My "pain points" re homeschooling are all domestic. I grew up watching the Jetsons. Where is my Rosie the Robot and Foodarackacycle food serving machine that I was promised? My Roomba vacuum, Suvie kitchen robot, Hero pill dispenser, Jura superautomatic espresso maker, Bartesian bartender, and Alexa are all sad and pricey substitutes. (Kidding, I don't own all of these, but wish I did! At least, until Rosie comes along.)

S will be taking Intermediate Algebra in the fall, starting in August, ideally any night during the week other than Tuesday. For the Spring semester, he will be taking precalculus, starting in January. Same schedule -- any night during the week other than Tuesday works best for us (he has Civil Air Patrol on Tuesday nights). I hope that he gets the chance to take one of your courses. 🙂

I don't know about at the high school level (because we didn't have fancy classes like anatomy at my high school), but biology was a pre-req for anatomy at most of the community colleges in my area (I had to take anatomy for nursing school). You might check the requirements to take anatomy in your area.

Oh gosh. I want to say that Sacha took that in the spring of 4th grade, I think? I don't remember anything one way or the other. We have always been fans of OG3 and MCT, so I assume it was fine. The following year (5th, I think) was when he took some high school level Bravewriter classes -- one in persuasive writing and then another in research, as I recall. He was able to pass the essay portion of the California High School Proficiency Exam (a high school diploma equivalent that enables him to enroll in community college classes) in the fall of 5th grade, when he was 10, with just that OG3 Pa

Today. He swears he is almost done. Mhmmm, sure. He sucks at trig, btw. Both he and I are like whaaaaat when it comes to trig.

Omg, I looked at your email chain from yesterday afternoon for a brief second and I'm like, you wasted 2 hours yesterday saying absolutely nothing except how your software program is being wonky. Focus, kid!

I pink puffy heart you. I am so glad that I am not the only one with this kid. I have no idea how he solves problems. It's been this way for so many years that I have just given up. A real mathematician is trying to sort out his ADHD brain at the moment and I feel like sending her a case of wine because she must be banging her head against a wall by now, trying to get him to focus and sort out his thoughts into some semblance of a logical structure. It seems like the only fair thing I can offer her in exchange.

This is what I do. I wouldn't be able to help him with a lot of the questions at this point, even if I wanted to.

I would take Advanced Government through Online G3. Then, if he wants to study and sit for the AP exam, if he feels confident and has room in his schedule later in the year, he can. But, it won't look terrible if he doesn't sit for it because it isn't an official AP (but still says advanced, so you could assign honors credit/GPA points), and OG3 builds flexibility into the schedule.

I was clueless about what to ask for and the ladies here really helped me to clarify the accommodations I thought we would need for Sacha going forward. If you do a search, I am pretty sure that I posted all the accommodations that we put in his 504. If you cannot find it, let me know and I will dig out his 504 and paste it for you. I know how hard it is to anticipate what it is you are wanting when you are new to all of this. Then, I had to start all over again with the IEP process for services (for Ronen), which is a whole other animal, and the ladies here similarly came to my rescue. ❤️

I am a huge planner too, and know that I had something similar when Sacha was in second grade (I don't do this with Ronen -- have learned my lesson!), but MamaSprout is right. This would be waaaaaaay too repetitive for my kid and very history focused. I am all for reading the Great Books, and perennial favorites, but there is also a lot of amazing contemporary lit that comes out each year. Also, Sacha decides to veer in different directions -- one semester he wants Shakespeare, then Dystopian Lit, then Science Fiction, then Russian Lit, etc. No way to really plan what specific direction he mig

I have one son (younger) who needed an IEP for services and one (older) who only needed a 504 for accommodations (he is PG, but 2e), but as the others have said, I made both schools go through extensive evals to ensure that we didn't miss anything and also that everything was well-documented. My advice is to have the school handle all of the accommodations requests with the ACT/SAT/AP. I thought this was going to be a headache, but the school disability coordinator has the relationships with ACT/SAT/AP folks and it took no time to get the paperwork back from the College Board saying that my ol

Thank you for asking this. I got an email request for more information from the financial aid office at Stanford (Sacha is applying to Stanford Online High School) and I was wondering whether I should read into it. I was hoping that they wouldn't waste their time working on financial aid issues for a student they planned to reject, but it sounds I shouldn't try to read the tea leaves. Another month of waiting....

ETA: Oh, and the wine in Paso! Apparently, I am drunk and cannot even edit! I quoted myself instead. Ha!

Yay! Cal Poly (assuming SLO) is such a lovely place. My dad used to be their head of security after he retired from LAPD, many moons ago. When I was stationed in Monterey, I used to drive down to visit him regularly. I also had a good friend from high school who went there from ArchE, so she would invite me to some of the social events. She loved her experience there, but got totally burned out in their ArchE program because it was so hard. She ended up going to business school in France and lives in London now working in a completely different industry. Sorry for the random story! That all ju

I'm glad you chimed in. That was the one that Sacha was most interested in, so I appreciate the feedback.

Omg, Minesweeper! I used to love that game! Do they still make it?

No clue. He comes to me sometimes when he's stuck, and all I ever say is 1) did you check the book, 2) did you check the message board, or 3) did you read the transcript again? He told me that he does normally use Geogebra. That's all I know.

This is the struggle we are having right now, but Professor Not a Number has been gracious enough to help Sacha try to learn to organize his non-neurotypical thoughts. It's a painful struggle, so I feel you. He literally is clueless about what they want him to do, and I just had no idea how to help him because the geometry that I learned was nothing on the level of AoPS.

This is why we switched to AoPS online classes. We were getting none of this in Sacha's AoPS Academy classes. He is learning (the painfully hard way) now how to organize his thoughts. It's just crazy to me how he can get blue for the week in both Alcumus and the challenge problems and completely bomb the writing problem because he has no clue how to organize his ADHD thoughts in a structured way.

I think you will be happy with the class, then. In my 101 Micro and Macro, we definitely covered different schools of economic thought, but had a strong PoV. I would expect that any basic micro and macro series would cover the difference between neo-Classical, traditional Keynesian, and neo-Keynesian thought, and how those schools of thought play out in how they view decision-making on an individual level and policy-making on the government level. Perhaps, the PAH class does that adequately. The course description just struck me as having a specific PoV -- that's all.

We ended up finding some high school STEM Olympiad winners, who are mentoring younger kids in STEM subjects to raise money for food banks. They are running classes, geared toward STEM Olympiad prep and other related subjects of interest, on a donation basis. Sacha is going to try a few of them out this semester to see if he likes them and might continue with them next year to shore up his competency in all the foundational courses (bio, chem, physics) and explore other areas of interest. Also, Jackie found me a biotech class at Open Tent Academy that looks up his alley if these other cou

Right, but there is a massive amount of extracurricular commentary in how you teach those courses.

I attended Claremont McKenna College, which had a very Chicago School/neoclassical PoV, but exposure to other schools of economic thought is very important to me.

I suppose this doesn't count re whether it's a secular class or not, but I took a look at their AP econ classes and they seemed to have a very specific viewpoint that did not seem very balanced.