Leave it to Ds to find rather useless degrees! First it was Classics (which never really seems to go away) and now this one. He is very interested in becoming a diplomat, so perhaps it might be a useful one along the lines somewhere? Perhaps a PoliSci minor focusing in political philosophy....who knows....

I had a feeling it might fall somewhere in there. I snagged a cheapo audible Great Course called Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas that looks like a good overview of the big guys. It looks like it might give me some good general info. Amazon is sending me a textbook soon! Thank you for the list. It was very helpful.

You guys are so awesome! Leave it to The Hive to save my bacon again.

Andover. This way they could claim they "went to Andover" and would not be lying.

Quick question. If there is only one parent on a birth certificate (me, the mother), will it work? Bio dad is not in the picture, has never been in the picture, and is perfectly happy to never be in the picture. He opted for no name on the certificate. It says that BOTH parents have to appear. Well, if he is not listed as a parent, then what?

It sounds like she is upset about the consequences of her behavior. P2's is boring because the fun stuff is gone. She caused the fun stuff to be taken away (whether or not this was great parenting is another matter). Having her have to sit in the boring ickiness for at least a couple of months would seem reasonable to me. Of course she doesn't want to go. But continuously reminding her that these are the consequences of her actions seems like the best route. It sucks. Welcome to tough love. I do not think you force her to go after two months, but to just let her out of it is to say there is an easy out for doing something unexceptable. I will preface this by saying I am not a snuggly parent. I have to work very hard at snuggly as I did not come from a snuggly parent household. She is going to have to learn this sometime or the consequences as an older person will be drastic. It might not be a magic bullet, but it is a recurring reminder for quite a bit.

I am watching The Great Course: Visualizing Mathematics. While everything is not mindblowing, it has some really interesting bits.

Many libraries have storytimes in different languages. We attended Spanish storytime for years. Ds was never the recommended age, but it didn't bother him since the littles were more than happy that they new so much more Spanish than he did. Soon, they were evenly matched and Ds did not need to feel awkward trying to conversate because everyone's vocabulary was very limited.

Tech is moving in here, but they will live across the Columbia River to be in the liberal, highly educated neighboring town. Many families have tried it, but just did not want their kids around the ignorance here. Neighboring town has AP classes, lego robotics teams, an advanced program for placement that does not focus on age, ect. Unfortunately, it is in Oregon and we are Washington. Otherwise, Ds would participate in a lot of the afterschool programs and sports. As it is, our friend base is over there.

I have finally left retail, but distinctly remember a woman freaking out that I did not ask how her day was. She proceeded to change her order three times and get much angrier each time I did not read her mind. It definitely was a moment when a lightbulb went off about why on earth I was doing this. Granted, she was probably just having a bad day, but the concept that our society has these social heirarchies where it is okay to treat other people that badly really bothered me.

Math Mammoth is good, but b.o.r.ing. If you have a workbook kiddo, it is great. If you have a wiggly, bouncy one, not so much. Ds is definitely the latter :). Beast is great for wiggly, bouncy. Easy Grammar is quick, independent, and painless. It also spans many years, so no reinventing the wheel. However, it is another workbook-ish one. There are some fun vocab apps if she is just starving for words. Copywork is also a lot of fun if you allow picture drawing and art to enter the equation. At thrid grade, I would have done just about anything for access to a stack of gel pens and permission to doodle around my cursive practice.

We had to wait until Ds was old enough for online (this year, age 12). It completely changed how he thought about school. Academic, friendly competition?! How great is that?! Around here, very few families send their kids to college and deem CC senior year of high school to be uber fancy. We just don't talk about school. The idea that other kids would out perform Ds in Latin was shocking and very exciting. Slowly we will switch to all online, but right now a couple of classes is fun. The Internet opens up the world to outliers. If possible, find friends st the library, the hobby shop, rec sports. Years 10-12 were hard. It gets easier. Sorry for things currently being a bummer.

My humanities and politics kid is down the rabbit hole again. We are reading Plato's dialogs and The Republic, talking about how society and government interact, Trump, citizen responsibility, the DNC, electoral college, all that jazz. Along the way, he has somehow discovered Jeremey Bentham's Panopticon and is totally all in about this idea of how it creates a social prison. Well okay then. I have pulled the books 1984, Brave New World, and Foucault's Discipline and Punish. That should hold him for the moment. Thank You Internet! The problem is a larger one than just right now for me. I am completely out of my element. Ds as a younger child was fascinated with ancient myth and the stories a culture tells themselves. He loved deciphering power balances, social heirarchy messages, and cultural norms from these stories. That seems to have now morphed into (developed maybe?) the idea of how societies politially deal with outliers, create order, and self govern. My question is, what kind of sub-heading does this type of thought and study fall into? I know very little about these topics. He is giving me quite the crash course....

DP

Supposedly there are scholarships. I just didn't want to begin something we could not finish without help. Without a fairly permanent six years, the kid would not be getting any kind of diploma from them.

Five was NOTHING compared to two. You have made it! Celebration chocolate is in order! ðŸ©ðŸªðŸ«

So much $$$. For that price, we have opted for specialized programs (Lukeion for classics work for example) and AP's. If money were no object, they look pretty good and I have heard good things - High rigor, very little hand holding, quality instruction.

No gifted program. We live in a conservative, rural area. They don't even grade accellerate.There is a reason we homeschool. The district where Dh teaches has PreAP in middle school. Ds would just be default dumped into these classes, even if he has aleardy taken the AP test the class it is a prereq for. If we hollered about that, they would either put him in the STEM magnet (even though he is not a STEM kid) or dump him in the project based learning magnet (the catch all for creative thinkers who do not fit anywhere else). He would be expected to just be in a stack of extracurriculars like band, lego robotics, and a sport. Here most gifted programs have been eliminated for just diversified magnets. No gifted instruction or perr group, just a different way the information is presented. As a result, most just start college between 14-16 and take a mountain of AP courses. It is simpler to fast track than to be a high achiever.

We waited for outsourced Algebra for just this reason. Kiddo could have taken it earlier, but we wrere instructed to just do two courses in 7th or 8th so it would count. Ditto for Latin.

We are in Washington, but right on the border to Oregon. Most of the educational stuff is actually over on Oregon so the kiddos friend and our church are on the otherside.

My brother had terrible acne that they just could not seem to get under control. It would get better, then terrible. Then better, then terrible. Turns out that not only was the towel an issue, but the pillowcase as well. Is he changing it?

Mine has anxiety and OCD stuff going on. It manifested young, so psych stuff was pointed and milder. However, it is still there. He sees a psych sporatically when he feels he needs it. We talk him down a lot. It is still showing up and flaring at various moments. I was warned that hormones can cause flares. I am definitely not a psychiatrist, so who knows about your Dd. I say this for you to try and look back over time and see if there has been any past history which could have had anxiety. It can help you and the psych possibly figure out either a trigger or why it is flaring right now. But get her help. By the time parents know, it is usually much worse than we think.

How significant is your grammar background? The best thing I could have donefor Ds is to give him an entire year of formal grammar instruction. We used a lighter book, because he was young. If he was going to start in fifth, I would have gone with as hardcore of a textbook as I could find, drill academic names and complex diagramming, and really make sure he could take apart a sentence. Over and over it has paid off. He is not trying to learn Latin and grammar at the same time.

I hear that! My kid definitely does not care enough about math to do the AoPS classes. A page or two of problems each day and a test once a week, that he is good with. Watching very short videos on Derek Owens page when he is stuck or has forgotten, that is great. Definitely not competing at math or going all out with it.

The very point that it is not a race is what I am saying. I meant was that before 8 or 9 the kid can race through anything they want, it is all coming back. There is no harm in letting a student that young read Calculus for Kindergarteners. It isn't that precludes them taking a formal PreA class. They will still have to take formal Trig. It doesn't do or mean anything other than allowing the child to freely explore numbers. So they want to geek out on permutations - great! Along the way they might pick up multiplication facts. So they want to get overly into tessalations or fractiles or logic - awesome! They might begin to glimpse visualizations of exponents. There is very little harm that can be done if a kid this young decides to pound astronimical amounts of math at a break neck speed. They flat out have to repeat the formal subjects. Just let them fly with it and then when Intro to Geometry comes around, they will have a much larger pool of information which might be pulled from. They will have to take Algebra 1 at some point no matter what is done at 4. So what if she wants to pull down the book and read about modal algebra? She might get nothing for it, but she is only 4. Nothing is lost even if nothing is gained, and what great things can be gained! Her child will never run out of math. Neither will playing around at six (regardless of mastery) allow her to skip ahead. There is a reason most all of the precoscious math kiddos here go through PreA or Algebra1 somewhere between 7-9. Most of those kids have done all sorts of background work. Ds is having his Algebra class for his p currently take 3 months for the whole year's credit. He took Algebra forever ago, but granting formal, outsourced credit wasn't reasonable until 12 (frankly, his handwriting is STILL attrocious enough he has to redo pages more often than not). But he has to take it. It has to show up somewhere. Quark's son still has to take the Calc classes. He either has to test out of them or has to take them. He is doing it early, but all his previous work didn't make it disappear. So let the kid race through whatever, even if she doesn't get it. At 8 or 9 when formal curriculum really gets going, or when her kid decides that Beast is the greatest and just wants to fully invest, or when it actually has any kind of weight (personal or otherwise), then set a path. But not at 4. At 4 let the kid just eat as many and as much number information that she wants to cram in her head for the sheer joy of doing it.