school setting already. (I say may, because rules change over time). How do you document that in a homeschool where things are flexible and you don't normally give tests? Note how much time it takes for task completion, and whether that is a longer time than you would have expected from unaffected peers. Note whether normal, ambient noise is unduly distracting or distressing, and how it is accommodated (quiet work space, headphones, etc). Does the student type as a result of dysgraphia? Use large-type or audio books due to a vision disability? Require non-verbal directions due to a hearing disability? Even in a one-on-one nontraditional setting, you can document key areas where you are, in fact, providing accommodations (even if for you and your child, what you are doing is just normal). Do plan ahead. Find out how recent any testing must be in order to satisfy the CB, and find out how long the waiting list is in order to get testing arranged, completed, and a report issued; the timeframe can be anywhere from weeks to months to a year or more, and the College Board often requests weeks to a few months early notice prior to registering for an exam. It sounds daunting, but other than the financial barrier for many families for testing, it is a pretty straightforward process when taken one step at a time. Do try to find out if there is any way to get insurance to pay for testing, if the school won't cooperate or only provides minimal testing (sometimes school based testing is not very detailed-- but do start there, as it is the most economical method). Another thing to consider is that many (NOT ALL) colleges wish to see documentation that was completed within the past three years, making late summer to fall following the freshman year of high school an ideal time to get testing accomplished if you only want to go through it once and have it count for both testing and college accommodations (you can always start the process of requesting an appointment earlier if going the privatei route, and specify that is when testing would be best for you).
  5. My son took the third administration of the Stats exam in June, and his score just appeared. They are appearing earlier than promised!
  6. By “Syllabus number” do you mean a class join code? That would be a join code for the class for the College Board account that will let them access practice problems, sample grading rubrics for free response questions, and videos from the College Board. The instructor of the course manages the online “classroom” on the College Board site and assigns or unlocks problem sets and videos as they see fit. If your online class does not have a local testing site, it will still be up to you to contact local schools and ask if they can take the exam there. The school will then issue you an “exam only join code” which will be connected to the classroom code (the online class teacher will be able to see that the student has registered successfully to take the exam). So your kiddo will ultimately use two join codes: first, the class join code for access to the free prep materials (which are truly awesome) on the College Board site, using the class join code provided by his online instructor, and second, the exam only join code provided by the school where they will actually sit to take the test. I hope that helps!
  7. My kids are split between using online calendar apps and paper planners. Cozi is nice because you can color-code different streams of schedules, and it’s simple to use; it’s not a fancy student planner; it’s just a calendar app. In early high school, I’d help them get it set up by printing their syllabi, highlighting the important bits, and helping them transfer that information to their planners (because they would eventually lose the syllabus lol). That key info had to include instructor name and contact info and office hours, not just assignments. By the end of high school, they had to be responsible for doing that themselves, and for following up by keeping track of assignments themselves. This means I had to be willing to let them take a zero now and then when they goofed up— better in high school than later in college or in the workplace. In reality, that occasional failure for bright but asynchronous kids who were not used to “failing” anything was good for them— they learned they HAD to keep track; they learned the world would not end if they were not perfect; they learned how to bounce back from a problem, and they learned how to self-advocate and how to communicate with their instructors if they had a problem, because I wasn’t doing it for them. Whether they are college-bound or employment-bound after high school, you do want to give them a couple of years worth of experience managing their schedules before they have to do it on their own, so you can help talk them through it the first few times they screw it up; because it almost certainly will happen.
  8. Colleges actually got the scores up to a week before the kids did, so maybe that helped a little. Some kids found out about this because their scores showed up in their college portals, ahead of the official score release by the College Board.
  9. I’m sorry you had to deal with that. It’s so frustrating. We used to hear similar comments, but now that my oldest is halfway through college and my youngest is starting his senior year of (homeschool) high school, it has died down. Hang in there!
  10. Byline teaches journalistic writing, which has a specific set of skills, but many of them generalize well to academic writing— sorting out opinion from facts, evaluating and citing sources, organizing information logically, paragraph structure and flow from one paragraph to the next, word choice, forming a thesis, writing conclusions, and how to focus on a more specific thesis from a more general topic. The parent manual provides some tips on how to guide the grading to be helpful and informative to the student.
  11. We didn’t. We figured they should be admitted based on who they really are, if we want them to get a good fit of institution. My oldest did karate, and for a few months, worked a part-time job pushing shopping carts at a local grocery store. In his senior year (after applications had been submitted) he worked on an internship. He wasn’t president of anything, he didn’t cure homelessness, he didn’t win anything (though he did earn a black belt). And he got into colleges, based on his academics. Younger is following a similar path. He did chess club at the local library, and he takes swimming lessons, but doesn’t swim competitively. He keeps trying to volunteer at the library, but they keep saying they don’t need volunteers. He took a reading club at WTM this summer, and we’ll list that as an activity rather than a class. We may look again at volunteering down at the Food Bank, which we have done before (and they always need hands) but by this fall, the applications will already by out, so it won’t be for college benefit. He’ll just have to apply based on academics, and go somewhere where that’s what they care about. Follow what they are interested in, and don’t try to force it to impress colleges. Colleges see hundreds of applications from kids who “did it all,” so that they don’t actually stand out; I think they’d rather hear from kids who can explain why the one or two activities they did do, meant something to them. Finding stuff— see what’s going on at the library; there are crazy kinds of programs at ours. Do what your kid actually wants to do, and remember it doesn’t need to sound impressive. Cool if they wind up being an officer or something, but it’s not necessary. Find out if there is some local social issue your kid cares about and wants to help with, like tutoring (our local schools had a brief opportunity for kids to mentor visually-impaired students as they learned to read Braille) or packing food at the Food Bank, or helping a mom with twins, or and older family who needs help with yard work. Delivering food with you through Meals on Wheels is COVID-safe, and can be very meaningful to the recipients.
  12. I read recommended to get a vaccination as soon as possible; required to get one before returning to campus. They are likely requiring a vaccination even if a person has had COVID. It has already been well observed that the vaccines are conferring longer lasting immunity than the infection, counter-intuitive as that may be. There have been many cases where individuals have contracted COVID more than once. It is not yet known just how long the vaccine-induced immunity will last; this and emerging variants are why boosters are in the works.
  13. We read a lot of lit to support history; we didn’t analyze book to death to do literary analysis, though we did talk about the books he was reading (he did Build Your Library, and they also furnish discussion prompts, which is helpful when I don’t have time to read everything he’s reading). He is, as a rising senior, holding his own in a reading discussion club this summer in TWM, so it doesn’t seem to have hurt him any. And he did the occasional one-off book discussion class from Outschool when something interesting and short-term popped up. Context: He plans to major in English in college. We really read a LOT of literature (and poetry, and plays) to support history. They do also read in the rhetoric courses, and of course, if you do three years of rhetoric followed by a year of AP English, there will be a lot of reading in AP English, whether you do literature or comp. But our history reading provided buckets of literature, so there was no need for a separate lit course.
  14. You are already doing another WTM class. Have you looked to see if there is a rhetoric class available at the WTM academy? Their rhetoric I—III series is excellent. My oldest did that series followed by AP English, and has had a pretty easy time writing in college. My youngest did Clearwater Press’ “Byline” at home, and will finish the rhetoric series at TWTM Academy this year with Rhetoric III (I gave him his choice between rhetoric III and AP Comp, and he chose rhetoric III, because he is really enjoying the classes). I never hesitate to recommend them.
  15. I only started it for my oldest because one of his colleges (maybe Lehigh?) wanted it. I didn’t set out to volunteer it.
  16. At least two colleges gave us hints that they read them, when they interviewed him. I suspect others might not. As to whether everyone gets the course description— in the Common App, I seem to recall (it’s been a couple of years) there is one place to upload your transcript. I figured I had to create a transcript that met the most requirements imposed by each college he applied to, so that it would meet all of their requirements; this means the course descriptions were part of the transcript. I did make it easier on the colleges that were not interested, by making the first page the “Cover” for the transcript (school name, graduation date, student name, date of birth, school address & phone, abbreviation legend, etc), and page two was a single-page summary transcript that listed the courses, credits, grades, and a page number where they could find a course description of each course. That way if someone just wanted to see the reading list for English, or whether we covered Evolution in biology or what the heck the “History of Science” was, they could find it quickly. My thought process was to make it clean, complete, and easy to find what they might be looking for. Then everyone got the same thing (thank you Common App) and it was up to them to sort out what they wanted.
  17. Schools can fine-tune the ALEKS scoring system to fit their course prerequisites. It sounds as if your daughter maybe didn’t perform her best on the first round, using that “I don’t know” more than she needed to, because of the confidence issue. Because ALEKS is adaptive, it asks harder questions as you get things right, and backs off when you get things wrong, so it is very unlikely to get an out of whack high score just by random guessing over the course of the entire test. My guess is that after the practice with ALEKS (which is a nice review system) her confidence perked up quite a bit and she not only remembered a few things, but she answered significantly more of the questions, moving up levels instead of backwards, which would increase her score by quite a bit. If she scored enough to get into the pre-calc course by the skin of her teeth, she might consider backing off a level. If she has done fine through algebra II and she scored comfortably in the range to place into the course, she should probably feel comfortable taking precalc. She can always email the undergrad math advisor and ask if they have time to meet with her by zoom for questions if she is still uncertain; it is possible there will be time to do this during student orientation as well— though making an appointment ahead of time is still a good idea. But let it be her call, particularly if you are the one with math anxiety. In my experience, students are not usually “forced” into a class, but the academic advisor who helps with freshman course selection uses the placement exam as more of a maximum placement — though this is not necessarily a universal truth, I would be more surprised at it not working this way. In sum, hold off. The test and her sibling are indicating she can handle this. Let her talk to her academic advisor during orientation, or whenever they do freshman scheduling. If everyone is feeling comfortable that this is the correct math placement for her, don’t be the person telling her she isn’t capable. If it’s really the wrong course, the math department wherever she is going is probably pretty accustomed to helping students migrate to different level courses in the first couple of weeks of drop/add, and she can handle it herself at that point— there are usually many sections of those early level courses, and spots open up in the first couple of weeks of class, oftentimes. it’s one of those college independence things to get through for both of you 😉 It’s not easy, but you’ll be enormously proud of her when she navigates it!
  18. Some Assembly Required, by Neil Shubin. This is a fantastic book on evolution that goes well beyond the basics, while still being very readable by the student or non-expert. The Data Detective, by Tim Harford. This book is a layperson’s guide to understanding statistics better, without needing math. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez. This book is, on the surface, about the hunt for the cause of the extinction of the main group of large dinosaurs. More, though, it is really a neat insight into how science works at its ideal, including several layers of tensions as scientists try out ideas while figuring out a puzzle, including having to reject a beloved hypothesis, peer review, chasing a few blind alleys, collaboration, no more. Last Days of Night, by Graham Moore. This novel is a fictionalized account (based on real events though) of the race between Edison and Westinghouse to bring electrified lightbulbs to US homes. Notables including Nikola Tesla are encountered through the protagonist as Edison and Westinghouse wage their discovery and patent wars. The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone. I’m up and down on this one. On one level, it was a neat book because it shed light on a female who was accomplished in a field where women were not welcome; on the other hand, the book can drag a little in places. In balance it was worth reading.
  19. It’s still there! I have plenty of spots left! AP Statistics with Jennette Driscoll
  20. It’s a good list to keep bubbling to the surface! But there are still a lot of colleges out there that aren’t extending Test optional to homeschoolers, and refusing the SAT isn’t a hill we are ready to die on. He could get in to the local state U on his current record and freshman SAT scores— they were good enough already, and he has taken several courses there plus a couple of AP’s. But I think he is leaning toward also trying to get into a few private colleges to see if they will throw him enough merit money to make it worth his while. He has a couple on his list he’d actually really be serious about if they will show they are serious about him.
  21. We are working on this now, updating the transcript, finessing the list of colleges to potentially visit this summer, either online or in person. He was supposed to be FINISHED with all testing over a year ago, but, thanks ‘Rona 😛 So his only SAT’s are from before his freshman year. I’m thinking of signing him up for a round of SAT’s in the August or September testing. We always try to get most of the application stuff over with before we start the senior school year, and that testing will clearly make that goal a bit impossible, but oh well, sometimes you just have to roll. I figured everyone’s in the same boat, even if the details may differ a little, so no sense complaining. btw, if anybody has any last-minute additions we should be looking at for a good warm-location east-coast school with a good English department, feel free to inbox me. I am both looking forward to this and dreading it— I feel like this empty nest deal is hurtling toward us at light speed.
  22. I am taking over Carole Matheny’s AP Stats class next year— although I have my own take on things, she did actually gift me her wealth of materials, class structure, and I spent the past year shadowing her class while my son took the class with her, so I could watch her teaching in action and interact some with the class. Several of her top students have agreed to TA for me next year as well. I am moving the class to a new environment (new to that class; not new to me); I will be teaching over both Zoom and Canvas, both of which I have used before for other classes. If you have any questions about the class, please feel free to ask me directly. Best wishes in discovering the option that will suit your and your kiddo best. I of course would love for it to be me, but I honor the fact that families have many factors that they need to weigh when making choices and that there is no one choice that is the best for every family. Good luck with AP Statistics, no matter which way you choose!
  23. We list electives. A) My kids earned the credits, so they go on the transcript B) I think it paints a fuller picture of their academic lives beyond the basics. Art, photography, music, health, PE are all important parts of the overall plan. C) The scientist in me says a transcript is suppose to be a complete and accurate record, not cherry-picked data.
  24. “…while they accept course descriptions, they ask that they not exceed five pages…” BWAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, Charlie. But at a solid paragraph per course, plus massive booklist for every class, I would have to write that in a 2-point font to squish that onto 5 pages. The one-page summary chart yes, we do do, for the TL;DR admissions folks who only want to read what they took and how they did. But no, we are not going to create a DIFFERENT annotated transcript to meet the requirements of each college. The Common App only wants you to upload ONE transcript that everybody gets. We’re not applying to Hillsdale, but that 5 page thing struck me as pretty hilarious. I don’t think the book list alone would fit on 5 pages, even in a double-column. Could I write a one-page-per-major-area course description? Sure. But that’s not what OTHER colleges ask for. I remember one college even wanted number of “hours spent per subject, who taught it and their qualifications, materials covered, how the course was evaluated, what kind of work was turned in, and all books with ISBN numbers” listed, for each course. So . . . It’s either write up a separate transcript for every college, or write up the most detailed transcript needed for the pickiest college, and everybody gets that one. Sometimes you have to wonder who writes these things.
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