Beautifully said, hornblower.

Is it better to teach a book that most of the class will refuse to read/be unable to read and rely on "she can't fail the whole class", or to try and teach something that they will actually read? It is frequently said in homeschooling circles, "The inferior curriculum that gets done is better than a superior curriculum that doesn't get taught" -- I submit that the same thing is true in public schools.

How old is she?

One of my mother's worst insults for food is: "It tastes like it ought to be good for you."

Just eat the pie filling with a spoon :)

Oh, I misunderstood, sorry.

I agree with 8fill. I wonder if his reluctance to develop contingency plans is because he sort of feels as if he will "jinx" Harvard by planning for anything else?

Going off your last post it really sounds as if he doesn't want to go to school this year at all. Is this ok with you? Have you told him it's ok? I think (and pardon me, please, if I'm telling you what you've already done) that you all need to have a heart to heart about whether he actually wants to go this year and if he doesn't, brainstorm about interesting things he could do instead.

You know, a gap year would not be the end of the world either. Does he need a break from the treadmill of rush-rush-rush-rush-rush? Is there something non-academic that he'd be interested in volunteering for during the coming year? Could he apply for a visa to do one of those work-abroad-for-a-year programs? I'm just tossing out ideas at this point ... The issues with joining the military (if he's not very committed to it and is just doing it because he doesn't know what else to do) are the very real probability of getting shot at and having to shoot at someone else, and the fact that there's a minimum time limit on the commitment. A job or volunteer year avoids that issue.

Nope nope nope. Tonight's a heck no because I refuse to shop on holidays, and tomorrow's a nope because too many people drive me nuts. I'm doing my Black Friday shopping on amazon.com.

I just wrapped my hands in cloths (not getting my oven mitts dirty for this) and grabbed it by the drumsticks.

I would also recommend that she make sure to emphasize the problems with returning the response papers on the evaluation forms that the department sees (I assume they exist). It would be best if there were as little emotion as possible -- something along the lines of "There were x response papers worth y% of our grade. We submitted the first one on Date and never received feedback through the entire semester. This made it impossible to find areas for improvement in subsequent response papers." His chair ought to know that he's doing this.

Please don't read it that way, scoutermom. Of course he should apply to elite schools if he is near or above their median. It is a crapshoot and he might get in. He just shouldn't make his entire high school career about trying to make himself someone that the elite schools want. Some of the Illinois state schools (based on your name) are also very good. I'm not sure what he's interested in but in my field (math) UIC and UIUC are quite good and would definitely be able to challenge an above-average student, and many schools with doctoral programs wouldn't be too bad either.

It depends on how you stray from the syllabus and what you do. Covering stuff out of order? Not really a problem. Changing the grade boundaries so that grades drop? A problem. Not giving feedback or grades until the end of the semester is a serious problem. I can't imagine anyone I've worked for being ok with me just telling people "it'll be ok, it'll be ok" while not marking their tests in time for them to actually learn anything from them. That being said, it depends a lot on institutional culture -- what do the other students in her class think? Is this common? Is this person full-time or adjuncting?

Roasted the turkey breast side down and then flipped it. It was awesome. Yorkshire pudding fell completely. I threw it out and skipped it.

I think this is probably the best solution if you don't know the preferences of your guests. The biggest reason I don't peel mine is because, as stated above, that's where all the nutrients are.

I'm not sure if this really counts as a homeschool tool, but amazon's Kindle Fires are on sale for Black Friday.

Agree with Crimson Wife. The flagship state school would probably be different, but I went to a University of State - Rural Town school to save money and because I always heard that it didn't matter where you did your undergrad. There are lightyears of difference between what my courses covered (even in the major) and the types of thinking we were asked to do versus what they're asked to do at high-end schools. Half the students in my major wouldn't have made it through at the more high-end schools, and most of the rest would have been the struggling C students vs. the coasting A students. If the internet had been around, I might have been aware of this difference. There are definitely plenty of schools outside the Ivy League which are just as good as far as education goes -- I could come up with a fair list for mathematics, for example -- but the idea that most state schools are going to be just as good is just plain wrong. Schools without a graduate program (master's is usually enough) in the area tend to not be able to offer upper-division electives simply because they just don't have enough students to fill them. I would say that most flagship state schools would be just as good.

I don't peel them.

Yes, many people do this when moving directly from one book to the next without a break. As to whether you specifically should do this, there are good arguments for both ways -- they are both reasonable. My personal preference would be to do the testing through as your wife would like to do. But if your son would enjoy doing the relatively easy lessons at the beginning of the book, it would not be wrong to do that either. If he starts to complain that these problems are too easy, then I would definitely do the testing through.

I think there's a big difference between tossing out an app to a "reach" school which may or may not be an Ivy, and filling your high school years with stuff that isn't "you" in order to appeal to colleges.

OP, you might want to update your initial post telling people where your update is -- every time you update you get a few well-meaning people responding to the original long-since-settled question.

But by golly they took a post-algebra-2 class. Look at our student achievement rise! Why aren't our test scores rising? :rant:

I can't answer some of your questions, but: If a student is able to apply grammar rules and create well-crafted sentences, I would consider grammar instruction done at high school. As far as "research papers she will never need", I would hesitate to completely eliminate them as whatever she majors in at university, she may end up completing them in other courses for general education.

With English it's a lot easier to just label it as "English 9", "English 10", etc., even if the books were not normally considered high school level -- this is not customary in math. What the PS will customarily do in math is use an "easier" course which teaches just the basics and then label it the same as the regular course. There are a number of reasons why this is a really dumb idea in math, but until we manage to convince our legislators that just because you mandate a post-algebra-2 course doesn't mean that you're going to improve the math skills of high school students, we are stuck with what we have. So what homeschoolers should do is try to figure a way to teach the student where s/he is, and then label it so it doesn't look too dissimilar from PS peers. I can assure you that as someone who *teaches* math at a university, I would much rather have a student who took two years each on algebra and geometry and actually understood them enter than someone who had been pushed through a "lite" precalculus which had never moved beyond monkey-see-monkey-do. The students who've gone through the "lite" courses tend to not understand anything and have to start in developmental math *anyway*. It's far more common than you think for students with precalculus on the transcript to have to start in intermediate algebra.