The only mistake she made was replying to the whole email list, instead of just to the organizer/director. A mistake I know I've made, and I'm sure that most of us have.

Thanks! The "single finger trick" would seem to be difficult to get 100% right.

Here's my question, only somewhat related to Ebola, that's been on my mind. Let's say that you are working with some dangerous substance that you really don't want on your skin. Maybe that's Ebola, maybe it is radiation, maybe it is cooties. Let's say you have perfectly impervious gloves while you do your work. How do you remove your gloves when you are done, so that you never touch the contaminated outside parts of the gloves, even accidentally?

I don't think it is going to be useful to solicit opinions from the hive, as we are located all over the world, and this seems to be a local thing. If you are worn out by your work now, will a 10% raise make it all worth while? Will raising your price cause you to lose (or gain?) gigs? If you are so busy that you are turning away work, it probably makes sense to raise your rates. My feeling is that homeschoolers in general have a strong "do it yourself" ethos, which probably applies to a lot of aspects of life. I had no wedding planner or "day of" coordinator, and things went just fine. Every wedding has minor surprises and gotchas, and if the bride isn't ready to handle them with grace and aplomb, maybe she isn't ready for married life.

I haven't see this text, so I'm making a bunch of guesses here. Assuming that the lesson here is about measurement, error and significant digits, it might be more useful to have him start with the 1/4inch ruler. Have him measure the cylinder with it, and he should notice that whatever he is measuring isn't exact to the quarter inch. So, he'll have to make an estimate, and know that this measurement isn't 100% accurate. But that's ok. No measurement in science ever is. He might say, "we should switch to the millimeter ruler", and yes, that might be more precise, but still not 100% accurate -- there's some amount of error in every measurement. What is important is that he have a feel for how precise the measurement might be. You could ask him "You made an estimate for this measurement, but is there a lower and upper bound, that you are very confident it is between?" So, if he measured a diameter at 5 1/4 inches, he might say, "Yes, I'm sure it is between 5 and 5 1/2 inches". Then you could do the same thing with the circumference. You should then point out that the calculated value for the circumference (pi * best estimate of diameter) probably doesn't exactly match the best estimate of the measurement of the circumference. But that's ok, because you knew the estimates weren't perfect. The measured value for circumference, however, should be between the calculated value of circumference for the lower bound of diameter and the upper bound. My guess is that the point of this lesson isn't to empirically derive PI, but to teach about measurement and error.

And here I am in complete agreement with you.

I think this just underscores the point. Here, even in the best possible case, with the student having taken many University DE classes, attending a competitive, but non-Ivy school, and having a world famous homeschooling mom, they didn't want to finish early, even though they could. They see the benefits of graduating in four years, and all that entails. The goal of a high school curriculum should be to have the best possible high school experience. If you are setting up your high school goal to have the quickest possible college experience, I think you are selling your kids short.

Totally agree, but consider the context of the OP, whose goal is trying to minimize classes taken at the terminal school. Personally, I feel that DE and AP each have their place as methods to enhance the high school experience, and to improve chances for admissions. Relying on them to finish college in three years or less is a fool's errand.

Computer Science is such a young field that the course of study isn't terribly standardized. Unlike, say, Physics, where the first year course of study is pretty well standardized (and even there are differences from one school to another), an entry-level computer science class at one institution may use a different operating system, a different programming language, a whole different style of teaching than another.

Some AP classes are more college level than others. I think the ones that tend to be taken by 9th and 10th graders are the ones that have less rigor. It is telling that the UK college admissions system divides AP classes into two tiers, and the less rigorous tier earns less than half the number of admissions points that the more rigorous classes do.

Now this would be a really interesting statistic for the College Board to publish: How many students, based on PSAT results, should, statistically speaking, do well on the AP Calc exam, but actually bomb the exam. Or, more to the point, what schools have an unusually high percentage of students in this category.

I had just edited my post to add that thought!

This press release is filled with horrible education jargon that makes it difficult to read. Apparently "readiness" is today's buzzword. However, it didn't seem to say anything about, exactly, the college board was doing to "enhance readiness" for "all students", whatever that means. The one interesting statistic in the press release is that they claim that some unstated score on the PSAT is a strong indication that a student will be ready for some specific AP level work. But, almost 40% of such students never took this (again, unstated) AP test. It would be interesting to know why this is -- are those classes not offered to the student? Did the student take the class, but not the test? Did the student take a DE class instead of AP? If the College Board wants to use historical data to shame public schools into offering more rigorous classes, and teaching them well, I'm all for that.

:iagree: And not just changed once, but changed again, and again and again. We use it for supplemental things, and if I'm not doing a good job of explaining something, it's nice if there's a five minute Sal video on the subject. But otherwise, it seems like there are substantive changes every few week, and even if it works perfectly for you today, it's a little scary to think that it could completely change tomorrow.

If there's an app that shows where the book I bought is (in the car? kids bedroom? ...), then you've really got something!

There's no standard definition of what an "internship" is. The top of the line internship is often the engineering internship, which are vital to starting a career, advanced training, networking, and can function as a semester-long job interview, and are actually paid well enough to fund subsequent semesters of school. However, the low end of the internship scale is simply drudgery, where the student isn't paid any wages or benefits, and often has very menial tasks, and little chance of networking, and no training. So, I would look very closely at what type of internship this is, and see if I could talk to some of the previous interns before recommending it. And, I wouldn't fear-monger about overnight travel, but I'm curious about the mechanics of a high school student travelling overnight for work. She's not old enough to rent her own hotel room or car, so how does that work out?

Isn't the department ranking, or even a particular professor to work with much more important in those cases? If I'm looking to get a PhD in, say, Classics, the fact that Cal Tech is number one on this list isn't really relevant.

???? The top ranked school is Cal-Tech, which isn't exactly known for it's broad range of majors. I'm not sure what the utility of such a list is. I suppose it is fun to look at the rankings, but is any student realistically going to think "I was accepted to both Oxford and Cal Tech, but Cal Tech is rated higher, so I'm going to go there".?

How about a tangible example? I publish a book in the UK and the US at roughly the same time. I'm so shocked by my success that I immediately die. Assuming I didn't give ownership of my copyright to my publisher, my heirs own these copyrights. They continue to receive any royalties from publishing that work. 70 years after my death, the work goes out of copyright in the UK, and anyone can use it in the UK without negotiating any payments. However, it is still covered by copyright in the US. Any publication or sales there still needs to be negotiated with the current copyright holders, whoever they may be. Note that the country where I lived or died, and where my heirs live probably doesn't matter at all. Again, I'm not a lawyer, I could have this completely wrong, but this is my understanding.

I'm not a lawyer, but my guess is that the above is not correct. What country the materials are hosted in probably doesn't matter. Works which are out of copyright in Australia, and thus kosher for people living there to freely copy, may not be out of copyright in more restrictive countries like the US.

I also like most of the problem, except for section #2: label the length, width and height of the box on the unfolded form. Seems like like what they are asking for is to assume that the longest line in the diagram is the 12in one, the medium-length line the 8in and the shortest the 2in. Otherwise, depending on how you orient the box, any dimension could be the height, width, or length. However, in geometry, one of the tricky things to teach is that you can't rely on what "looks right" from a diagram. If a geometry problem doesn't label two lines as perpendicular, you can't assume that they are just because the look like right angles.

Reputable companies always try out out new test questions and materials before generally rolling them out. The SAT had a "unscored" section that every student takes that doesn't count for their score, where new questions are trialed.

No, it is even sketchier than the magazine sales. I always (politely) turn them down, but the kids always talk about how they are "raising awareness" for their organization, and learning "leadership skills". The organizations usually have the word "Christian", or "Leadership" in their names, in the same way that North Korea's formal name is the "People's Republic of North Korea".

It's one thing if a local kid selling girl scout cookies or boy scout popcorn comes to my door, especially if I recognize a neighborhood kid, or the local school or organization they are representing. However, three or four times over the last few month there have been older kids coming to my door, soliciting for some group I've never heard of. There's a van idling up the block, that drops off a bunch of kids, they solicit a whole block at once, then pick them up and move on. This seems sketchy to me, though I feel sorry for the kids. Who can tell where the money actually goes, or what these organizations are?

I guarantee you that bridges are easier to understand than people.