DS has done the SAT and the ACT and found the ACT a bit more straightforward. Also the writing is entirely optional - with the SAT it's the first section and you either have to write something or sit through it and take a 0 on that part....

Not required for graduation.... but definitely encouraged for the college-bound. No foreign language in our local elementary school although they might learn a song in Spanish or something - not formal instruction... and although there are two languages offered in junior high and four in high school, it would be uncommon for anyone to take more than one.

My main reason for requesting grades when I did was that for that year it was DS's main math instruction, and the instructors were (for once) not his mother. Math is the only area where he had never had an outside teacher before AoPS... We'll never have a non-mom letter of recommendation from a math instructor, so I feel like I really ought to have something from someone else to point to when I get to write that one myself. When he did AMC prep classes I didn't request grades, both because we would have the test results to objectively evaluate his ability and because those were never his main math course for any one year. As another poster has mentioned, the letter you get is more than just a grade - it has a very nice, detailed evaluation of how the kid did in class (problem sets and class participation). I would be fine with just the comments on problem sets, honestly... they're really detailed too... but just for sticking on the transcript I do like the one letter grade that I didn't make up myself.

He did it a couple years ago and found it pretty easy. All written, timed, but no scratch paper, so it's meant to be mental math. He's in class right now, but I'll ask him for more details at lunch time.... The one thing I really liked about it was that we had been almost exclusively problem-solving oriented up to then (not focusing on computation speed at all), and it was good to know that our approach hadn't hurt his speed and accuracy at all.

This isn't the standard approach, but it works for me..... Consider what you'll need at the end (college application? scholarships? whatever you're aiming for). What do you want on that transcript? If one credit of sewing is going to be a benefit and four would be excessive, go for one. If she's going to be applying somewhere that four years of sewing will help her application, go for that. If she's applying for a program that doesn't care about sewing at all, make it an extracurricular. Once you know what you're aiming for, establish that she has done (or will have done) the work. Hours can be useful, but consider also what sort of portfolio you could put together showing her ability and effort as well as her improvement over time. Are there particular techniques she has mastered? Anything that has sparked her interest in particular, that she has put extra time into or done extra projects on? Creative changes she made to existing patterns? Experimenting with fabrics? Even with more standard courses like English, I like to consider all of these things. DS needs an English credit for every year. He has an English credit for every year. I want to establish that he did sufficient work for each, so we have papers he wrote and he can intelligently discuss the books he read. And he has good SAT scores. I personally find counting hours fairly tedious and not particularly helpful. DS does a lot of work every year - I have no doubt that he makes whatever hour cutoff anyone wants to set (and then some) but what I really want is to be able to show up at the application deadline with the transcript he needs and the supporting material (test scores, portfolio, etc.) to establish that what I say we did is actually what was done - showing both that he has substantial ability in the areas he studied and that he improved from year to year. If I can't provide that, then no amount of arguing about how many hours it took will help.

We do tend to think of a -4 as "negative four" and a single value... but as Creekland says it's a matter of having a standard that we can be consistent with. In this case I think it's part of the problem with using the same sign for negative as for minus. If you had 1-4², it's clear (or at least clearer) that the four is the value that's squared and the operation in front of it is subtraction and happens after... or if you had -1*4² it wouldn't be confusing. It's only when you have the negative and the squaring run together as -4². This sort of thing really is kind of a trick question. Not because order of operations isn't absolutely vital, but because this particular point of it will catch so many people that if you want to be sure of communicating clearly, I'd use the parentheses.

The "-" is interpreted as multiplication (times -1), so the exponent happens first. The way to make it happen before the exponent would be to put only the -4 in the parentheses, as (-4)².

We did The Raven.... Wrote out the text and marked it for meter and rhyme, found alliteration and consonance/assonance, interesting word choices, etc. But then we did some interesting followup stuff too. We compared it to a rewritten version without the letter E in A Void (Georges Perec), and talked about how much of the sound of the poem was retained even with very different words... We watched a youtube of a Simpsons Halloween episode with Bart as the raven (LOL).... We read a paper Poe wrote about his writing process, called "The Philosophy of Composition", and we read a critical (very critical) essay by T.S. Eliot called "From Poe to Valery". I thought it was a good poem for discussing word choice (especially with Poe's self-analysis and Eliot's criticism), the significance of the sound of the poem (with Perec's rewriting), and issues of performance (The Simpsons). The performance discussion continued with other poems (Allen Ginsberg does a terrible job reading his own poetry!), and the overlap between poetry and song lyrics (Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen). It's not the world's best poem, but it's well known, widely discussed, and accessible.... and I just like it. :)

Ramping up worked really well when DS was little... Actually schooling year round worked really well then too. As he has gotten older (and especially with high school work!), we both need the summer break, but we're also both better and jumping back in smoothly with a full load or nearly-full load. The one thing I've noticed, though, especially with online classes, is that it's kind of nice to take one day to get oriented. Like that first PS class of the year when all you do is go over the syllabus... DS makes sure he has his books where he can find them, organizes his computer files, gets all his logins for online things, finds the calculator, sharpens pencils.... that's a nice start to the year. With his current schedule DS has a dozen logins to keep track of plus shortcuts to the various websites he needs, a gazillion programs and files he'll need at hand, videos online or downloaded, little plug-ins and apps for macrons and accents and math notation.... Just getting it all downloaded, installed, updated, and tested is a pretty full day! That was today. Tomorrow he has actual assignments. :)

I generally think that you have five years to make something of an award... So if he did something impressive in 8th grade I'd be much more likely to include that than something in sixth... But also if that was the last he had done - like an essay competition in middle school but no writing competitions in high school - I'd probably skip it. What I'd be likely to include are later middle school (8th grade, maybe 7th) where the awards form part of a progression with further work in high school, showing early interest that turned into bigger and better things in high school. And I think you can skip the objective - if it's an interview for college admissions, they pretty well know what his objective is! :)

10% of any project is what you planned on doing. 90% is the (expensive and/or dangerous) problems you found after you started, which had to be fixed before you could proceed.

This exactly. If I say "we did statistics for math this year" everyone assumes I mean we just spent a year averaging things. :glare: And my saying "no really - I know what statistics means" doesn't carry much weight. But with the AP exam it's clear that we covered much more than that, in sufficient detail to get a good score. We do AP at home - not at school - and it's not a matter of teaching to the test but of recognizing where the things he is already doing could be confirmed by an exam. Environmental science next year is a huge bunch of things he's continuing from Field Ecology last year, well beyond the syllabus, and we're adding in a little bit of textbook to fill in a gap or two. But really the bulk of the course is research, not test prep. Physics and Calculus are closer to the syllabus because they're more textbook courses, but actually we're rearranging a lot to fit another project - again, research, backed up by a little test prep.

He hates Ikea... hates the crowds, hates the quantity of stuff there, very skeptical of the meatballs..... :lol: I took him there once and we were in and out in ten minutes with one desk and him on his phone posting to FB that he had a new least favorite place in the world. Me though? I'd have to leave the cards at home and take exactly the right amount of cash. And then I'd probably change my list while I was there.

This is exactly what I want :) DH just pointed out the palm oil in the ingredients list and I promised I'd look for a homemade recipe... after this jar is gone. :D

In the past we've spent a lot more (a WHOLE lot more) but at this point DS is out of a lot of lessons and classes and into more volunteering and working. So instead of an extra science or robotics club or class, he has a volunteer position with a watershed group and is putting together a robotics team of his friends in our basement. On the other hand he's about to need a new flute, which will be a significant expense... but not a monthly fee.

:party:

We bought one the second year that DS had online classes (so late middle school), because I was tired of sharing. I work on my own laptop, and sometimes it really isn't convenient for me to stop because it's time for his class! We started out with a public-areas-only policy, but it's gotten relaxed over the years without incident.

What I found with DS was that learning cursive in English and Russian helped his printing (in English - he never printed in Russian) tremendously. I really think it's more a matter of developing hand control, strength, and stamina rather than any particular shapes.

At that age we did a lot, and enjoyed it... As long as she's happy and you're not feeling stressed by the time and/or expense, I don't think there's anything wrong with a busy schedule. I always liked to have a day or two (including weekend days) entirely at home without anything on the calendar just for lazing around or getting into random projects. As DS got older we did more sit-down schoolwork and trimmed back the extracurriculars to just the things he was really devoted to. It's still busy, but it's a very focused kind of busy-ness.

DH is a huge Moliere fan and I'm a bit of a Russophile, so we're really looking forward to this year's theater season! :)

Rum Doodle fans are so few and far between - and it used to be a very difficult book to find in the US! So I have to ask - is that the source of your board name?? :D

I have no idea what it's going to be like, but I'm intrigued! They're doing Othello too, but we've seen it several times, and it always makes me sob which is a little awkward in public... lol

I did Zome with a group of late elementary to early high school kids, but my own child was 8-11 at the time. He doesn't make a representative sample though - his math has been extremely accelerated. I don't remember where I found Artmann, but at the time we were surrounded by universities where I had library privileges, so we didn't have to pay for it - we just checked it out again every few months. If I couldn't borrow it I would absolutely pay for it though - it's worth the price.

I haven't read Into Thin Air yet, but there's another about the same season, written by Tenzing Norgay's son, called Touching My Father's Soul. It's part travelog/ mountaineering book, part autobiography, part biography (of his father) and partly a memoir of his spiritual journey and coming "home"... It's definitely worth a look. And if you want something light (both of those are quite tragic, being about that particular climbing season), The Ascent of Rum Doodle is really hysterical once you've read anything about mountain climbing. For the Everest-specific connection, there's a bar in Kathmandu called Rum Doodle's... It's a thin connection, but there it is! LOL

We had a companion book by Benno Artmann that made it rather more comprehensible than the straight text, and we spread it over the course of about three years. We were also using Zome geometry materials and the AoPS number theory book and course, which both went rather well with it.