My copy of this book finally came in from the library, and I just started reading it. Even having not finished the book, I would recommend it to anyone with kids on track to go to college. First interesting point: There are very wealthy students at this college (University of Indiana), very wealthy meaning their fathers are CEOs and CFOs of large multinational companies, who fly around on private jets. This is because the university goes out its way to recruit them, especially from out of state: they pay full price, need no scholarships, generally have higher-than-average standardized test scores, making the University look better, tend to be good alumni givers after graduation, and they generally don't ask for lab classes or other expensive, specialized training. Often these girls are the least academically gifted in their families. While they need a college degree to "succeed" later in life, any degree will do, and it is more important for them to leverage their existing social connections and spend their college years developing a large social network with the families of other upper class students, who will be in a position to hire them after graduation. The authors call this the "Party Pathway", one of three strategies college students select, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer, it is really more of the "Social Pathway". These kids come into school knowing a lot about the social issues there, and the first thing they do is select to live with each other in a "party dorm". Often first generation students don't have this background, pick a dorm randomly, and end up accidentally in the "party dorm". IU caters to the party pathway's needs by offering "cakewalk" majors in subjects like communications, event planning, recreation management, hospitality, etc. One way in which this hurts the lower class "strivers" is that no one tells them, out-and-out, that these majors are mainly useful for upper class kids. For example, one lower class girl majors in "Event Planning", thinking that wedding planning would be a fun career path. What no one tells her, is that only the wealthy hire wedding planners, and they don't look for a college degree, they generally want a wedding planner who was steeped in the consumerism and brandism of the upper class. They don't care if you have a BA in Wedding Planning, they want someone who is familiar with high fashion, which isn't what a farm girl from rural Indiana is going to present.

Presumably, it's not just a problem for your ds's application but for all (of this adcom? for the whole school ??)'s applicants. I would tell your ds to put himself in the adcom's shoes, and think about this as an opportunity to show the school what kind of go-getter he is, and let him stand out from his competition. Show them that he isn't the kind of student who gets knocked down by the inevitable vagaries of life, but can be proactive and mail back the adcom, and say something like "I think I've done everything right on my side, how about I just send you the info directly?"

This kind of book is what used to be called a "Reader". I don't know of any keyed to Henle, but there's a book keyed to Wheelock called "38 Latin stories", which are progressively more difficult, and "Scribblers, Sculpters and Scribe", which is all original Latin, though much of it is pretty easy. I'd also recommend "Lingua Latin, per se Illustrata, Familia Romana", which is entirely in Latin, and again, progressively more difficult. Lots of reading there. There are many, many readers published in the 1900s which are now freely available for download from google books and elsewhere, though often the scan quality is a bit low. One of the most charming of these is Nutting's "de America", a short American history written entirely in short snippets of Latin in 1913: You can download it for free or read online at: http://archive.org/details/afirstlatinread00nuttgoog

While this is great fun to argue about, and rile everyone up, perhaps first he should clarify what this would even mean. CCSS only covers Math and English in K-12 now, and describes what students should know at each grade level. What would the equivalent be at the College level? There's just a lot less in "Common" in College than in High School, even within the same campus. What should a third year journalism student study? Will curriculum be broken down for each major? I think my big state U offers three different Calc 1 classes (one for Math majors, one for Engineers, one for business school) Will this define requirements for BA/BS? Regardless of whether this is a good idea, I just don't see it ever happening, defining these things and playing the politics across 100s of universities is just intractable.

Seems like CC's come up a lot around here, often in the context of DE, but frequently enough in the context of transfer-to-four-year. I am curious, though about "Junior Colleges", which I don't think I've ever seen talked about on the boards. I don't think we have them around here -- is this a regional thing? To my mind, CC's are public, relatively inexpensive, and commuter. Or, are these two terms really synonyms? A relative just sent her eldest off to a two year junior college, and I'm not sure I'm understanding the value. It is a private, residential college, and thus not cheap, and I'm not sure this private school has any transfer agreements with neighboring four year schools.

An outline is a tool to an end, it isn't the end.

I intentionally do not teach or use Power Point. It is the antithesis of WTM. Strong writing, with good sentence structure and generative grammar, combined with good interactive discussion and thinking skills are what I want to foster. Power Point does neither. It encourages non-grammatical bullet lists, shallow reasoning, and emphasizes presentation over content.

It isn't just you. I think it is because the authors are social scientists, they write neither with the clear precision of a hard scientist, nor with the grace of someone in the humanities. :-) On a serious note, I don't understand how the social sciences, like economics, can be called sciences. In this paper, while it is clear they are collecting data, it is also clear that not only can they not control all the variables, they have not idea what they all are. Several posters have already proposed more variables they didn't consider: time of day, type of major, etc. Maybe some would say "economics is not an experimental science", and I guess that's true, but if you can't run controlled experiments in any particular discipline, how can that be called any kind of science?

FYI, it took a following a bunch of links to make it to the actual paper: http://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2013/IPR-WP-13-18.pdf Note that this was non-peer reviewed working paper was published in the same NBER journal that got in trouble earlier in the year for the now-disgraced Reinhart-Rogoff paper about the value of Economic austerity.

Generally speaking, I think that most college foreign language classes spent the first two semesters on grammar & vocab, and the rest on literature and culture. Now I'm curious if there are any languages for which this is not the case? As far as Latin, it also takes 2 semesters to cover most of the grammar and a good chunk of vocab. Even though, as someone pointed out, Latin is more highly inflected than most other modern languages, and thus, one would think, take longer to learn, there are some things that make it easier. First, it is very regular. There are only something like 5 irregular verbs and a handful of irregular nouns. Second, as someone else pointed out, it is extremely phonetic, so not only do you spent no time learning how to pronounce it (compare this to Chinese!), you can trivially spell any word you can pronounce, so there are no spelling issues, which also makes it easier to memorize words. Third, the vocab is very easy, though learning it all never ends. Most beginners learn about 1,000 in the first year, which is thought to cover roughly 80% of classical usage. Moreover, there are a ton of cognates to English, and the semantics are very straightforward, at least to English speakers. Ancient Greek, on the other hand, not only has a much larger vocabulary, but many of the words have very fine shades of meaning, making it harder to learn. A quick look at an online vocabulary tool claims that Caesar's de Bello Gallico has 4,500 unique words, and the Aeneid has 7,100. Of course, the latter is verse, so words much also be chosen for metrical reasons. One of the reasons that Caesar is taught early is that he is famous for sticking with a small, consistent vocabulary.

One thing I see here is an intensive specialization in one activity from a young age. Kids start swim team or gymnastics or dance at age 6, and only focus on that one thing year round, often going to lessons many times a week. As a result, if the child decides that's not her thing, and wants to switch to something else when she's older, it can be hard to start another activity from scratch at the "old age" of 12.

I'm not sure what your question is here. Although there are many high-school level Latin textbooks, the curriculum that each cover is surprisingly standardized, though often the order is different. What does differ, though, is vocabulary, which can make testing difficult if you've switched from one to another. For High School Latin, about half of Wheelock (maybe a bit less) is typical for Latin 1, or all of LNM book 1, or (with a lot of help from a teacher) about half of Lingua Latina. You said that she's done some chapters in Wheelock. How many? Which ones? Are there any chapters in Wheelock that she hasn't done in that book, but look familiar enough from other texts? What is your goal?

First off, I'm not sure there's anything wrong with studying longer, as long as you are being effective. Most colleges recommend that you study 2-3 hours per credit hour per class, even if there isn't that much homework officially assigned, and I bet that most students don't put that kind of time in. If your math homework is the odd problems, and you are struggling, it won't hurt to also do the even ones. Or, find another math book for the same course from the library, and see if that explanation makes more sense. I'm not sure that the idea of differing "learning styles" has been scientifically validated, but I do think that employing more than one learning technique can be helpful. One of my favorite tricks is, before taking a test, to write up my own test. This forces you to really think about what the material was, and what was important. and make sure you understand all of what was covered. Bonus if you can find a friend to do the same thing and take each other's. For me, the act of writing was very important. Writing out copies of conjugation tables. Writing out math problem sets. Writing out summaries or outlines of history texts. If I were going back to school today, I think I would also make audio recordings of some things (foreign language readings, maybe summaries of literature books) and put them on my ipod, so I could play them back during all those "filler" moments during the day. (doing dishes, driving, etc.)

"Catwings" by Ursula LeGuin

You need to ask her what her goal is, otherwise it seems difficult to answer the question. I don't think the ABA approves of online legal education, and so there are no ABA certified online law schools. Does she want to pass the Bar exam in a particular state? Most states require a JD from an accredited program to take the exam. Many law schools with easy criteria for entry have very low pass rates for the Bar. Otherwise, if it is just for personal enrichment, I'm all for that in general, it is very WEM, but seems like a very expensive personal pursuit, it might cost on the order of $30,000 to $50,000 dollars, all told.

I do so like it when the NY Times, or the mass media in general, uses its power to bring to light these kinds of studies, which apparently, hadn't gotten the visibility they deserved. Such a better use of their reach than to just repeat the latest sensationalized stories.

If you are just lazy and want the answers, you can type them into wolfram alpha online, and have it solve them for you, with nice graphs and everything: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16+-+%28x+-+11%29+%5E+2 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10x%5E2++%2B+13x++-3

At least around here, it wasn't _that_ long ago that such activities at these ages were normal in the US. Well, except for the public transportation, just because there's not that much of it here. My mom often told me and my siblings during the summer "go to the park and play, and don't come home before dinner".

According to the rules, she wasn't allowed to even touch the boat during her swim, much less get out of the water. She stopped several times to eat, but didn't sleep. "Impressive" doesn't even being to cover what she did.

Thank you! This is a fascinating statistic that I've seen nowhere else. I must confess I'm a somewhat skeptical, I had several college friends who were education majors, and they all seemed to get teaching jobs upon graduation (though many of them burned out early).

Oh, and something curious that the author said in the interview, that no one followed up on, "We educate twice as many teachers as we need in the U.S. " What did she mean by this? Are we hiring twice as many teachers as we need? Are half the ed school graduates not going into teaching? Does anyone who read the book knows what she was getting at here?

Here's the show I heard: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-08-19/amanda-ripley-smartest-kids-world

I also heard an interview, and am waiting for the book from the library. I haven't read the book, but a couple of "likes" from the interview: The exchange (high school) student from the US who spent a year in Finland (a very high performing country) was struck by how little technology was in the Finnish classrooms. They had no smart boards, no laptops in class, and the teachers just lectured from notes, not with powerpoint. In the US we have this fetish for technological solutions. I think it is very WTM to think that you can get a first-rate education without learning powerpoint or a using a smart board or mandating that every child has a laptop or ipad. Instead of running lots of standardized tests to figure out which teachers are good or bad, and trying to fire or improve the bad ones, they work really hard on the "front end" of teacher training, and set the bar very high for entrance to schools of education. Interestingly, it is more difficult to get into school for elementary ed than secondary.

Yes. There are several words in Latin that are always plural, and a few others that have different meanings when singular vs. plural. This can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, so when I teach this, I ask the student to think of any English words that are always plural, like "jeans", or "scissors".

Not viewable or searchable for me from here in the US. Sorry!