For me, an honest, personal, heart-felt thank you from a kid involved is worth more than any bling. One of the classiest things I've seen at a swim meet is the Navy swimmers who always sincerely thank the timers and officials after their races.

Thank you! I wonder how many of the foreign language test takers were native speakers of that language? Also, the report really shows the disparity in difficulty for the various AP subject exams. If almost half of the kids who take Human Geography are high school freshman, do we really think that this is equivalent to a real college course? Less than 1 percent of kids who took the AP Latin exams were freshmen. I'm very familiar with the AP Latin test, and I can clearly say that not only is the syllabus equivalent in difficulty to a college class, it is equivalent in difficulty to a fifth or sixth semester college class.

Flashcards. Or if you have a smartphone or tablet, one of the spaced-repetition flashcard programs.

Is there any evidence that there is an "epidemic"? Seems like everyone here either cheated or knew someone who did back in the day.

For every possible house feature (detached garage, island in the kitchen, in-ground pool, hot tub, walk in closets, etc. etc.), you can find someone for whom it is a deal breaker.

The reason (neo) classical education is chronological is that history and literature build on each other. You can't fully understand why World War II started if you don't know anything about World War I, and so on. Shakespeare is filled with allusions to greco-roman culture. But science is really not like that. Lots of early science was just bad science. The Greeks thought the sickness was caused by imbalances in the body's humors. Moreover, the dependencies in science tend to be more interdisciplinary and intermingled than chronological. Typically, high school students study biology, then chemistry, then physics, as if there is some huge red line separating the three, when really, there's a lot of physics and chemistry in biology, and vice versa. For young ones, we try to just do many hands-on science projects (I wouldn't call them labs). Too often, I fear, science at that age becomes just a vocabulary test. I was struck by a science test posted in another thread about religion in schools. Ignoring the obvious issue, it seems like not much science is going on in that class, just learning words about science. I want to avoid that.

I'm more concerned that we're raising a nation of good test takers. That is, kids who know how to cram for an exam, get a bunch of information into their short-term memory the night before a test, have good test taking skills and strategies, do well on the test, and forget most of it the day after the test.

I think the trick is to help him find the right square hole he fits into, not just for college, but in life beyond. Many of these kids have great gifts, but have a very difficult time exploring on their own, outside of their current comfort zone, to find something that might be a fantastic, lifelong opportunity for them, and a good match for what they are good at. Hours spent now on this investigation are probably more valuable for him than anything spent on core academic subjects.

And they continually get the long term picture completely wrong, because the global economy is incredibly complex, and there are always unforeseen new developments and problems. Remember in the 1970s when we were going to run out of oil in a few years? And in the 80s? And in the 90s? Or the last time the federal government ran a budget surplus for a few years straight, and predicted that surpluses would continue for the foreseeable future, and the federal debt would be completely paid off by 2010? Or the prediction that the Iraq war would "pay for itself", because it would only last a few months? Currently, the US is almost producing more oil than it consumes, because of the boom in fracing and shale oil. No economist saw that coming 10 years ago. We all know how quickly Chinese consumer goods export has grown -- who could have foreseen that coming when we still called them "Red China"?

Without getting into politics of any kind, I have no trust whatsoever in any economic prediction going ten years out.

Maybe it is obvious, but the other two E.B. White children's books, "Stuart Little", and "Charlotte's Web" are also classic readalouds.

Clearly, the correct answer here is "Teacher".

Given that we recently replaced our VW which had one thing after another go wrong starting at about 70,000 miles, the VW ad was infuriating.

Athenaze is a tough text. It is used in many college introductory Greek classes. Personally, I don't find it well organized. If you don't know ancient Greek, I think you'd be hard pressed to teach with it at any speed. 2 years/book would be tough going with lots of frustration for the average 12 year old. Jumping from the Greek Alphabetarion to Athenaze is like reading Dr. Seuss one day, and David Foster Wallace the next. However, there's not a lot of choice in Ancient Greek textbooks, especially Attic for younger learners. If you have your heart set on Ancient Greek, and can afford it, I'd recommend one of the online classes like Lukeion.

I would only switch foreign languages if we could make a long term commitment to sticking to the new one. In the US we generally start way too late with spoken languages as it is. I see little value in doing one year of French in seventh grade, then giving up and switching to another.

As others have said, the remediation is key, whether you did it yourself at home now, or during the Summer, or by sending her back to K now. To continue the simile, if today she's lost in 1st grade math because she's trying to do division without knowing multiplication, trying to teach her division again next year without her ever having learned multiplication in the meantime seems to doom her to repeat her failures. And, what, exactly, are these missing K math concepts? Seems like they shouldn't be too hard to teach at home.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by his "works", he was an incredibly prolific writer, and very popular in his day. My public library has many of his histories, and used bookstores, both local and online are filled with cheap copies of books he wrote. As Margaret in CO writes, the more modern biographies of him are great reads as well.

Dear Ask A Briton: Here in the US, we are told that the rise of mass media in the last 50 years has smoothed over and homogenized a lot of former regional dialect. (Though clearly, no one will mistaken someone from Boston from someone from Texas). I understand that in the UK, there are many more regional dialects, often very localized, and often tied up with class distinctions. Do you think that mass media has had, or is having a similar impact in the UK?

If both languages are to be spoken, and require pronunciations which are different from the native tongue, I might start with pronunciation exercises in both languages earlier. I feel there is a "window" that closes somewhere around fourth grade, after which it is much, much harder to learn to speak new languages. They can still learn vocab and grammar later, but a few months of learning what the language sounds like, and how to recite it make a world of difference.

There is a follow-on, "Minimus Secundus"

The proposed changes to public school law are just weird: They want to charge parents $$ if the kids need remediation? And if the parents don't or can't pay, then what?

I don't know if this is a solveable problem, but what I would humbly suggest is to focus on one academic area first, maybe one that is difficult to homeschool, like foreign language or laboratory science, and really hit a homerun with that one academic area. Get the absolute best teacher you can for that area, give her lots of support, allow homeschoolers to drop in for that one class, sign up for national competitions in that area, etc.etc.

There's something else going on here, I'm sure political, but I don't know what it is. It makes no sense to me that one coalition of Texas businesses is lobbying to remove one math class from the requirements to receive one kind of diploma. They claim that the have plenty of jobs that don't require Algebra II (directly or indirectly). But the companies are free to hire kids today with the non-Algebra II diploma, or no high school diploma at all, for that matter. They also claim that removing this one required class will free of lots of time for high schools to offer more vocational classes that would be more immediately useful for their industries. I'm very skeptical of this claim. I'm curious what an example of such a class is, that couldn't be taken by a student whose schedule is so filled with Algebra II. While I think that more opportunities for more vocational education may be a good thing, I'd be worried about High Schools focusing on the short term needs of nearby corporations. All of us of a certain age know how volatile the oil industry in Texas is, it may be booming now, but in a few years students may regret not having a more general purpose education.

I like the idea of making a map. I hate the idea of copying someone else's map, for a lot of reasons. However, how is this supposed to be graded? We've got friends who live out in the country, and a 10 square mile map (3x3 miles, roughly) would look like: one road, one house, couple of outbuildings, no rivers, no landmarks. Done. 20 blocks in New York City, though, would be a tremendous amount of work.

Does your library have the teaching company videos?