How about something like Mark's Daily Apple (website)? It covers both healthy eating and exercise and often discusses/links the most current research studies in both areas. It is very popular and interesting to read. I really enjoy it. I especially like that he states that your diet doesn't have to be perfect 100% of the time. My only criticism of his site is that he does promote his own products for sale. Just skip those posts.

I'm enjoying all the responses. I especially think the above from GGardner rings true. I had not considered it from that angle.

When I attended university a few decades ago, it seemed like working 20-hours a week was typical for students who were attending school full-time. Now, I keep seeing (in articles and on college confidential) that 10-12 hours is recommended. Are we underestimating what students can handle? Personally, I worked 20 hours a week (except for one year when I worked 30, adding 10 hours a week of research work for one of my professors) while carrying a full-time load of engineering courses. DH also worked at least 20 hours a week and he had a time intensive major (architecture).

Lial's is a solid program so if that works for your DD, you should stick with it. Consider doing math daily, even through your school breaks. You can stretch out the lessons and assigned problems over more days this way and not fall behind. I must admit that I'm surprised when folks say that they've never used algebra in their adult life. I see it everywhere.

Sure! Sometimes there are certain days (usually just before classes start) that are WAY busier to move in. If a student lives close enough, it makes sense to move the stuff in earlier and then return once the bulk of students are moving in.

I'm very sorry for your family's loss and especially for having such an occasion marred by inappropriate remarks from the minister, of all people. At my mother's service, the minister (chosen by one of my mother's sisters) spent significant time preaching that we were all going to hell unless we followed his beliefs. Since no one in my immediate family is religiously observent, that went over like a ton of bricks. When my father passed several years later, the same aunt suggested that we use the same minister for the service! Needless to say, we found someone else and clearly laid out our needs ahead of time. I was dressed casually for my father's funeral, btw. I had traveled 6 hours to visit him and he passed away unexpectantly while I was there. Traveling home and back again was not feasible and i was not capable of doing much looking/shopping for formal attire (a huge chore for me in the best of times). I stopped by a local Walmart and bought the first darkish colored shirt I could find.

The Tennessee Promise funds showed up in DD's student portal account last night. Be sure to check! These funds showed up before the Hope scholarship, so the account currently shows Tenn Promise paying the full amount of the tuition and fees. DD went ahead and confirmed her schedule of classes but will still pursue making sure her eligibility for Hope is confirmed and credited. She certainly doesn't want a problem getting Hope once she transfers to a university.

Thank you for all the information and advice. This is very helpful. I'm going to share it all with DD and start following up on the suggested approaches. The academic advisor at the CC did provide a written transfer agreement that they have with the 4-year university that specifically lists all the courses needed at the CC and then the courses that would be needed at the university to fulfill their B.S. requirement. However, it also warns that computer science is a competitive program and simply completing the transfer agreement does not guarantee admittance into the program.

Still waiting for Tennessee Promise funds to show up. Student portal message is to expect it mid- to late August. Hope scholarship funds are supposed to on the student accounts now but nothing on DD's. She filed a review request to have them look at her Hope eligibility. She is definitely eligible and had no problems getting the dual enrollment grant at the same institution. Strange. The good news is that her schedule of classes did NOT disappear with the passing of the confirmation/pay due date. *whew* I was pretty worried because all of her classes are FULL and it would be impossible to get everything back if they dropped her courses. How is it going for your TN Promise students?

Nice list of questions to pose! Thank you for that. Much better than asking "how competitive is it really" and getting a qualitative answer.

Generally, a higher percentage of students are accepted early decision than regular decision. I agree that this can be a bit misleading because the early decision pool is made up of self-selected students who are highly focused on that specific school. The regular decision pool will have many more casually done applications. If passed over for early decision, the student app goes into the regular decision pool anyway, right? I agree that if paying for the school is not a concern and it is the student's first choice, early decision is a fine way to go. However, I also think that it is best to gently dissuade students from having a single "dream school" such that they would be crushingly disappointed to go anywhere else.

No guaranteed admission to specific majors, unfortunately. Thanks.

DD is currently planning on community college followed by our local state university for a computer science degree. We know that it is competitive to get into this major at this school. However, she is getting differing feedback on just how competitive it is. Her academic advisor at the CC told her that she would have "no problem" transferring to the state university if she continued to do as well in her courses as she had done in her dual enrollment courses. However, a representative from the university (admin, not from computer science dept) gave a talk at her CC orientation and DD asked how difficult it would be to transfer into computer science and the rep told her "very hard." How can we find out definitively if this is a reasonable goal or not? There are other schools that DD could target that would be easier to get into computer science as a transfer but they would not be within commuting distance (thus, higher overall costs and likely student loans would be needed). Also, the courses that DD should take at the CC differ a bit between the different target transfer schools so it is not ideal to just wait and see if she can get in once she finishes CC. I'm hoping for some "been there" advice. Should she contact the dean of the dept at the target transfer school?

Thank you! I really appreciate all the input. I'm trying to learn all I can on this topic to be sure that we do everything right and proper while optimizing the overall tax situation. I did find some discussion on this aspect of taxable scholarships on the TurboTax site. Apparently, they weren't doing it quite right a year ago and got clarification from the IRS. Their software should be able to handle this situation now.

I admit to finding this a bit confusing. Can you please explain a little more or link a reference where I can read up on this? My understanding is that any scholarship $$ in excess of tuition and fees needs to be claimed on the student's tax return as income. . .am I correct so far? So, would a program like Turbo Tax automatically calculate any tax based on the parental unearned income rate instead of the student's earned income rate?

This is my understanding as well. The AOTC is claimed on the tax return of the person who claims the student as a dependent. It doesn't matter who pays the costs. There are some examples on the IRS website with divorced parents, even if one pays the college costs, the other parent gets the AOTC if they are the one who claims the student as a dependent.

Great additional info! It is very important to keep up with all those book receipts when purchased at different places. I need to go back and make sure I have all of them.

I wanted to share a few things that I've recently learned about the AOTC: 1. You CAN include eligible expenses from dual enrollment if they were incurred the same year that the student attended at least one term at least half-time at an eligible college and pursuing a degree. In other words, the senior high school spring term dual enrollment expenses can be included in your AOTC calculation if they start attending freshman college courses at least half-time in the fall of the same calendar year. The IRS website is suprisingly easy to read and very clear about this point. 2. The AOTC currently only extends through 2017. Congress may or may not extend it again beyond that. So, while I can't quite max it out ($4000 expenses for 2015 for a credit of $2500), I'll probably go ahead and claim it rather than saving the credit for the first full calendar year of college expenses, which would be 2016 for DD. You can only claim AOTC for a student 4 times so it is sometimes better to not claim it for the calendar year in which they just start college (since it only includes 1 semester). If Congress extends the credit, I'll be a few hundred dollars behind but if they don't extend it, I may be ahead by a lot more than that. 3. Unless a scholarship specifically states that it must be used for tuition, you can chose to apply it to non-eligible expenses and thus claim more tuition costs for the AOTC. This is true even if the school automatically applied the scholarship funds to tuition. The amount that you chose to count towards non-eligible expenses must then be claimed as income by the student. There's a great publication put out to explain how this works with the Pell Grant as well as scholarships. I'll try to add the link here after I post: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/Pell%20AOTC%204%20pager.pdf

Yes! Pretty much the same experience here. DD has been FED UP with the continual emails reminding her to do what she has already done. We also received the assurance at orientation that Tennessee Promise students wouldn't have their classes dropped while waiting for the funds to show up. However, she still received emails, a postcard, and a recorded phone message stating that she needed to confirm and pay or her classes would be dropped. Argh! Finally, I had DD sign in to the student portal and poked around long enough to find that her schedule does actually say "confirmed" so I started feeling a little more comfortable. DD has regularly volunteered at one location since she was 14. She became very frustrated by the number of new volunteers this summer who came in and did a crummy job just to get their Tennessee Promise volunteer hours completed. She had to keep cleaning up after them.

Yes, we used Write Guide. I would recommend that you define clearly what you want and the timeframe when you sign up. We were happy with our use of Write Guide as I sent my expectations and those were met. DD had been writing essays using Jensen's Format Writing and I wanted her to get feedback and experience with revising her work. When I signed her up with Write Guide for one month, I indicated that I would like for the tutor to work with her on revising 4 of her previously written essays. The reviews that I've read where people weren't happy with Write Guide were folks who didn't go in with a clear goal. . .and they didn't feel like time was used well and not much got done. Also, you should know that your student will receive their input from the tutor at the same time every day (it is set up to automatically send at the same time). Your student will need to respond by a certain time in order to get more tutor input the next day. So, while your student can get feedback daily (weekdays), it takes a bit of coordination to make sure days aren't missed/lost. I was pleased with the way the tutor worked with DD to improve her essays. She provided positive feedback as well as what could be improved. At the end of the month, I asked for an overall assessment of DD's writing skills, which the tutor was willing to provide.

Does he need a checking account and/or credit card? I'm currently setting up my 18-year-old for these.

Have you looked at Barbara Runkle's? The title is something like "Welcome to the Wonderful World of Geography". It is an interesting textbook. We added in mapping activities and some fun books like Material World, Hungry Planet, and a couple others for supplemental reading.

I appreciate all the feedback! Glad to hear that everyone agrees that #2 is just wrong. It was said verbally, not in writing, so it is always possible that my DDs just misheard/misunderstood. Trust me, they are getting plenty of driving time with me and DH in addition to the formal driver's education class so we can correct any of these oddball driving tips. Interesting that many folks are reporting learning #1. I can see the extra space coming in handy if someone is about to or does rear end your car. We are in Tennessee. I haven't look it up in the official driving guide or the state laws. That's a good idea.

My teens have recently taken a driver's education course. I know that driver's education has changed since I took it in the dark ages, like advising the 9 and 3 hand positions on the steering wheel because of the air bag (instead of the 10 and 2 that I was taught). However, I was surprised and don't necessarily agree with some of things being taught. I'd like some feedback if anyone else has had a student take such a course in recent years and if they were taught the same things: 1. It is not enough to stop before the painted bar/line on the road before a stop sign or red light, you must stop far enough back that you can still see the line. Similarly, you should stop behind a car at an intersection far enough back that you can see their back tires meeting the road. My DDs and I are all shorter than average so we'd have to stop sooner than someone taller; doesn't seem very consistent between drivers and a line of stopped cars would take up way more space on the road, possibly interferring with intersections further back. 2. This is the one that I'm actually upset about. They were told that on a highway or interstate with several lanes, they should drive in the far left lane. The idea being that the far right lane would have cars merging and exiting and the middle lanes would have cars on both sides of you that could come into your lane. Since they are also being taught to drive no faster than the speed limit (which, of course, is the right thing to teach) I think these students are being set up for tremendous road rage as they park themselves in the far left lane driving 54 mph on a 55 mph highway/interstate where the average speed limit easily exceeds 70 mph. Any thoughts? Pegasus

This is a powerful tutoring technique. Sebastian's entire post was great but I wanted to but sure that this one line gem didn't get lost in her overall message. Sitting together and working the problems independently but at the same time is a great way to work through challenging problems. Not only is the student enouraged by having someone in the trenches with them, they get an extra boost of confidence when they manage to work a problem correctly and the adult doesn't. I wouldn't make errors on purpose (the student would be sure to pick up on that!) but mistakes happen and it is good for the student to witness this in work besides their own.