Caput palma.

I think it is important to tell our kids that college isn't a place where smart kids automatically do well. College is a place where people who work hard do well. I see a lot of kids skate by in high school on brains alone, and tumble when they hit college and need to put in the hours. So, it isn't that the "smart fairy" visits the non-AP kids during the summer before college, it should be that in college, kids who didn't take AP classes are now ready to step up and do more work.

I think everyone is saying that she is accountable for the money she borrowed. But that's just the cost side of the equation -- you can't make a judgement on this without balancing the cost against the value. $150k to become a surgeon is surely reasonable. Without knowing anything about this student, I'm not willing to blame her for not predicting the correct economic value of her degree (currently: $0). Who is accountable for the universal narrative that a college degree is the only key to a good job? Monmouth college advertises that 99% of their graduates are either employed or in graduate school after graduation. Money magazine rates it #14 in the country on the "most affordable private colleges" list. (!), and #15 on the "degree adds the most value" list. I would love to know the statistics for employment rate of their communication studies graduates.

Each High School gets to decide what is or isn't worth of credit. If you homeschool High School, that would be you. If he goes to public school, it would be under the aegis of that public school system. There is no central authority. Having said that, I wouldn't count FF1 as a whole high school credit. FF1 through FF4 together cover most all of Latin grammar, which is generally considered to be 2 credits of High School or 2 semesters of college level work, and even then the FFs are light on translation. Memoria's logic on this is quite specious -- their claim is that FF1 should take as many hours as a typical Latin 1 class, therefore, it should be worth the same number of credits (1). By that logic, I should be able to grant my 3rd grader a high school math credit for spending as many hours working on memorizing math facts as a high school student does learning Algebra.

I find it interesting that if you go to Monmouth College's Communication Studies department page, they have a section "alumni", where they list "Recent Monmouth Communications Grads", and their employers. Only three are listed: two from class of 2008, one from class of 2001.

I don't entirely understand the issue. I assume the math prereq is algebra of some kind. Is the problem that you believe she's already passed a suitable algebra class, but can't prove it, and doesn't want to essentially repeat the same material? Most CCs use the COMPASS or other placement test for math -- has she taken a placement test? It's hard for me to believe that a CC wouldn't have some kind of math placement, and force all students to run completely through their own math sequence.

I hope California will be good to her. However, I just know that somewhere along the line, someone will tell her that she'd be much more hireable in her PR field, if only she had a master's degree...

This sort of grouping helps students to understand what is wrong with these kinds of sentences. It feels like someone once told this author that rising tricolons (groups of three things) is a powerful rhetorical device, and the author now feels like it must be used as much as possible. Ugh. In the first part -- isn't a "response" in edu-speak always written? So, composing and responding are the same thing, and don't need to be mentioned twice. In the second part, "knowledge" and "understanding" are basically synonyms, so why have them both? And in this context, I don't see that "developing understanding to do something" and "developing skills" to do something are all that semantically different. In fact, the whole second part seems superfluous. Would you say "I'm going to lift weights to develop strength to play basketball better"? No, you'd say "I'm going to lift weights to play basketball better". So, the sentence would be stronger with the whole second part removed, and the responding bit removed. And that leaves you with regentrude's rewrite: "We'll be reading and writing".

As is often the case, I feel like the article completely misses the point. This earnest young lady, took out huge loans to get a college degree to improve her life, and after graduating, apparently, couldn't find a job better than her waitressing gig she had before she started college. The real problem isn't that she's got the huge debt (although it is a problem), the real problem is that her degree didn't help her to land a job on track to middle class. Then, while I wish her luck in California, she seems naive about the cost of living, and how, even if a fast food waitressing job pays $9/hour, it isn't going to go nearly as far towards rent as it would back home. I hope she can find the PR job she wants there.

Cal, Michigan, Harvard, Yale, Brown, really all the Ivies, UNC, Bryn Mawr. Because she's coming in with 5 years of Greek and 4 of Latin, if she wants to continue in these languages, she'll want to go to a University with a strong graduate program in the classics, otherwise, she'll run out of classes fast. Therefore, I'd avoid any pretty much any traditional LAC.

This reminds me of one of my favorite math jokes ever. A professor starts a math lecture, and writes two equations on the board. He says "I think it should be obvious to everyone here that the second equation follows from the first". Then he steps back and looks at the board. He steps back again, and quietly stares at the board for 10 minutes. He then takes a seat next to a student, pulls out a pen and notebook, and furiously scribbles out equations for 30 minutes, filling many pages of the notebook. He stops, scratches his head, stands up and leaves the classroom. Ten minutes later, just as the bell rings, he bursts back into the classroom and says "Yes, I've discussed this with several colleagues, and we all agree it is obvious".

This is commonly quoted, but I'm not sure how true it is. The last time we talked about this, the only college found that wouldn't accept Latin for admissions purposes was the Air Force Academy.

The James Burke "Connections" documentaries aren't quite in the same mold as Cosmos, but I bet if you liked Cosmos, you'll like Connections. They are all up on YouTube now.

There's a fantastic essay on how to read Latin more fluidly written in the 1800s: https://archive.org/details/artofreadinglati00hale Basically, it requires a lot of practice, and discipline to read sentences in their original word order, and not play the "find the verb" game.

High school transcripts should only show work done during High School.

How much work is it to be an AP coordinator? Is this something that a well-organized co-op could do? I know there are restrictions on the coordinator -- it can't be someone whose child is taking the test that year. Could a co-op hire an existing public school AP coordinator to act at AP coordinator for the co-op?

Very interesting indeed. The OP asked why the mail keeps coming, and I'm sure this is one big reason. As the number of applications that the average student submits grows and grows, I can't imagine how difficult it must be for admissions departments to manage their yield, and fill their incoming classes. Sounds like this school really messed up their yield that year. And I wonder how desperate the college is to fill the freshman class. The conventional wisdom is, the sooner you apply for aid, the better you do, all other things being equal. If the college's yield is much lower than planned and the student/parents know this, I wonder if that puts more negotiating power in the hands of the student? (And, this is a nice counter-balance to the "why do you have to be so accomplished to get into college" thread.)

Isn't your son an NCAA basketball player? Is his insurance on the hook for any injuries suffered as a result of team activities? Is it just me, or does that not seem right? You hear all the time about college football players who get injured, and need what must be expensive surgeries. I had always thought that the college would cover these expenses.

I'm curious what browser you have now, on what operating system, and why do you need to change it? My impression, and I'm not an expert, is that they are all pretty much the same. Some pages don't work on some browsers, but, by and large, most work the same on most all newish browsers.

First of all, if an intelligent person has an important point to make, an essay or opinion article is a much better medium than a powerpoint slide show. I must confess that I'm rolling in the irony of a complaint about the dumbing-down of schools formatted as bullet points, superfluously 3-d graphs, sentence fragments and other chart junk. What really strikes me about my local Lake Wobegon "everyone is above average" schools is the lack of individual textbooks and reading books. I was chatting with a friend of mine who has a public high school senior, and she was running out to the bookstore to buy a copy of Orwell's 1984, which her daughter was reading in English. The daughter wanted to read ahead, but they only had enough copies of the book to stay in the classroom. If you can't bring your assigned text home, how are you supposed to study from it, or write a decent essay? How are you supposed to learn these study skills if you don't have much to study from?

I'd start with SWB's The Well Educated Mind, as a "spine", and go from there.

If this is still her path when it is time to think about college, I wouldn't consider a degree in dance, I'd think about a degree in Sports Management. She'll have plenty of experience in the dancing itself, but running a studio, and managing a small business is an entirely different skill set. There's an accreditation agency for sports management that accredits programs throughout the country, and I'd use that as a starting point.

First, I'd ask the coaches. Second, I would not worry at all about additional stress on his body at swimming longer races. He is surely swimming many times that distance at each practice. Third, I'm curious about the lack of challenge in his 25s. Is he dropping time? Does he have a friend about his same speed he can race? What's his breath control for his 25 free? How's his starting technique? There's all kinds of ways to be challenged (many of which involve math (!)) even when swimming sprints. Finally, putting in the practice time is hard work. If he feels that swimming a 200IM is a reward for that work, by all means, I'd let him swim it. It won't hurt him, and it is good to get that first official time from which you can mark how much time he's going to drop over the next few years. And if he swims the 200 free, lots of kids lose count of the laps their first time, so that's something he may want to think about.

I am perhaps the least organized person here, but making a librarything account for each child, and insisting that they log every book has been so useful. I'm sure good reads is the same. I can keep track of who has read what, make recommendations based on previous reads, and I use it to make sure that I don't buy books that have already been read. Just the other day, another mom was bemoaning that her dd couldn't find anything she liked to read. I pulled up the librarything account, and immediately gave her twenty recommendations!

Wow! How wonderful that he has the instinct to ask this question at this phase of his training. He's gotten great advice, I'd just add that it would be good if he could keep asking this question every few years throughout his training and practice.