Keep a pluggin' away at the math, but take heart. Many career scientists are not necessarily math experts. There is a lot of collaboration at universities for research, with research teams involving science people, math/statistics people, etc. If a talent for science exists, keep nurturing it! Like English is a tool for communicating ideas verbally, math is a tool for communicating quantitative information. It's really just another language to learn.

Dear Yoyoma, you stated that you feel paralyzed with the gnawing fear that your dc has "outgrown" you, and is turning out to be STEM oriented rather than humanities oriented, which is your strength. This is a temporary feeling which will pass once you get your internet "sealegs" again. Good luck! Of course, your DC is really just coming of age intellectually, and all of the liberal arts foundation and solid grounding is now in place. You have in a sense, "done your job" providing a humanizing, ethical, and historical framework for a young person who is (perhaps) rushing toward a STEM field in our technocratic society. DC would probably never have gotten that foundation in any other way. GOOD JOB! :hurray: Technical training without ethics, history, and an appreciation of humanity through art, literature, etc. arguably leads to an amoral result. I thank you personally, for the enriching gift you give us all by presenting our world with a well-rounded future adult! Never doubt for a minute your contribution and your own inherent value-addedness here. Cast away forever the word "outgrown" for that applies to clothing, not good ideas coming from good people.

Been there and freaked that, as well. My DS14 "solved" the problem of sleepless nights/college credential freakout by announcing he wanted to go to ps at the end of 8th. We enrolled him and he is in the middle of placement testing, etc. It was harder for me than it was for him. After a month of reflection, I have decided to remain headmistress of his EDUCATION even though I have outsourced his CREDENTIALING to the local ps. N.B. the diff. I am still the strategic planner, the big picture person, and the ps is the day-to-day tactician, fighting the smaller battles of lab work, testing, etc. You might say I promoted myself from major to general with creative outsourcing, and, more importantly, MENTAL REFRAMING. Good luck.

It's harder for you than for your kid! Hang in there! You have not abdicated the role of headmistress! You are supervising the school..... Good luck. :hurray:

Follow this link for a well-organized math review site, with a question bank. http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/math/ALGEBRA/math-ALGEBRA.htm#Coordinate_Geometry. Although it is for the NY Regent's examinations (which are given to HS students to earn a Regent's diploma), the site is applicable, and b/c it's Integrated Algebra, there is a little bit of everything there. I second the suggestion of Khan Academy. The Regent's site has the advantage of being broad but not too deep. Using the quick review lessons can quickly identify weaknesses which can be explored more in depth at Khan. Good luck.

We do "camp" in the summer: Since the plays have 5 acts, we do one act per day (read along to a well-performed CD), hitting pause when we need to for explanations and discussion. Then, on Friday, we watch usually the BBC production (unedited). For Hamlet, we watched several cinema productions and compared them. We are lucky to have a local outdoor Shakespeare festival in the Hudson Valley, and so this year, for All's Well That Ends Well, we can have a live performance to watch on the Sat. after we finish "camp." The kids like this, and since we do the "work" during Dad's "work week" it all feels very businesslike. Also, the chopped up one-act-per-day format means we only spend about an hour a day on the project..... doable!

I recommend Lingua Latina by Hans Orberg. It sounds like he's ready to start an immersion course which develops and ear/eye for Latin idiom. It's self-paced and the Exercitia Latina workbook which goes along with the text provides targeted practice on specific grammar points. The College Companion text which goes with the text contains an English-language discussion of the grammar points in addition to useful tables and a dictionary.

I am blinded with science. Planning for first high schooler for this fall: I am trying to decided b/w a conceptual or algebra-based physics course for my son. I'm still reviewing texts and deciding if the algebra skills are solid enough for the STEM course.

What about volunteering to help out at a dig run by a college, state archaeology dept (maybe in the Dept. of Nat. Resources?), or even the fed gov't (Bureau of Land Management has archaeologists). Digs are usually low budget affairs and welcome volunteers. U. Chicago used to run a field school in Kampsville, IL which was well-regarded. Do you have a specific interest, such as American, Central American, Greek, Asian, etc.? Another idea if you are near a museum or academic dept: docent/volunteer work in the museum. Stratigraphy, soils, and surveying are excellent toolbox skills for an archaeologist, and are vital for understanding site formation, explaining preservation bias, making wise decisions on where to put in the first exploratory trench, mapping what you find, etc. There are also interesting tie-ins from paleontology, zoo-archaeology (the animal bones at the site), paleo-climatology and tree-ring analysis. A whole other interesting area of arch. projects involves re-creating native technologies: find the old copper smelting furnace in the ground. Next, try to replicate it and smelt copper with your modern furnace. Etc. Just some thoughts.

I agree that vocab programs are not needed if tons of literature is in the offing. However, I could not resist "The Word Within the Word" Vol. I, by Michael Clay Thompson. The book is organized into lists of word roots, mostly from Latin and Greek. Less-common derivatives are used to illustrate word-formation. The activities are well-designed; overall the book is a great resource for the teacher. One of my favorite activities is the Guess challenge, in which students make well-informed guesses about the meaning of some truly bizarre words. We had to go to the OED on a few of these for definitions! Analogy practice is well-written, with different logical categories used in different questions to increase the challenge/insight. Another great activity revolves around the writing prompts given in the text -- some stealth composition-writing is always welcome! I love the neologism challenge -- make up your own word (but it has to make sense from the roots!) This is one vocab book that, in providing a potpourri of well-designed word activities, has made vocab study productive and fun. The intro to the teacher indicates that is essential to memorize the twenty stems and their one-word meanings (which comprise each lesson). I can't tell you how useful it is to have instant recall of the meaning of the roots -- you can read and understand faster. Learning to encode lists in memory was super-difficult for me until I watched the Teaching Company's three hour lecture series on "Scientific Secrets for a Powerful Memory," with Peter Vishton. I've been using my brain wrong all these years..... Rabbit trails~ enjoy.

Regentrude, does the AOPS style of instruction, in your family's experience, develop the "creative" side of math problem-solving? Secondly, are the students able to solve problems using the traditional formulae and techniques as well? Forgive my ignorance of this program. I would want to develop the creative side of math problem solving while also being able to perform ordinary problems. We use NEM from Singapore.

I agree with Nan that part of the creativity issue is finding the area for your own creativity. For example, I haven't got a single artistic bone in my body, but I love creating systems around the house that reduce work or make work more productive. Maybe I'm creatively mundane or mundanely creative. Either way, I get to be "creative" when I play to my strengths or interests.

My youngest enters 9th grade this fall, followed by sister in 8th. I plan to continue my old time management trick during the high school years: Monday is cleaning day. I'm not kidding. On Monday I am around the house (cleaning, etc.), but definitely not available. In fact, I have a hearing protection headphone with pleasant radio/music to cancel out the vacuum cleaner and other noise. It's a military campaign to restore order. The kids have their academic calendars filled out with independent work -- for the history, science, and lit subjects, this means reading, for the IEW, it means writing/outlining, for math, it means review/check your work. By the end of the day, I have a decent supply of fresh undies and clean grout to get through another week, and the kids have some time management practice and completed assignments. Oh, and they must clean their rooms and change sheets, too. My son handles all the yard work and my daughter has to do lighter gardening and housekeeping in the room which she messes up pretty badly with art projects. Don't visit me on Sunday - it's hopeless..... entropy is real. Another time management tool I picked up during law school: do as much work as you can from Monday to Friday so that you can eke out a dabbins of free time on the weekend. Sometimes it isn't possible, for example, during test week. However, I am constantly reminding the kids to view Monday to Friday as a work week so that assignments are not delayed to the weekend. Work while you work, play while you play.

I don't know if he's advanced; in 8th grade now we just finished Singapore NEM part B with little trouble. Frankly, I had planned on 9th grade physical science, 10th g. chem, 11th grade bio, 12th grade more physics. I planned to outsource 10-12 grade science. DS 14 has an instinct for physical principles that I don't have, so I don't want to "hold him back". My instinct is telling me that in 9th grade it would be okay to prioritize math (again) over lab science. Am I crazy?

New to ninth grade science. Does this course have a lab component? Should it be attempted by a non-scientist mom/teacher?

Maybe the Oxford/Cambridge tutorial style of teaching would be useful or appealing?

For 9th grade, you could go from 1500 to about 1850. This gives you the Age of Discovery, Renaissance/Reformation, colonialism, and the beginning of all the revolutions which led to the modern world, to name a few things. It could be a great year for reinforcing geography, exploring languages, music and art, and even using some of the Great Courses for visual learning. You could also slip in some Am. history here, too, to take the pressure off of 11th grade.

I have hsed for the K-8 years and will begin my last four year sequence 9-12 this fall. I have done the WTM rotation of ancient-medieval-early modern-modern twice now, using age appropriate material and assignments. We used Susan Bauer's SoTW for K-4 but branched out to mom assignments in 5th grade. I have also doubled up on history and offered US history as a separate history course since 4th grade. Each year for US history, we go into a little more depth. For example, last semester we spent four months studying battles of the Civil War and leadership models for the generals involved. Things got very detailed, and the subject captured DD12 and DS14's interest. (this was 7th and 8th grade). Concurrently, we were doing modern history. The 20th century has a lot of US history to study, so the subjects overlap nicely. I really think that US history is worth the extra effort of offering a separate course from the world history, and with an older student, you can assign independent work or on-line coursework and achieve a lot of learning goals. If you are worried about having enough material -- define history broadly: history chronology, history of music, history of art, period literature and even political theory, history of religion, history of science and technology. This also gives you the breadth you (or your student) may need. Good luck, and welcome to the greatest adventure~

Reading works twice and then discussing them is the technique used by author Marguerite Yourcenar, who was educated at home and discussed literature with her father in a one-on-one tutorial. I doubt that papers were written. I think that literary criticism is a learned skill set like so many higher subjects, and that to some extent experience in reading it and in reading lots of works is most important -- definitely more important than writing the 5,000,000th paper addressing the ghost's meaning in Hamlet . I like Regentrude's approach of having her student attend literary discussions with pros. She learns to be articulate and how to "talk shop" in this specialized endeavor. Yourcenar's approach of reading a work twice washes the skeleton of plot away and lets the deeper meanings and the writing style itself emerge. This takes time, but might be useful approach with some students for some works of literature. I think this approach would be esp. appropriate with "astringent", meaning-packed works such as a Shakespeare play, Greek dramas, portions of Homer, and modern short stories. 2X reading would also allow a hyper-focus on style or form, esp. if the student is seeking to emulate another author.

For world literature, the Norton Anthology of World Literature provides a dabbins of this and that concerning less familiar, non-Western works. With editorial commentary, it could be a springboard for you to explore world lit.

Pickwick Papers by Dickens has a similar serial/picaresque format to Don Quixote. It's also zany and not ribald.

I agree with Wendy K that, as sovereign headmistresses of our home schools, we are beyond the pale of CC. Not only is CC irrelevant and inapplicable to our domains, if others assert jurisdiction over us, we know what to do. That is, to stick out our tongues and keep on a keepin.

The Pointer Brand jeans are cut with room in the crotch. These are like the jeans from yesteryear.

I read aloud Henty books for years to my kids when they were K-6. It seems like a lot of work at first, but it trains the ear for Dickens and builds a huge vocab. Plus, the history is accurate. The voice is English Protestant. We enjoyed "With Lee in Virginia" for a rebel's view of the Civil War, and my DS8thgrader loved "With Kitchener in the Soudan" Honestly, there is no greater collection of 19thc boys' adventure lit. Now, I have kids that read these books on their own and even Dickens, too. They are not put off by the long sentences and Latin derivative diction. Good luck!

We've done Singapore since K. Now I have DD(7th) and DS(8th) and we've moved into New Elementary Math by Singapore. In the early years, less is more in my opinion. A lot of programs throw a bunch of stuff at the kids which can be learned in 15 minutes when they are older, but valuable grammar-stage brain time is used for it when they should be focusing on living and breathing arithmetical operations. When you get to algebra, you want a kid that can multiply, divide, etc., and handle fractions, ration, and percentages in his sleep, You don't care if your kid has been exposed to everything there is to know about math. Go deep not wide, is my advice for the primary years. I guess that adds up to "don't worry, you're doing ok"