As far as free trips from frequent flier miles go, don't all domestic flights cost the same?

OK, you can't just drop a snippet like that on the WTM boards without providing a reference to such a list. Inquiring minds want to know! (And incorporate into curriculum!) As for the OP, if you tell us what you DO like to do, I bet you'll get a lot of good recommendations in this thread for a perfect-for-you vacation, not just a merely OK one. Also, rough idea of budget, when you want to go, and how long would be helpful.

Mom always had us soak our swim suits in clean cold tap water when we got home from the pool, and the let them air dry. So, this is what I do, and seems to help.

"Learn to Read Greek", by Keller and Russell is a serious, complete, college-level text, with lots of examples. Not nearly as fun as Athenaze, but it is so complete, I think it may be easier for people without access to a Greek scholar. You can download the first few chapters from the book's webpage at: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300167719to get a feel for it.

Athenaze is one of the few Greek textbooks, and it uses the reading method ("whole to parts"), but the problem with the reading method it espouses is that you really need an expert at hand to help you get unstuck. More importantly, I've found it easy with these reading methods to kind of understand something by context, and gloss over the actual grammatical lesson being taught, and not actually learn something important.

Greek is much, much harder than Latin. The alphabet is only about 1% of why it is harder, though. A little-known fact about Latin is that it has a relatively small vocabulary, and so much of the grind of learning a language is memorizing vocabulary, and there is just a lot more of it in Greek than in Latin. Moreover, my experience is that there isn't a lot of nuance in translating most Latin words -- their English meanings are straightforward. Greek words, though have a lot more color and specificity to their definitions, and thus are harder to learn and really understand, which is why Greek was the language of philosophy. The Greek grammar is much more complex than Latin, especially non-Koine greek dialects, with the aorist tenses and duals and particles and all kinds of constructions that Latin (or English) doesn't have. However, what really makes Greek so hard to learn, especially before college, is a lack of good textbooks. There is now an embarrassment of good high-school level Latin texts you can use, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a single good high school level Greek textbook that I could honestly recommend.

It wasn't too hard to google and find the name of the college and the situation, and I think that the details in this case matter. The email was sent out to all 300-some residents of a dorm by the dorm's director, under his name. He is a 26 year-old, certainly a "digital native", an employee of the college, not a tenured faculty member. He was formally reprimanded by his boss, who chose not to fire the director, though firing seems like it was certainly an option, and not prevented by tenure or other work rules. As a result, the director sent an apology email, and acknowledged the original was a bad idea. What would bother me is that this email was sent by a person the dorm residents see every day, not a faceless bureaucrat. I'm guessing the dorm director doesn't live in the dorm, but I'm sure he's there every day. Moreover, it was sent by a person with a certain amount of control over the lives of the residents -- who arbitrates messy roomate problems, and the like. Yes, college is a time to be challenged, but maybe not by the person who holds a master key to your room.

Thanks for the update! Sounds like an interesting program. After thinking about this for a while, i wonder if the leaders were actually surprised by the students' fatigue, or if they expected the fatigue, and feigned surprise as part of an effort to set expectations for future challenges and be a counter-balance to the "everyone gets a trophy" culture.

So, a 13.5 mile hike in the mountains, is what, about 7 hours, not counting stops? And I wouldn't necessarily say that sneakers without ankle support are appropriate footwear for mountain hiking. So, I'd say almost all of the students would be "feeling it" the next day, and a good percentage would be unable to keep up before the end of the hike.

On a related note, I just saw this research from BYU, where a large study of students shows that open source textbooks seems to be as effective, if not more so, than traditional ones. I bet that in the near future, many colleges will switch to open source textbooks, especially for introductory classes, where there is a pretty good consensus about what material should be taught when.

I'd object to this project. Maybe not out loud or to the teacher. But not for any religious reasons. What's the pedagogical purpose of making a diarama? This is high school Spanish, not grammar school. Serious students should be memorizing vocab, practicing pronunciation, and learning grammar rules and how to apply them. Perhaps one might think that learning about Latin American culture is an important part of Spanish class, and perhaps it is. But, I've learned more about what the Day of the Dead means in this short forum posting than I would be any art project.

The mods have said that they can easily delete all the posts from any one "person", and it seems the bulk of the most recent damage is all from the same "person", so at least it shouldn't take too much time to clean up. And, there's not need for us to individually report each spam. Still. Ugh.

Illegal seems a bit extreme. A well-known Yale Law professor assigns his own textbook, and refunds to his students the royalties on the book, as he feels that's the ethical way to resolve a conflict of interest. (link). For a $150 case law book, this comes to about $10 a book, so it is hard to get rich this way, especially if you consider the thousands of hours that go into a writing book.

Do you think this is just because the Open Source textbooks are new, and in some years, after many eyes have looked them over, they will be OK? Or is there something fundamental about textbooks that is different than, say, wikipedia. Also, what about problem sets? Even if an Open Source community could build a good, say, introductory Physics text, wouldn't someone need to come up with new problem sets periodically, otherwise, the answers would be all over the internet. What percentage of a science text is writing and testing the problem sets?

Assuming you require four years of English, and you want to show progressively more difficult classes each year, what would English classes would follow AP English Lit if it were taken in 9th grade? Not all AP classes are equal difficulty. Generally, math/science and foreign language are considered the most difficult, and the social sciences the easiest. For earning points in the UK admissions systems, some AP exams are worth half that of others, to give you a objective view of their difficulty.

If you want to count the high school foreign language as a full credit, I would want to have at least an hour a day of work, including direct instruction, memorization, and translation exercises. If you don't want to go "faster" through your text (and I'm not that familiar with Latin Alive), I'd recommend adding in a reader to supplement, like Lingua Latina, or one of the old, public-domain latin readers you can download for free. The only downside is that Lingua Latina (or any given reader, really) isn't going to be keyed to your text, and may introduce grammatical concepts and forms that the text hasn't taught yet. In particular, LL starts the passive voice and deponents much earlier than most texts. (Personally, I like this, as most real Latin text are filled with deponent verbs). Also, I would consider what your goals are. From her NLE scores, it sound like she's covered most of a typical Latin I sequence in the last four(?) years. However, Latin 2 is harder than 1, and Latin 3 is generally much harder than 2, for that is when you leap to mostly translation of real Latin, which can be a difficult change for many students. Starting with a reader early can help smooth this Latin 3 transition. If your goal is to get to Latin 4 or AP Latin in the next three or four years, she'll need to pick up the pace quite a bit from GSWL and LNST, in order to more closely cover one year of HS Latin material in one year of schooling. Good luck! A remember -- even if she doesn't study Latin in college or ever again, students rarely regret learning the language.

Science Fiction is generally more about ideas than about character development, so it often works better in short story form than novel form. And, especially as he's new to reading, so may not know what authors he likes, I'd recommend one of the "Year's Best Science Fiction" short story anthologies.

I don't know why you need two and a half people to cook breakfast every day. What if sleepy girl got up early to make breakfast Mondays and Wednesdays, and slept in on Tuesdays and Thursdays when her younger sister made breakfast. Keep in mind that your youngest may be needing the extra sleep soon, too.

I don't understand why a 6am wakeup call is non-negotiable for a home-schooled teen when she is often spending 25 minutes in the morning resting in the bathroom. Let the poor kid sleep in.

Presumably, a "No SAT/ACT" stem school would have a different entrance requirement than an essay -- maybe, show us a project you've built, or a program you've written.

This is where very directed question can be useful during an on-campus visit.

It sure would be handy to rate undergraduate departments based on the ratings not of their own graduate departments, but on the graduate rankings of the schools their undergraduates go to. Assuming, of course, that grad school is your goal.

Couldn't find German prices, but it is available in Canada and the UK for about $1.50 a pill.

The drug in question was approved by the FDA in 1953, and until recently cost just $1 / pill. The company that now owns the rights to this drug does no drug research or development of their own -- they are run by a former hedge fund manager whose m.o. is to buy up the rights to old drugs like this, then jack up the prices.

I bet you didn't even genetically engineer the lemon, or smelt the ore for the copper wires. "Made" a clock, indeed!