In addition to everything said above, I would also point out that in the arts fields, a degree of any kind doesn't guarantee a job. Employers want to see the student's portfolio, and often value that more than the degree -- because they can directly see the kind of work the candidate can perform. If your ds rushes through a graphic design AA while still young and less mature, will that be reflected in his portfolio?

Not to get too WTM-ey here, but do you think those who pick the mascot "Trojan" for their teams remember that the Trojans lost their famous war, and had their city burned to the ground? And, it seems like many mascots are from the losing side, or the side that was terrifying for a while, but eventually lost: Trojans, Indians, Chiefs, Vikings, Warriors, Pirates, etc.

To help us out, I think you need to put a finer point on what kind of "part time income" you hope to get. However, I would point out that a part time photography *business* is primarily a business. Even if you had the best photography skills in the world, growing the business to be a part-time job where you have work every week would take more than six months. I would advise that for every hour of learning how to make better images, you spend an hour learning how to operate a small business. Learning market research, pricing, insurance, risk management, competition, etc. etc., is as important, if not more important than learning about lighting, lenses and all the technical stuff.

But you can't have it both ways, the math just doesn't work out. If, as you point out, you zero-out Walmart's CEO's salary from $20 million / year to $0, and distribute it evenly to the 1.5 million workers, that's less than $20 / person / year. But, by the same math, if the same CEO donates his entire salary to some charity that would benefit those same workers, each would also only get $20 / year, which clearly isn't going to be life-changing for them.

'In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.'

While that may be true in the long run, it may not be true in the short run, or for individuals, especially as the rate of technological change is accelerating. As a society, we need to make sure to take care of those left behind, or else suffer the consequences. At some point in the future, maybe not in my lifetime, long-haul truck drivers will be replaced by self-driving trucks. When this happens, 3 million truck drivers will need to look for new employment. The standard government response to this is "retraining", which I think is incredibly naive. It will be very hard to retrain the majority of these truck drivers into careers with similar pay and similar skill sets. The fact that there will be some new jobs available in biotech won't matter for the majority of these ex-drivers.

I hear people say things like this a lot, but it strikes me as an innumerate, 1950s world-view which has little in common with today's reality. If you believe that employees should be able to start at a minimum wage job, and work their way up to a middle-class job that they hold on to for the majority of their careers, the math just doesn't work out. This requires that the majority of jobs at any company an employee would be these good middle class jobs that someone can work their way into. Take a McDonalds franchise, as we've been talking about. Ignoring the owner, who must be wealthy to even buy in, each store has basically one title(Store Manager) that is at least close to middle class, and there are usually only 3 or 4 store managers per store. These managers may have 100s of hourly employees below them who are no where near middle class. So, the math just doesn't work out -- no matter how hard you work at McDonalds, only a small percentage of people can be promoted into what is then maybe a $40k/year job. Or, look at it the other way -- the coveted jobs people want to today are at places like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, where I'm sure the majority of jobs are the good, middle class ones. I *guarantee* you that a vanishingly small percentage of Apple iphone developers started at Apple by sweeping the floors, and working their way up. I'm sure there are exceptions out there, but these exceptions are rare and serve to prove the rule. By and large, for the good jobs out there, employers want pre-trained, college-educated employees. Today's work world is all about the short-term, and very few employers are willing to invest years in training employees.

I feel like the author is missing the forest for the trees. Isn't the root cause here the complete opaqueness in the admissions process, leading to a shotgun approach from the students, and yield anxiety from the administrators? Students and their families seem to have no idea which colleges they can get accepted to, and the Common App has made it very easy to apply to a lot of colleges. It isn't unheard of for students to apply to 20+ colleges, and it appears that there are some public high schools, which, for PR reasons, encourage their students to apply to every Ivy League school, as a matter of course. Because students are applying to so many more colleges than in previous generations, I bet they are getting accepted into many more, even though they can only enroll in one, causing enormous headaches for admissions offices to fill their classes, and working their waitlists, which results in more stress for the students.

Actually, this is why we love ours -- yes, your files are (usually) stored entirely in the cloud, and aren't available if wifi isn't working, but the upside is huge: If a chromebook every breaks (or is lost), you can simply log into any other chromebook and continue working right where you left off. No backing up, no restoring, no re-loading software. It is great!

I don't think there's any wrong answers to these kinds of questions, but it is important that everyone is on the same page, and you are super clear up front about what your expectations are, and the consequences of not meeting expectations. And speaking of being on the same page, it might be helpful for you to recommend some particular edition of the books for those who don't already own a copy -- just so if someone needs to call out a particular page in class, it is easier for everyone to find.

You've got a lot of good ideas here, but I'd reinforce LoriD's classroom management questions. The lively, Socratic discussions are always the dream, but some co-ops just don't work out that way. How long have you been in this co-op? How well do you know the students, and their families? What will you do if a student hasn't done the reading in any particular week? What if a student consistently doesn't seem to do the readings? Are you going to assign grades? What if the parents complain about the grades or other aspects of the class? How will you handle absences? If there's a wide variety of ages or abilities in the classroom, how will you handle that?

The correct answer is to ask the instruction which style guide they are using, and to follow that. In classical studies, it is generally preferred to use your own translation. Here is a link to the American Philological Society's guide on this issue: https://classicalstudies.org/sites/default/files/documents/TAPA_Style_Sheet.pdf I've also see it done with a footnote after the first translation saying something like "all translations in this work are the author's"

When asked if a Math class would fill up and close, a professor responded: Usually, I teach this class in a 300 seat lecture hall, but if that were to fill up, there's a 600 seat room in the neighboring building. And if more students than that sign up, well, I hear they don't use the football stadium much on weekdays...

Seconding (or thirding?) Lingua Latin. I especially like the follow on book, Roma Aeterna, which has simplified retellings of parts of the Aeneid, ab urbe condita, etc. One thing that's a bit hard to do at first, but is very useful, is to try not to translate LL into English, but rather, just read it in Latin without translating, but understanding the Latin as Latin. Oh, and I cannot more strongly recommend against using Rosetta Stone Latin.

Ain't that the truth! And for a real head-scratcher, how about this fact -- there is some scientific research to show a correlation between lower basal metabolic rates and increased longevity.

I wonder what the difference in grade levels of the average parents in these districts is.

That is what the article said. What is kind of surprising to me, and the article only mentioned this in passing, was that when the dieters were at their peak weight, their metabolism was merely "normal". I would think that carrying around a hundred extra pounds or more would greatly increase your metabolism. So, the problem isn't that their metabolism decreased, so much as it went from "normal" at heavy weight to "below normal" after their weight loss.

It would be interesting to know how much of their weight loss was muscle vs fat. But reading the article, these folks were working out an insane amount of time -- working out became their full-time job -- from the NYT article: His routine went like this: Wake up at 5 a.m. and run on a treadmill for 45 minutes. Have breakfast — typically one egg and two egg whites, half a grapefruit and a piece of sprouted grain toast. Run on the treadmill for another 45 minutes. Rest for 40 minutes; bike ride nine miles to a gym. Work out for two and a half hours. Shower, ride home, eat lunch — typically a grilled skinless chicken breast, a cup of broccoli and 10 spears of asparagus. Rest for an hour. Drive to the gym for another round of exercise.

I know that SWB, and others wiser than me, advocate writing in books. But if I have a book filled with my marginalia, how am I supposed to find that one quote I'm looking for? Not that I'm organized enough to take notes anywhere else.

I'm lucky enough to live in an area where we can see live Shakespeare pretty much every year. I'm amazed at how much more I get out of the plays now than when I was in my teens or even my twenties, and my favorites have changed greatly over the course of my life, especially as I look at them through the eyes of a parent, not as a child.

Sounds like the teacher is creating a paper trail, so she can prove academic misconduct for the appropriate parties -- in these cases, it often doesn't matter so much what she knows, as what she can prove. My only advise for your dd is to retain a paper trail of her own -- keep the unanswered group texts, screenshots or other evidence of when work was (or wasn't) done, etc.

Ferrous Bueller

An enormous difference between a homeschooling mom and a professor is the amount of time devoted to grading and assessment. I have no idea how many classes this professor is teaching, or how many students total she has. It seems reasonable to guess that she has at the very least 30 students whose papers she needs to return in short order, possibly a lot more. Given that, a good guess is that she spends just 10 minutes grading each one, and writes comments during her first and only reading. You keep saying that the professor "didn't read the paper", or "didn't read the paper well", despite writing all kinds of comments on the paper The golden rule in writing anything is to know the audience. And in this case, the audience probably gives the paper one quick read through, with the detritus of every previous essay still lurking in her head. So, there is little place for subtlety here.

IMHO, if you are complaining that the professor is marking off for specific grammatical errors, you can't also complain that the professor didn't read the paper.

I'm sure you know this, but even if a student is allowed and willing to skip a college class in lieu of an AP class, the sequencing of classes in college may prevent an early graduation. For example, even if a student tests out of first semester calculus, second semester calc may only be offered in the spring semester. Maybe the student can use these slots to take extra electives, or to take fewer classes and focus more on them, but a student may very well enter college with "sophomore standing", and still require 4+ years to graduate.