The short answer is "because everyone else has (or used to)". This may seem initially unsatisfying, but substantially all of the canonical authors had studied Latin and Greco Roman culture, and were profoundly influenced by it. Dante, Shakespeare, even Karl Marx and Adam Smith were awash with classical references. The founding fathers of the United States all read Latin, and this left its mark on them, and our founding documents. Why is the 2nd amendment so tricky for us to read today? Because there's something like a Latin ablative absolute clause in the middle of it, throwing off those who don't understand Latin grammar. The authors of the Federalist papers chose "publius" for their pseudonym, which again shows what they were thinking about. To be lacking latin is to be deaf to big chunks of the Great Conversation.

Though I have not used this particular Rosetta Stone, from what I've heard about it, I would stay away. As I understand, it makes no attempt to teach grammar or have the students memorize paradigms, which is the only way to learn Latin.

I must confess that seeing the thread with the abbreviated title: "Pros and Cons of a Bachelor" makes me giggle.

I agree that memorizing a list of prepositions can make things more confusing, rather than understanding them by function. For example, the word "to" is a preposition. Except when it isn't.

The above are all modern Greek.

I love the NLE. It is cheap, they make it easy to administer (no need to find testing centers), and it is low stakes. If they don't do well, oh well, you don't send the test scores anywhere, and they can try again next year. If they do well, it can be used to validate "Mommy grades". In a small way, it is practice for the "big" standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. At least for us, it maps pretty well to what we'd be studying in Latin anyway, so there's not a lot of extraneous test-prep. If a Latin program didn't prepare students to take the appropriate level of NLE in the appropriate year, it wouldn't be rigorous enough for my tastes.

I assume you mean the Hans Orberg "Lingua Latina, per se Illustrata, Familia Romana", not the other, similarly named, text book. As much as I adore this book, I think it will be really hard to use without a Latin expert to consult frequently.

Totally agree. Moreover, who knows what the requirements will be 10 years from now when it is time for him to apply?

This is one reason I like the Singapore Math bar diagrams. When doing word problems, you know you are going to draw a bar diagram of some kind. So, you read the problem, often outloud, two or three times, and then think about what kind of bar to draw. It helps get past that "what do I do next" stage.

i would make sure to keep those text messages.

We took a family trip there in the Spring, and it seemed like every middle school in the Western Hemisphere was there that week on a big Spring Break field trip.

It is doable, but a lot of work. I'd second the recommendation to start with the Legamus Vergil reader over the summer. Many public AP Latin students are assigned vocab memorization and reading the poem in English over the summer, so you'll need to hit the ground running. I believe the current AP has over 900 lines of the Aeneid to cover in addition to the Caesar, so I'd budget at least an hour a day, maybe two hours a day at the start to the project. You talk a lot about what you want, but what does your son want? When push comes to shove, he's the one who has to put in the work. Good luck! "Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit"

If turn off my cell phone, calling it goes straight to voice mail. If I pull out the battery when it was on, it rings a bunch of times before going to voice mail.

For the ice, get a 16 oz plastic coke bottle, fill it with water, and freeze it. The, roll it under your arches. Good Luck! This hurts!

You are a better person than I am. I didn't get past her simile defining "curriculum" and "standards". "Standards are like an umbrella. Curriculum is the handle". Huh?

My heart goes out to the families of those on this flight. However, I'm very disturbed by all the images of grieving families in airports that are plastered all over. Surrounding a crying relative with dozens of cameras is just wrong. Is there no shame left in the media?

Right, so the fundamental question is, "Why is the ACT gaining market share?" Seems like most colleges accept either.

I haven't used LNM, but I have read through it, and I like it a lot. I like that it covers a wide variety of classical texts, including medieval literature, which is often omitted. It certainly is more colorful and better looking that wheelock. I don't particularly like Henle. In addition to being too Ecclesiastical for my tastes, it is very Caesar-focused, with a lot of vocab and tons of exercises about armies and battle lines and wars and who is killing whom.

They are also removing the penalty for wrong answers, so that they will be encouraging blind guessing. I'm curious if there is any good reason for this particular change? I always that the penalty for wrong answers made sense -- if you could narrow it down and remove some possibilities, statistically, you were better off than guessing completely randomly.

And that's just GDP, not employment. There was a great bit on Planet Money where they followed the making of a t-shirt. They started at a cotton farm in MIssissippi. This one farm employs 13 people total, and every year produces enough cotton to make 9 million tshirts.

There are de-facto standards that cover the majority of schools. Standardized testing and college admissions drives a lot of this commonality. For example, what percentage of public high schoolers study two foreign languages concurrently here? My guess is less than 1 percent. There are a handful of Spanish immersion elementary schools in this country, but how many public elementary students have any kind of meaningful foreign language instruction? Again, I guess less than 1 percent. There may not be a mandated national curriculum, but there's a lot more commonality than diversity.

The US education system has such low standards that even the "non college" track of many foreign countries is superior in many ways to our "college track" (to the degree that it exists). In my travels, I've met many European taxi drivers, farmer's market vendors, public transit workers, postal workers, etc. who learned three or four languages, starting in primary school, and speak them fluently. I assume that few of these folks went to college, or were on the college track.

i wouldn't be so quick to assume that. Ever bought anything from amazon that you could have bought at a local store? Does your state offer "virtual charter schools", with teachers on the other end of an internet connection? Maybe not every career can be outsourced, but a surprising number can.

Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt". And to think of all the things I'd like to be able to memorize, but can't...

But he hasn't. If he finishes French 2 at the end of ninth grade, that's what he's accomplished -- French 2. Done with grammar, ready for literature. It doesn't matter if he had one year of prep work to make it to that point or ten. The purpose of the transcript is to show what the student did in high school.