Good luck on a great start to all who are starting the 2013-14 year this week. DD will not begin until the last week of this month. I am finding this particular summer a little harder to part with than previous ones. It just seemed to come and go too quickly. Hopefully something will kick in with me while I am doing the final planning this last two weeks while she is in an intensive, and the "rah, rah let's do this" spirit will emerge. I just keep getting this feeling I will go to sleep and it will be time to pull out the holly and baste turkeys.

Regentrude speaks truth. I am about to march through physics with Dd and I can see a real need to instruct and be involved with the Knight text. If I had handed the text to her last year without being very involved, she would mirror what you saw with your son and I suspect it would be a bit lonely and boring. The text is great, but being 14/15 and sitting with it alone would be uninspiring.

We are leaving the door open for a fifth year. Part of the reason is based on what we saw last year, but a larger part is really exploring some areas we both just think would be time well spent and there is a lot we would like to do. I posted to your other thread, but to recap: they can be incredibly bright and able but not mature enough to work independently. Dd has realized this herself and we are choosing to wait and see. We are not calling the upcoming year anything, we are just going to do. I am going to be much more hands on and she is agreeing to make that something I will not dread doing. Several people posted in the other thread about he may be ready to move on and there is something to that in a sense. Bright kids can be impatient but lack the work ethic to really master being a solid student. Dd could handle the content of just about anything, but she is not mature enough to handle the work load and that is what continuing with high school will help accomplish. She needs to learn to jump through the hoops or accept the consequences. I would prefer she do that in high school than in a college setting entered earlier and the consequences be far more real.

9th graders are strange birds. Dd is 12 lessons shy of finishing Algebra 2. We have about a third of chemistry to wrap up and about a 1/3 of Spanish. She otherwise completed the goals for Literature/Composition, World History (- a need to do a bit about post Korean War) and completed all the logic/rhetoric goals we set. It was often very frustrating, if I gave her an inch she would drift a mile. She found ways to widdle away time and pull some of the types of things you described. I decided in mid-June to list out what remained to be done and explain that she could make it up during the summer or have it would be tacked on to this school year making everything far more difficult. I could see it wasn't sinking in with her at all. We wound up traveling together a good bit in July and just talking. We have decided to wait and see, work what remains into this school year and and add a few weeks. She suggested I sit with her more, especially at first and force her to stay focused on task. I am scrambling a bit to rework some plans for the year before we start in a couple of weeks, but it feels far better to be working together than fighting one another. We don't need a transcript for the next 9 months so we are going to try out what we have discussed and defer our decisions until we are winding up the 2013-2014 year. She matured a great deal over this summer and the differences versus a year ago are striking. Summarizing, I have come to the conclusion she was being a young teen and her recognizing on her own she isn't done with needing supervision yet may just be the most valuable bit she learned as a 9th grader.

:iagree:

My biggest regret is not having pulled DD after K. In retrospect, the one year of K would have given her all she could benefit from learning. The discovery math in elementary was so poorly guided...it created a five year span of kids who needed serious remediation, spelling programs were changed from year to year in a search for the right one and it shows in the cohort as high schoolers. Grammar was largely abandoned in favor of teaching whole language reading and writing skills, again poor delivery resulted in poor ultimate skill development. We spent two years of homeschool solidifying basic skills while allowing the vertical advancement Dd needed. This took time away from being able to relish some of the opportunities homeschool otherwise would have allowed. I would so love to take a mulligan on those lost five years. In our local area it is widely acknowledged policies adopted to reform elementary in the years between @ 2003 and 2009 created a mess. That in turn made an already muddled middle even less effective, more process oriented and filled with remediation instead of content rich base formation. Thus, they had to do what I had to do at home but found it far harder to accomplish because of the issues with mass instruction. I talk with AP teachers who are seeing these kids now and they tell me they are very challenged to do the same with this cohort they were able to do with earlier ones. You and I tend to agree on the devastating impact of a US stance in education that fails to differentiate instruction to address varying needs based on ability.

Dd wants to do it all and it will be a life issue for her to maintain balance. My question in posting is more directed at thinking about the way GGardner addressed the trend toward doing more advanced work as a "solution" to the less than stellar performance of students in the system. We have more routes to completing higher level work for more students and yet colleges have to remediate basic skills far more often. I wonder if the ever increasing standards that indicate "ability" and "achievement" wind up actually narrowing knowledge and skill development. In the past five years we have seen a real trend locally to normalize the expectation of college achievement in high school (on site dual enrollments/increase in AP expectations). Is this actually producing more competency?

Stovepiping refers to segregating each subject distinctly and indicates treating them as distinct disciplines that do not operate cooperatively or share a common understanding or bodies of knowledge (the term is often used to describe government agencies which perform the same or substantially similar functions but don't communicate with one another and thus miss important opportunities and/or each repeats tasks of the other creating redundancy without effective connectedness and communication-think FBI and CIA both investigating the same individual without sharing resources/information). We tend to do this far more in the US than in other cultures in our instruction of math, sciences and cross disciplinary composition. Think about the way phases of matter often are addressed in Biology, Chemistry and Physics in several chapters in each, and yet a solid understanding taught effectively once and showing the application in each arena might save substantial time in each content area to delve into other more domain specific areas.

Unless you know the chatty nature of Jacobs will really be a full on hit for her, I would suggest trying MAHE with another program (Lials, Forester ...). Two programs by the same creator in the same style could be putting too many eggs in the basket. MAHE is great book to work parts of into the mix over time. Algebra is so fundamental to understanding all that lies beyond and the sciences that it deserves a solid march through.

John Suchocki's Conceptual Chemistry and his uncle Paul Hewitt's Conceptual Physics would both be options you can find relatively inexpensively and do without the math background.

PS, if you decide to read Pete's a Pizza use a paper grocery bag to make a huge slice of pizza (make sure to cut a wider arc for the large end and roll it to look like a pizza edge.)

Simple to make with brown construction paper (or old paper sacks) and green tissue paper or construction paper. A palm grows in a layered trunk manner of sorts anyway so piecing it together is more dimensionally real and the whole thing would make a fun project to work together doing.

Honestly, take a deep breath and go for one solid year of learning. It really is 5 subject areas and an elective. You can spend like crazy, have all the best stuff on the shelves and fret yourself to the brink...or you can take a deep breath and tackle finding something you can live with for each subject. I would second guess myself to distraction if I didn't spend time around a large number of teenagers and see they really just need to learn to write effectively, understand maths and how to apply them and gain a solid science background. Absent gross neglect or utter idolness, most will find their way to college somewhere. You care, you want to do well and you can design a program of study that works for you and your teen. You will make mistakes, but you can choose to correct them. The traditionally schooled student who winds up with a mistake in terms of a poor teacher match or poorly designed course faces restrained choices, you can adjust and adapt as works for you and your teen.

Regentrude: I agree with you about the wasted three years of middle school in the US. I will never forget how disgusted I was when Dd's elementary teachers in a AG school kept stressing the need to prepare them for the requirements of middle school (which really meant teaching them to conform to processes largely designed to make grading and evaluation easier for middle school teachers...ex: notebooks organized in x manner). When it really hit me just how much the content had changed from my experience, it meant pulling Dd and fundamentally reworking the foundations. The stovepiping of content areas across all grade levels is one of my greatest beefs with the the system in the US generally. I did not realize until I started homeschooling Dd just how valuable the more integrated and classical studies model I had experienced had been. The science and math sequences especially bother me. Pre-algebra, life science, pre-calculus, even Alg 1 vs Alg 2 sequencing ... all odd when your really think about it. The thing I see as I am walking through AP's with Dd is a specific test and name associated with what I experienced as basic solid college prep studies long ago. Watching several students we know start and work in college over the past couple of years has prompted a great deal of pondering. Many of them never really covered an array of good literature in high school and with the trends of the day are not finding it in college either. They temporarily mastered various line items for threshold exams, but lack a working fluid knowledge of the sciences or maths, lack real communication skills in their foreign languages and seem to write without purpose or voice. It concerns me that perhaps generations of this is watering down the undergraduate college experience.

GGardner quote from the NY Times Admissions article thread: "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." The above appeared in responses to the thread re: NY Times Admissions reviewer commentary and really struck a chord with me. We start Dd's next school year in a couple of weeks and as I try to work out course pacing, scope and goals, I find myself torn. On the one hand, Dd could build a fairly impressive set of academic achievements over the next several years. On the other, we could really strive for solid coverage with effective redundancy to build a foundation. My heart leans strongly to a foundational approach, my head leans toward the "OMG it is crazy competitive these days...hurry to check the next shiny box." Let me give a couple of examples: Dd never really did study of earth, space and weather in a comprehensive way. We spent a great deal of middle school covering the far too many gaps the "debacle that was public gifted education" left us to cure. I would love to really do a great study of these topical areas, but doing so would take time that will mean foregoing either AP Chemistry or AP Biology and leave her transcript listing coursework that hardly notes the real rigor and depth she would experience. I would also love to let her work through Saxon Calculus and then do AOPS Precalculus and Calculus for a year to come at it all from a second perspective. Allowing time to do so would mean foregoing some other shiny box she could check. The pressure to go the shiny box route is heavy, demographically our area is filled with seeming overachievers (and some legit ones). Striking a balance for us may mean adding an extra year (allowing us to do a comparative religions course, art history, music theory, study of markets/investing.....and a third foreign language along the route). I see how targeted the coursework is toward given shiny box type achievements and I do feel it often looks advanced but lacks enduring foundational value. We dwell in the world of the 8 plus AP over highschool public schooler and yet rarely encounter ones that can really articulate a multidimensional/interdisciplinary response or engage in novel problem solving. I wonder if it is a matter of mock versions of shiny box achievements. Just wanted to see some discussion of where the line falls.

GGardner, I am taking a selection from your post to start a thread because I really appreciate what you stated and would like to see discussion of the point made (pro or con).

There are so many different ways to be a highschooler (honors at a school with no AP's, selective prep academies, boarding students, AP heavy course loads, IB, homeschool with a huge array, competitive athelete....). Admissions sort all those pathways and all the nontraditional student types. I wonder more and more often if there is really any way to say there is one distinct path anyone can really rely on to guide how to prep for admissions. This is why I lean toward the idea of doing what works for Dd and hoping result will be a match we may or may not currently have on our radar.

A 10th grade year AP Physics B, AP Latin and Precalc/Calc is a challenging year regardless of the rest of the courses being taken (debate, history and English). I would be very reluctant to add anything further, especially given his swim schedule. Cummulatively, he will have completed 4 AP's before entering his Junior year in a variety of areas. He is on track to present a very impressive body of work.

Nope!

:lol:

Even in the stone ages when I graduated the advice was if you have a specialty area of interest look at the graduate schools for it and work backwards in selecting where to obtain a BS/BA. When doing so the results can be a bit eye opening. We would look at which schools and majors the grad school accepted over a period of several years. I suspect this may be even more true now. The other piece of advice we got that served well is to think about the community to which you want to belong. If you know you want to remain in your state beyond graduation, an in-state school may offer a great deal better networking than an out of state one. If you suspect you will be looking for more national options, then a brand may matter more.

The answer would be yes with a caveat. I am careful not to double dip too much. If we are listing something as an extracurricular activity, I don't count it for credit as well. This is a bit challenging and I sometimes wonder how fair it really is given that many public high schoolers have a band/theatre/chorus class for credit as a fine art and then have these listed as extras as well. I tend to treat is as a class, but if anything goes above and beyond (competitions that are optional, plays that the ps'ers are also in not via their classes...that sort of thing) I will treat that portion as the extracurricular and the rest as fine arts or PE.

TY both of you (Regentrude and FloridaLisa). I wasn't sure if I was expressing the question well, but you both hit what I am mulling. That dance/theatre/music schedule rules us and focusing on a meal sitting down together is really something I think we may make an extra effort to do better this year. It may have to be breakfast or lunch, but yeah it would be nice to reorient a bit in that direction. This is the first summer in a while that I did not build in time to make sure some academics were done and we will see how that works for us as the Fall is under way. Doing math in the summer has been a real help to the year's schedule in past years, this year will be a new challenge in that we didn't. One help is we will have less drive time than past years due to some consolidation of the extras. Maybe that alone will take some of the frenzied feeling out of the mix.

The Teaching Company has a course that might fit the bill. We have not used them, but I have heard positive comments from those who have used them to do a review. We are considering picking up the Pre-Calc and Calculus ones next year because of the positives we have heard.

When Dd was in school, it often felt like we had her only when she was tired or on the way to something else. Although her life is far fuller and more active as a homeschooler, we really do appreciate being more a part of it generally and not having to sign in or undergo a background check just to be a part of her waking hours. We love that we can schedule the big projects and assignments so that the choice between time with extended family or failing to meet someone else's deadline is not there. Dd finds that many of her in school friends complain about not being able to do as much on weekends because their families insist that time be for family as it is the only time they have available. I am glad we don't have to say no to something she would enjoy and benefit from just because it means giving up the only remaining time during the week.