Is this the Traupman, Lingua Latina, or the Orberg Lingua Latina per se Illustratra?

Jessie Bauer has a great bit about this in the beginning of TWTM. She made her kids checkout one book from each of several categories (science, history, art, craft, biography, novel, storybook, poetry), but the child could select any titles from these genres, PLUS as many other books of the child's selection that she wanted (age appropriate, one assumes). When the children were reading, they could read any of these, free choice. If your kids aren't reading yet, I wouldn't make the commercial books a "forbidden fruit", but I might refuse to re-read out loud any we had already finished, and then work our way into the "good stuff".

What don't you like about Wheelock?

At my library, most multi-part items are clearly marked, and you can check out each part individually. There are some multi-part books, however, for which you get a random part. For these, if you talk to the librarian, they can put the right parts (or all parts) on hold so they get delivered. I found it odd that you'd need special librarian powers to do this, but I'm happy to get what I get.

Many public libraries have them...

As long as the data is anonymized, I think it should be publicly available. I'd love for smart, statistically-minded people (i.e. not me) to notice things in trends of data. The great schools website that everyone likes to talk about uses data mining to present the test scores that everyone argues about. The Freakonomics guys used data mining to detect wide-scale cheating at standardized tests in Chicago. As long as you believe in the value of standardized tests, there's all kinds of useful questions that could be asked. For example, if one teacher raises her class scores dramatically more than her peer, how long does that improvement last throughout a student's career? How often is a bad test just one "blip" in a career, versus the start of a bad trend? etc. etc. etc.

I usually think of college acceptance as the finish line, but seeing so many colleges and universities near me on this list with 50% (or lower!) 6 year graduation rates, I need to remember that getting through college is just as important. Having a huge amount of debt and no degree is probably worse than no debt and no degree. But, I wonder how transfers out of a given college impact this published graduation rate.

I'm shocked at the graduation rates of some of these schools. You'd think the super expensive ones would want to keep their customers.

Are your guests coming from far away? Have they visited your area before? I'm weird, but if I'm travelling somewhere, I'm always interested in foods unique to the area that I can't get at home. Maybe this is becoming more rare. It can be dangerous to make a main course of this, but if you can put out a side dish or snack of something local, or something they can't get at home, I find that fun.

One of the many important things he can learn from studying Latin is to learn how to memorize. Different people memorize best in different ways. Some with flash cards, others with mnemonic devices, others with songs, chants etc. You may want to encourage him to experiment with different techniques for memorizing data. I guarantee it will pay off for him during college!

Wheelock alone is sufficient. There's a free teacher's manual floating around the web which is pretty easily found, as is very useful. A chapter a week, certainly doing translation, grammar and vocab is the right way to go -- don't skip the translations. BUT, you must be ruthless in ensuring that the memorization of not just vocab (in both directions), but also paradigms is happening every day. I would assign a quiz, at least every week, making him write down, from memory, all the paradigms that he should have learned by then. You don't need to know a lick of Latin to grade these, or assign these, and if he knows there are always coming, he should always be working on his memory work.

If you have the opportunity to watch the Teaching Company's, "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft", you'll see the value of grammar in understanding how to construct powerful sentences. It isn't just knowing that a particular combination of words is a correct one, rather knowing which choice of grammatical constructs is more useful for a given circumstance.

I'm so sorry for the OP -- I can totally see how this can happen. I know it is the college board's rules, but I agree with the above. When you renew your passport, they mail you back the old one. I was always curious about this, and asked someone, and they told me that an expired passport can be used for ID for some situations that accept it.

I've never used any ancillary material with LL. The tricky thing about this text is that you really need to read it closely to get the value. It is very easy to just get the gist of what is going on in the story, and not really learn the grammar. Make sure to read slowly, and understand why every word has the ending it has. The pensa are very valuable -- make sure you do all of them at the end of each chapter. Sometimes, it pays to just copy out the Latin story by hand, to slow you down, so you really think about everything. Good luck, and if you have questions, feel free to ask here.

Is this legal? Seems sketchy.

I'm not an afterschooler, but I think the proof is in the pudding, as it were. I'd see if I could talk to existing students and their families outside of the earshot of the school, and get the real scoop. Ask them questions like: what's the best thing they like about the school, if they could improve one thing, what would it be, etc.

I think one reason many folks here express skepticism, at least for their own family, is that graduating kids from high school by 12 seems anti-TWTM. How do we express this in terms of the classical trivium? Are they doing the rhetoric stage at university, having compressed grammar + logic into the first six years? Or is it compressing logic + grammar + rhetoric into six years? Is it skipping one of the stages?

Nan keeps correctly reminding us that we all might make different choices if we had ten children. I think if I had ten children, my focus wouldn't be getting them to college quickly, it would getting them to an inexpensive public college/CC, or getting the most scholarships and grants, or into ROTC or something like that. If Bama offers free tuition for high SAT scores, I'd seriously consider the opposite strategy, and red-shirt my kids to try to improve their scores. Does the book mention financing college at all?

So, if they weren't academic standouts at their third-tier schools, how did they get accepted into graduate and professional schools? Or has academic inflation reached to that level now?

Interesting. Can you tell us what kind of curriculum the "high school senior" 12 year olds followed? Had they studied four years of foreign language? Calculus? Reading lists?

Artemis Fowl series Septimus Heap series Catwings series Dragon Rider, by Cornelia Funke The sixty-eight rooms

My thought was the speaking fee was for more of a "motivational speaker" to some large group, maybe not even specifically a homeschooling group. And if she can get it, more power to her. Better she than former athletes, disgraced politicians, celebrities, etc. Course, I'd rather hear from the veteran gurus from the highschooling board, but that's just me...

What's amazing to me about these third tier private colleges is that they aren't cheap, either. Huntingdon's tuition is $22,500 per year! Compare this with their big state U, University of Alabama, whose SATs scores are closer to Penn State's, but whose in-state tuition is $9,200. Totally agree with you about the value of the academic peers at college. In one of the articles, it claimed the kids didn't breeze through their undergraduate college, that they were in the tutoring centers every day getting help, so perhaps they other college students were more peer-like? The one thing I really don't understand about the whole story is how these kids got into their graduate programs. They all went to these apparently not-very-rigorous local LACs, and perhaps did well. But, with degree inflation, those undergraduate degrees aren't worth much in the job market, so they all went to graduate or professional school. Was their young age a "hook" to get into grad school? For grad school admissions, is it better to be a huge fish in a small pond, or not? To get into medical school, say, is it better to be first in your class at this tiny school, or near the top (but not at it) at, say University of Alabama.

Without seeing what their 12 year old high school graduates have actually accomplished, it is impossible to completely accurately judge. But, it is very difficult for me to imagine that typical 12 year old kids could come anywhere close to the breadth of education that a motivated homeschooler could give their average kid by age 18, a la TWTM. Have their 12 year olds finished calculus? Four years of in depth language study? Studied a modern and a classical language? Are they reading Virgil in Latin? Have they studied calculus-based physics? Read good chunks of the Western Canon? Done several hands-on lab sciences?

I think we need to be careful when we talk about efficiency. I don't see efficiency as a race to get the minimum amount done in the minimum amount of time. I see being efficient as giving me extra time to follow rabbit trails, and cover more ground in the same amount of time. For example, out of the blue, studying the American revolution, I was asked -- when did the colonies switch from using English pounds for money to American dollars, and how did that work? I had never thought about this, but we took a detour and learned lots of new things. I'm certainly not the most organized person in the world, but I think homeschoolers have a built-in advantage, timewise here -- there's no time wasted in "classroom management", or commuting to school, etc.