But this is exactly what I mean when I say that we put too much emphasis on textbooks. No one can say with any certainty if this class will be "enough" based on the book alone, without knowing anything about how the teacher plans to teach, what extra materials she will cover, or how in depth she will use this book. Teachers shouldn't be slaves to their texts, the text should be an auxiliary to the teaching.

I don't even like "party" as a verb, but I know that ship has sailed.

As homeschoolers, I think we often place too much emphasis on text books. Lingua Latina, per se Illustratra, Familia Romana is a very unusual book. It is written entirely in Latin, and all the vocabulary is defined in term of other Latin word, or with pictures. With a good teacher, it can be a very effective tool. Typical, the first book (Familia Romana) covers about the same amount as the first two years of high school Latin. I'm not familiar with the exercise book, but learning Latin (as any foreign language) requires a fair amount of memorization, and the book never comes out and says "now memorize these 20 forms", but any good teacher would tell their students that, and verify that they have by testing them. So, assuming the teacher is qualified, I wouldn't worry about the book. The only thing that's a bit odd about the book is that the paradigm tables in the back are listed out in the British order, not the American one I'm familiar with. Now I'm curious what order is traditionally used in Canada!

This plea bargain happened months after the girl killed herself.

As usual, the media seems to be skipping out on facts important to the story, in order to simplify and dumb down the story. This guy was originally tried in 2010, and the prosecution offered a plea bargain where he would plead guilty to raping the girl, but the charges would be dropped if he completed his sex offender program ????? What was the thinking there? Was this same judge in that court? Seems to me that's a much more outrageous miscarriage of justice than his current parole violations. Still, if justice can be (belated) applied because of the seemingly minor parole violations, I'm all for that.

My first double-post!

Just to be clear, I don't think a three hour weekly lab is too much for a prepared high school student to handle, I just think it is impossible for a public high school to be this flexible in their scheduling. Even our local "block scheduled" high school runs four 90 minute classes a day.

Sounds like you are doing a fantastic job. However, I think you won't find many (any?) high schools doing three hour science labs on a weekly basis. Most one credit high school science classes are in the area of 120 hours. Assuming a 24 week academic year, that'd be 72 hours just in labs. Or, for the typical non-block scheduled school, with five one-hour classes a day, that'd be three out of five days a week in the lab. Aside: for a high school lab science class, what's a good rule of thumb for hours in lab vs. hours in direct instruction? I'm curious, then, how much time you devoted to this Biology class? And at what pace? Roughly a chapter a week?

I wonder if "percentage of students which take the SAT" is part of some automated high school ranking, and the district is doing this to improve how they rank on some score?

If you are looking to trim the list, there's a bunch that are more Youth/YA-ish than the rest. These include: Ender's Game Tripod series A wrinkle in Time Flatland Hitchhiker's Guide The last two Heinleins And if he's mature enough, and you could only read on Ursula LeGuin, I'd recommend "The Left hand of darkness"

When I talk to several of my friends who have gone back to college, this is a really common theme -- most of them say that they are so much more interested in deeply learning the material this time around, rather than solely focusing on the minimal effort it would take to get a good grade. I wonder why this is, is it just being "older but wiser", or is there some way we can help inculcate this desire in our kids for their first time through college?

I don't think I ever heard this word used in this way until a couple of years ago. Now you hear it all the time. What's wrong with "Johnny will be a 3rd grader" or "He's going into 3rd grade?"

How long are your going to be there, and during which season? You could easily spend four weeks in London, but there's lots of great stuff outside the big cities. Do you want to focus on urban activities, or get out and see the country? Any particular literary or historical tie-ins you have an interest in?

In addition to what was said above, I think it is key that we adults model the behaviors we want to see in our kids. In some ways, I think homeschoolers have an advantage over traditionally schooled kids here. Homeschooling is hard. If our kids see that we are continually learning, struggling to improve our skills, both as teachers and in the subjects we teach, that's a good life-long lesson.

Clearly, motivation and hard work alone are not sufficient to succeed. But the big difference between the Malawian boy and the LA boy is that the latter went to a terrible high school, where he apparently got little high-school level education. He essentially skipped high school and then tried to do college level writing, and is failing horribly, despite all his hard work. He just didn't have the required foundation. The Malawian boy had a benefactor who sent him first to a private high school school in the capital city, which is presumably pretty rigorous, and then to the African Learning Academy, which is a rigorous, two-year pre-college program. I'm sure the latter worked hard, but it is important to work hard at the right things, in the right order. The E.D. Hirsch books talk about this a lot.

This article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/back-to-school/laptops-in-class-lowers-students-grades-canadian-study/article13759430/ has been making the rounds about how taking notes on a computer leads to poorer test results.

There's all kinds of interesting essay topics you could assign around Latin. You could focus on the language itself: o) Latin has no definite or indefinite articles (a, an or the). How does impact what you can express in Latin? o) Latin is highly inflected, English much less so. What are some advantages/disadvantages to inflection? o) Take two lines from some well known Latin work, and find four professional English translations of those lines. How do they compare? Or talk about culture: o) Why did the Roman Empire last as long as it did? o) Many people like to compare the current political situation to that of the Romans before the fall of their empire. Is this an accurate comparison? o) Compare and contrast the Roman government with ours.

Classical is easier to spell and pronounce, so I'd choose that, unless they will be exposed to a lot of Church Latin. But, either way it isn't a huge difference.

Wow. Such great discussion. Just to put a finer point on what I was trying to say -- I think there's a lot of demand for so-called advanced classes, and there are, especially at the public high school level, a lot of classes being offered with advanced sounding names. But, I'm not sure how advanced they are. If AP classes are really supposed to be the equivalent of rigorous college classes, why is it common for high school freshman to take them? A couple of the thought-to-be easier ones, Human Geography and World History, are overwhelmingly taken by freshman and sophomores (http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/program_summary_report_2012.pdf), with a pass rate around 50%.

This also depends on what the student wants to do. In this physics case, they may get to see what an academic physics researcher does, but I bet that most of your class of 20 physics major never end up teaching physics in a research university. Isn't there a huge glut of pure science PhDs? And I bet a goodly hunk don't even end up in a field requiring novel experimental science, e.g. Wall Street Quant, High school physics teacher, computer programmer, etc.

If your thesis is that at a smaller LAC, an undergraduate is much more likely to be able to "do research" (whatever that means) with a professor, than at a huge big name school, I suspect that you are probably correct. But why is that important? Why should undergrads (especially the first two years) focus so much on research? I would hold that the ability for undergraduates to participate in a research program plays a very small role in the overall quality of a school. The MIT kids in your example may not have had any research experience, but I bet they caught on very quickly. One knee-jerk reaction to generally poor public education at all levels is the push to do "more advanced work" at every level. We want our elementary level kids to rush through learning to write and basic math, public school are pushing for (a dumbed-down version of) Algebra for many seventh graders, and high school kids are encouraged to do dual enrollment and gobs of AP classes. I suspect a lot of the basics are being skipped along the way, and these "advanced" classes are advanced in name only. "Calculus" sounds like a college-level class, but I see a lot of high school students who have taken this, and not even covered half of what a typical college Calc I class will cover. I think we should focus making sure the kids know exactly what they are supposed to know at each level, instead of pushing them to skip to some mock version of the next level.

While I agree, in general, with the "teach the basics" mantra outlined above, I think we need to be pragmatic every time we say it is really important to teach X, Y, or Z. In isolation, it is easy to make the case that it is really important to teach all kinds of subjects. But, here in the real world, there's a finite amount of time, and a real limit to the amount of study that any one kid can do. So, as much as I'd like to have my kids learn a classical language, a couple of modern ones, read the Western Canon, study western civ, realize that "Eastern" civ is growing in importance, and should probably be taught too, learn math through calculus, and statistics, numeracy, and discrete math also, do good, hands-on lab based sciences, understand how to apply technology, understand persuasive rhetoric, have enough P.E. to by physically fit, fathom economics, master philosophy, learn to write well, etc. etc. etc.; at some point you have to start ranking the desires, and dropping subjects that don't make the cut. It is easy to say that "cursive is important". I'm more interested in the tough conversations, such as "I'm skipping teaching keyboarding this year, and teaching cursive instead" (or vice versa). I certainly don't know the answers to all these questions, but I think it is much better to frame these in term of what you have to drop to add anything new in. (But we ain't skipping our grammar, I can tell you that much)

I'm in the queue for the book at my library, so I haven't read it yet, but I think the above is an important part of their thesis, and is true, at least for a subset of the students. They say that the upper-class girls realize that academics don't matter much for their career plans, rather, their objective is to network and meet other upper-class families that will hire them, regardless of their major and GPA. So, for them, the partying is a critical part of their strategy.

This is a fantastic answer from a six year old. Perhaps if you want to follow up, you could find a picture-book copy of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", and read it with him.

Yet another big change from the dark ages when I went to school: I just checked the web site of my alma mater, and apparently, changing roommates or dorms is trivial now. Just fill out an online form, and they'll let you know your new room in a few days. When I went to school, we were strongly urged to stick it out, that learning to live with someone you didn't like was part of the college experience, and it seemed like they would only allow changes under the most dire of situations. I wonder how common the former policy was in those days, and how common the more liberal policy is now. Seems like if it is really easy to switch dorms, it is possible for various groups to self-associate.