Is it just me, or do the lyrics for this song (and a lot of others on this thread) seem a bit wrong for slow-dancing? Or does no one care when the lights are low?

I'm not sure I buy the argument that elitists don't like grammar. There's no elitism quite like grammar snobbery -- I should know, I am one!

The story is about Lehigh, which isn't in the same ballpark as the Princetons and Yales which did not admit our satirist.

Thanks for the article about Lehigh. One quote really ticks me off: "She [the High School guidance counselor] told me he [the applicant] was basically rude to her for four years. She did say she has never before in her career given a student below average on anything." I don't care about the rudeness of the applicant, and how that effected his application. I'm more upset about this guidance counselor who, in all her years, has never met a kid below average in anything! Talk about grade inflation! I'm not sure she knows what average means.

Syntactically, the problem is that this isn't a complete sentence. "Sharing" is a gerund, making the whole thing a noun phrase. Semantically, the word "communities" is used as an abstract place, and as an active agent which can have goals. This makes the phrase convoluted. Grammatically, it would be ok with "We are sharing the same goals as the communities we live and work in". but still convoluted. I might change it to say "We share these same goals with everyone who lives and works in the community"

Can you imagine watching it as it came out, only one episode a week?

Note that "Lily" and "Livy" are very different people...

I would go further than that and say that many languages, especially English, are barely orderly at all. Kepler's laws of motion: there's order! But English grammar is a total mess: there are few rules that have no exceptions, many special cases, and people break the rules all the time without losing meaning. Moreover, it is continually evolving, and when we collectively decide that a certain grammar rule no longer holds, we make up new rules which become standard over time. Now, I think it is important (and fun!) to study grammar, the messiness and chaos is one reason we need to study it in such depth.

If I had known how much work it is, I never would have started. If I had known how rewarding it is, I would have started a lot earlier.

Well, a lot of Greek medicine is based on the four humors, and your sickness and your temperament can be predicted based on how out of balance your humors are. The Greeks thought that the heart (or perhaps the stomach) was the locus of thought. The direction of the prevailing winds of a city could be used to predict what general medical ailments the inhabitants would have. And lots of other things like this that just seem odd today.

I hope this is just a failed attempt at satire, instead of the whiny self-righteous screed it comes out as. I know that college admission is very competitive these days, but it is much more transparent than it ever was, between all the official channels and statistics available: want to know that the 25 and 75 percentile scores are for the SAT for your favorite school? Google it in under a second. Better yet, with collegeconfidential and other sites, there are a ton of unofficial channels available -- thousands of real world reports of what kind of application makes it and what doesn't, for any particular school. Also, I find it very telling that there's no mention of SAT/ACT scores in her rant.

I wouldn't recommend ancient science at that age, as it is a little, ah, odd in places. However, all of Loebs that are out of copyright (most of them, including your Hippocrates examples) are available for free download from either google books or the internet archive. Here's a big list of them. Great for e-readers: http://www.edonnelly.com/loebs.html

Much as I love "Lingua Latina", I think it would be tough to use without a teacher who knows Latin. There's just a lot of little things that are easy to miss. For middle school and up, I like "Latin for a New Millenium".

The problem is that in order to cost-effectively test kids, the tests generally have to be graded by machine, which means the tests need to be bubble-code multiple choice tests. If your school or your teacher's reputation depends solely on these tests, it is easier to teach how to take multiple-choice tests skills than real, deep understanding of the material. Something simple like learning how to blacken a bubble quickly can allow a student to complete one or two more questions in the testing period. Learning how to throw out obviously wrong answers, and make good guesses is another technique. Choosing which questions to answer, and skipping over the hard ones quickly is another technique. There's nothing wrong with defining the sorts of things that, say, a 4th grader should be taught. But, ideally, you'd want to judge how effectively they've learned the material by sitting down and talking with them for a half an hour with opened-ended questions and discussions like "tell me about the American Revolution". Or, writing a paragraph for LA.

Seems like this article is talking more about nannies, who a adults. I'd expect to pay them a lot more than the neighborhood teenagers.

Is your goal to improve the chances of acceptance to the college of her choice, or to improve her experience once there? For the former, I might suggest AP Chem + some intensive physics-related science fair project. For the latter, I might double-down on math.

The bar model is really handy starting about 4A, and there certainly will be problems you can only solve with the bars. If you have those books, maybe you should pull out an example, and show her how to do it, and even if she doesn't completely get it, she'll see that it is useful.

I would humbly suggest that your question is kind of misworded -- what you are really asking is Rosetta Stone French vs. GSWL. There is a bigger difference in the approaches between these two programs that the languages themselves. I'm not a big fan of Rosetta Stone, though I must confess I haven't seen the French version.

All the above is great stuff, but I would add that it would help a lot for your son to learn how to learn these kinds of things. Some people work best with flashcards, or the nifty online flashcard systems with the spaced repetition. Others do better by copywork. Others need songs or mnemonic aids, and get good at coming up with ones.

What is your goal? To test into Latin 2?

GotR is about a lot more than just running -- there's a lot of work on peer interactions, goal-setting, self-esteem building and other stuff, that, while not inappropriate for a younger girl, may be somewhat lost on her, even if she's academically above her age. I'd wait a year. And, I wouldn't worry about her athleticism -- it is a lot like a c25k program for the younger set. If she just wants to run, I'd look for a running club for her age.

Here, extra reading time _is_ the incentive!

Oh, I agree with all of this. Where I think Rhee was misquoted (or misunderstood) in the quoted article is the idea that if you took the very wealthy kids at elite private schools, their results on this tests would be the same as very poor kids who are struggling just to survive. I'm not saying that rich kids are inherently smarter than poor kids, I'm just saying that if you are always worried about getting shot at school, you probably aren't focused much on learning. The quote I'm disagreeing with: That just can't be right. And indeed, your quote contradicts this, assuming that Massachusetts is a richer-than-average state. Now, I'm sure if you average all the kids together, you get 26th, but that's not what the original author said. As I said before -- there's all kinds of problems with public schools, but we don't need to exaggerate or lie to make our points.

I fundamentally disagree with this assertion. Studies have shown that in Texas, the amount of remediation needed in public colleges went UP after they started their required-for-graduation testing. Life is not a multiple choice test. A valid high school graduation question for Social Studies is something like: Discuss for 30 minutes who should be the next President of the United States. But tests like that are too expensive to grade, so they will never happen.

I am not a professional mathematician. If any organization spends $10 to FedEx me a letter they could have spend 29 cents mailing, explaining how much money I can save, I am just going to go out on a limb and assume that my best interests are not in play.