There are lots of other ways to validate the rigor of your student's work — i.e., without his or her having to suffer through the mile-wide/inch-deep test-prep methods of AP courses. Our son, for instance, in the second half of his junior year of H.S., enrolled as a non-matriculating student in a course at a local university — he continued to take courses there through his senior year. And not only did he get As in those courses; he ended up with two university professors writing recommendations for him. — Certainly looked good on his transcript/application. So there are definitely other options. (Our son, BTW, ended up winning a full-ride scholarship at his first-choice school — four years' tuition, room, & board.)

Students in my writing classes spend the bulk of our classtime discussing one another's writing — specifically their essays, most of them quite personal. In live online discussion, they share: possible essay ideas, writing topics; mindmaps of essay ideas at various stages of development; drafts of their essays. They also discuss in great depth their reactions to and observations on dozens of essays by great writers.

Anna sun: I'm replying on Diane's behalf (I'm her husband). I'm afraid she's not going to offer her Geometry course in 2024-25 — that's why you didn't see it listed on our "Online Courses" page. She will, however, be offering all her Science Intensives and her year-long Honors Biology With Lab and Honors Chemistry With Lab. Hope that helps.

If you don't mind my asking, what is the "product" of this stage? In your process, in other words, at the point where your student parks his butt in a chair and makes the words appear..., is there a roadmap to the first draft that he has in hand and is staring at?

In some kids' minds, writing creates a kind of mental logjam, because they're trying to do two things at the same time: figuring out what they want to say — coming up with their content, their points, ideas, examples; composing clear sentences & paragraphs — drafting, wordsmithing their content. When we ask kids to "just practice getting words on a page," we may be repeating the logjam, over and over. Many parents believe that the way kids learn to write is by doing a LOT of it — an essay a week, or maybe every other week. But when students are struggling with such demands, we need a deeper understanding of both the reasons for those struggles (the problem) and the approaches likely to loosen the logjam & alleviate the suffering (solutions). Such kids need a writing process that does two things. First, an efficient process separates the tasks bulleted above (coming up with content; wordsmithing the content) into discrete stages — a thinking stage & a drafting stage. Second, a sound process provides high-grade, easy-to-use writing tools for each stage. To be clear: The struggle is created by 1) the inadvertent commingling of these stages, and 2) the paucity of the writing & thinking tools we give our students. (Many writing teachers still require Roman numeral outlines.) And as each stage becomes easier, the student's overall speed may increase dramatically. For the thinking stage, many students benefit from mindmapping...

Just a word of dissent... All this discussion of literary analysis and essential literary terms makes me uneasy, and I thought I should stop biting my tongue and say something. A couple of points: How important is it that our students learn to write essays of literary analysis? Once they complete their academic careers, 99.9% of our students will never again write an essay of literary analysis. Granted, in their professional lives they may write reports, journal articles, proposals, etc., but none of those things remotely resembles an essay of literary analysis. — The fact is, literary analysis is a peculiar form of writing, and as @Shelydon suggests above, it's not easy to do it well. Most of the literary analysis produced under the guidance of English teachers has about the same purpose as a quiz: its purpose is to demonstrate to the teacher that the student wrestled with the novel or poem or whatever — but no one in their right minds would read all those students' essays for pleasure; they're mostly drivel. In fact, most of the literary analysis published each year in academic journals is drivel. A really good essay on literature is a rare gem; again, see @Shelydon's remark above. (For my own literature courses, when doing preliminary research on a writer or period, I wade through reams of bad — and badly written! — introductions, journal articles, & essays.) So here's the point: Our emphasis on writing literary analysis in English class is misplaced. It's not the best way to teach writing. This kind of writing, moreover, doesn't even help our students prepare for a real-world writing challenge that's just around the corner: the college-application essay. How important is "literary terminology"? How important is it that our students' thoughts on literature comprise a cocktail of terms like protagonist, antagonist, foreshadowing, conflict, paradox, personification, and the like? Great literature, in many English classes, seems to be about technique, and analyzing great literature means spotting techniques and labeling them with proper terms. But is all this terminology really essential to reading, understanding, and appreciating great literature? — I think not. I actually think it clouds students' intuitions; it impairs their ability to perceive the writer's purpose and the work's design. A great work of literature is first and foremost an experience in the reader's mind and heart, and I think it's the job of the English teacher to enable students to have the experience the writer designed. The problem is that performing that service requires of the teacher a deal of hard work, refined thinking, and keen intuition. Teaching students to identify the antagonist, on the other hand, is a pretty straightforward business, and who knows? It may show up on the AP exam, or on the SAT... Thanks for allowing me to speak my mind.

I see a lot of debate on this forum about the virtues of AP classes vs. dual enrollment, online vs. onsite, etc., etc. The factor frequently omitted from such comparisons, though, is the role of the individual instructor. Look into your own experience: Some AP classes are terrific; others suck. Some college classes are wonderful; others are hopelessly mediocre — they can be deadly, stultifying experiences. The difference is the instructor. — Put another way, it's not the AP curriculum that makes a course great. It's not the classroom that makes a community college course great. Now granted, some online classes are horrible. With the advent of COVID, hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country began teaching online without giving any thought at all to how teaching online might be different from standing at the front of a classroom. Result: Millions of students complaining about how horrible "Zoom classes" were. — Remember? — And more often than not, they were horrible. But not because they were online. Again, it's not the platform that's awful; it's the teacher. And when an online class is wonderful — and there are wonderful online classes — it's not the platform; it's the teacher. And @MagistraKennedy, the specific features of your cottage school program that you seem to cherish, like interacting with others, feedback, etc., [deleted by moderator: advertising]

This is a tough one. The only work that came to mind for me was Michael Coe's Breaking the Maya Code — it's a good read, albeit challenging. It's about the individual players across the world who contributed to deciphering the Mayan inscriptions — something that was accomplished fairly recently — and I read it as you would a detective story. Your kids will find it especially interesting if they want to learn about the Mayan culture & language.

Just a note, @BusyMom5, to second Porridge's recommendation of Zhang Yimou's To Live — an incredibly efficient and moving way to acquaint students with both the 1949 takeover by the Communists and the Cultural Revolution. It can hard to get your hands on a DVD, but well worth the effort. Just one more note, this time on Russia: My literature students have been blown away by Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna — an amazing account of life under Stalin for ordinary Soviet citizens in the 1930s. Again, an incredibly efficient way of acquainting students with historical conditions.

There are two types of online — asynchronous & live/interactive; you're excluding both?

For years I've noticed that the dash is distinctly underused in student writing. Students seem a bit timid about using it, and I suspect that their hesitation derives from two things: The rules aren't clear. Most students have never been taught the rules, the guidelines for the proper use of the dash. The dash seems a bit suspect. The fact that students have never been explicitly taught how to use it leaves many students fearful that it’s not officially sanctioned—that it is somehow not quite as proper as the other marks of punctuation. Meanwhile, in books on English usage I've never seen anything more than the most cursory discussion of the dash, and my own students have for years been asking me for such guidance. (They read great essayists who routinely use it, so they want to know how to use it in their own writing.) After fruitless searches for such a guide, I created one myself. For those of you who work with your own students on their writing — I'm specifically thinking of moms like @lucyintheshadowlands and @busy5mom — I'm providing access to that guide. I hope you find it useful. — Please see the attachment. THE-DASH-from-Logical-Communication.pdf

The following work, which is a pleasure to read, can fill in some of the gap: The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium — by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

Been following this discussion. @lucyintheshadowlands: Is this the kind of thing you're looking for (attaching a PDF)? — It's an excerpt from The Writer's Guide to Grammar (there's much more). EXCERPT-for-lucyintheshadowlands-The-Writers-Guide-to-Grammar.pdf

What Lori's articulating here is the part that I suspect we parents often underestimate. There is a kind of developmental readiness in play, a ripeness that must be achieved in the student's brain. There's a lot of mental wiring that needs to come together, so that the student can do, as Lori describes, the analytical thinking, the abstract thinking, the intellectual parts of the task. And let's not underestimate the wiring involved in expression of thoughts & ideas: writing is not like science or math or history or even literature, because it's an output. For writing to take place, thoughts and ideas and observations and facts and explanations and examples must all flow out of our student — which means that they must all in some sense already be present inside the student. What's more, all those things must be produced in the form of nicely arranged sentences and paragraphs. — It's a minor miracle that it ever works at all. In my own experience, when the writing doesn't work — i.e., it simply won't flow out of the student — there are a range of possible causes or missing ingredients. We parents must perform miracles of diagnosis, figuring out which of the possible causes afflict our student, or which of the necessary ingredients might be missing. What's more, in any particular student, the problem may be traced to not one but several different factors, each requiring a different approach or remedy. I don't know whether this will be helpful to you, @BusyMom5 , but in my experience, one of the tools that has often proven the right remedy is mindmapping. I've seen students who had already been through Michael Clay Thompson and EIW and IEW, you name it, and yet the kid was stuck; there was something about the demand that he or she produce sentences and paragraphs on a given topic that created in the student's mind a kind of mental logjam. And what I'm saying is that I've seen many such kids (not all, mind you, just many) come unstuck the instant they really got mindmapping — what it is, how it works, how to do it. So that may be something you want to try. Just one other thing I'll mention: My first aim is always that the student become a fan of the essay form — that he or she falls in love with great nonfiction prose, with essays & writers & writing. I believe that it's our duty as parents to nurture that love, to cultivate it through reading & discussing great writers, so that the virtues of great writing form a kind of knowledge in the student, a solid foundation beneath the student's feet. I know that there will be moments where the student hates writing, hates his or her own voice in writing, thinks she'll never be able to do this; and in such moments, teacher & student alike are going to need to draw on that love of great prose, on the certainty of its virtues & worth. At times those virtues may seem like a distant, faded memory, but if the student has never experienced the pleasure of an apt simile the joy of a great thought well expressed, there may be little to fall back on.

We've had many, many students with ADHD / dysgraphia / dyslexia and other challenges, and in our science courses they tend to do rather well. That's partly, I suspect, because we're pretty flexible in our approach to meeting their needs, making accommodations where needed, but also our course designs include more than just the kind of knowledge featured on an AP test. Our science courses include development of executive skills and communication skills. — Executive functioning is an issue for every student, and our students always need support with becoming more effective at communication. All sessions are recorded, so that whenever a student needs to revise or beef up his or her notes, the recordings are always available. — Additional points you may find interesting: Note-taking sheets. We ship to each student the printed workbook (of which you saw a sample above). But sometimes the parent of a student with learning differences requests a PDF version, and in those cases we readily make it available. Also, you mentioned that the templates becoming more sparse might not work for all students, and that's true. But the note-taking sheets are not the only support for taking notes in the live lectures; e.g., on her slides, Diane tweaks the information to help students with the challenges of selecting / synthesizing / synopsizing key ideas and facts — it's often as simple as bolding or highlighting key words. Research projects. Diane assigns research projects both in her year-long courses (Honors Biology, Honors Chemistry) and in her 8-week Science Intensives (Ecology, Genetics, Botany). The purpose of these projects is partly to give students a workout with their research skills, but it's also to provide a context for developing their planning skills & their communication skills (e.g., these projects often culminate in a live presentation to the class). The projects are always assigned early, with a 6–8 week gestation period, and with project planning, Diane coaches her students on two fronts: 1) thinking through the components & stages—starting with the end point (e.g., a presentation or report due on a particular date) & working backwards to identify everything that must be done in the interim; 2) managing their time & their tasks—analyzing their own current schedules and obligations to identify where they can fit in all that needs to be done for their projects. Diane's aim here is to convey to her students that time is a limited commodity: if you blocked off a weekend afternoon for working on your research project and now your friends want to go ice skating, fine; go ice skating—but you must make up that time with sacrifices elsewhere in your schedule. Communication skills. Diane designs her science courses to foster lots of science communication. Our classes are live & interactive, so students discuss science issues, ask questions, and hear & discuss the answers, all in real time. — Implications: Students speak extemporaneously and soon discover that what sounded brilliant in your mind, in your thoughts, may come out garbled when you try to express it aloud. Speaking off the cuff is a skill, and like all skills, the only way to get better at it is through practice in real time. So we provide lots of practice in all our courses. (Many asynchronous classes use online forums; they designate required numbers of entries in such forums, but those entries are written, worked and re-worked; there is no practice in the challenge of expressing yourself in real time.) Another important form of communication workout is designing & delivering the research presentation. For some students, their first presentation comes as a rude awakening—i.e., they thought it was going to be easy; they discover that their research was insufficient, their design not very audience-friendly, and their talking points woefully under-rehearsed. In short, they find themselves in the real world. We have watched as students pick themselves up, resolve to do better, and then, with their next project, actually do much, much better in all phases—the research, the design, the live delivery... It's a glorious thing to watch. There's more to tell, but the above points, @WTM, should give you a fairly good idea of the kinds of experiences students find in our science courses. — Hope that helps.