We survived the first day of school!! Our district has 52,000 students all starting remotely (due to the county health dept pushing back in person learning until Sept 9) on the same day on 2 very different platforms (depending on if they chose virtual learning or in person). The learning hub crashed…VPN couldn’t handle the load, lots of disgruntled and stressed out parents…I wasn’t one of them lol.
My boys got through the day relatively unscathed. S21 and S23 Twin 1 had all the right classes, and no connectivity issues at all. S23 Twin 2 had some issues with WebEx (getting kicked out of first period and missing 3rd period all together) but it’s getting sorted out.
Since I work from home, I was able to hang out and observe each of my kids and honestly I was laughing all day at some of the high school boy humor and responses I heard.
I feel the same way with my two. S21 wants a big state school in a college town (nothing urban), no more than a 5 hour drive from home, that we expect to meet our budget (either in-state or OOS that gives good merit). So, he’s applying to the only 4 schools that meet those parameters and not interested in any other suggestions I provide. It’s fine – 1 of the 4 is a reach, 1 is a match, 2 safeties and he’d be happy at any of them.
D23 is more academically focused, and she actually talks with me, unlike S21. She says she wants to get a PhD and be a professor doing research and teaching in ecology. She already thinks W&M is her first choice and beyond that we’ll be exploring a lot of LAC’s that are strong in sciences. I expect it will be a completely different and much more complicated process!
We’ve found one silver lining of the school shutdown…she’s going to spend the fall doing training to be a Master Naturalist. It’s a weekly class + 5 field trips. Was interested in it before but thought she’d never be able to do it because it conflicts with marching band. But, there’s no marching band! So, she’s excited to do that and I think it will be a great EC for her as once the training is done, she’ll be doing volunteering at parks, nature centers, events or participating in citizen science projects, in addition to continuing ed to keep up the certification.
Fall schedules were released yesterday and school starts this Wednesday for S23. Our school is starting the year with a 4x4 schedule on a quarter system. Although S23 is enrolled in seven classes this year, he will only take four classes during the first quarter: Health, IB Chemistry, PIB Spanish 3, and choir. He will take APUSH in the second quarter which will give him some breathing room as chemistry will be challenging. According to D19, he lucked out and got the best teachers for both chemistry and APUSH.
Unfortunately, classes will be synchronous and he is expected to be in class as if it were a normal school day. Our family was hoping to craft its own schedule like we did in the spring to allow for ample nature breaks. Still, we booked a lengthy stay in the mountains for a change of scenery since everyone is online (D19’s school reversed course and closed its college houses and DH is still WFH for the foreseeable future).
We are living in interesting times. Best of luck to everyone as the school year gets underway!
@mountainsoul Dang, and here I thought my kids’ school district was forcing the quickest possible of all turnarounds with schedules released on the 17th and classes starting on the 20th!
@dfbdfb Our school really makes kids wait awhile for their schedules. It’s brutal! But too many badly behaved parents pestering the counseling office about schedule changes is the reason we have to wait. Now, we have a strict policy and a hard deadline for requesting changes.
S23 got his schedule today; his school district is doing a simulation run before school starts (9/1 I think?) so that they (teachers/staff/students) can understand and figure out what the rules and expectations are before school starts (starts on 9/8).
School started in-person right off 8/12 for S23 … so far only 9 cases (suspected or confirmed) of covid at the high school (a little over 1,100 students) - we get a daily report of new cases by grade level. Mostly review and some minor ‘what have you forgotten’ testing for the first week making up for missed info in Spring for Math and Spanish. Starting slowly in APUSH, Chem and English to see how first week goes with covid cases. Teachers have a pool on when we will have to go virtual. They think inevitable probably within a month, but at least they will have had a chance to meet students and develop a little relationship.
Swim team tryouts were yesterday - he’s been a state team member since 7th grade so not worried about making the team - just hoping that we actually get a full season all the way to County Championship, Sectionals and State. There was a football game last Thursday and kids and parents failed on the mask wearing mandate (we did not attend, but you may have seen it on Good Morning America) Just hoping they don’t pull/punish the other sports because of it. We’ve already been told no spectators allowed for swim meets since indoors (even though volleyball is allowing it) - but they still need volunteer timers and to run the computer (my job) He’s trying to figure out what ECs are even going to be available to be active in besides sports … slim picking on volunteer opportunities in the area and we don’t want to really travel/mission trip now so… hoping AOs realize that in 2 years!
We get our schedules late too. Staff went back to work yesterday and school starts Sept 8. I think the first thing they do when they get in is run the program to figure out all the HS schedules. S21 just this morning requested a class change (different science class) and his counselor immediately responded to tell him which one was available in the same slot as what he wanted to drop. Which tells me they have already set up his schedule. We just won’t see it until next week!
My D23 is in her second week of her new school. We transferred her from her large low SES urban school to a very small private school. It might be just for this year; it might be for all remaining. Who knows?!
I’ve heard little about her school days so far; hard to meet people when you are socially distanced and wearing masks . . . but she is really enjoying her teachers.
The public school basically quit teaching last march - in the name of equity - and I just felt uneasy with their plans for this fall. So far so good …
PSAT: anyone’s sophomore taking it? what’s the general thought process on studying for it as a 10th grader? any point in that? I know I’ve heard that kids should never take ACT/SAT tests unprepared . . . but what about PSAT sophomore year?
@bgbg4us one of my D23s took the PSAT last year as a freshman. She didn’t study for it. I just thought it was a good way to see where she was at, baseline, and for her to have the experience of taking it. I’d hoped she would do it again this year, but I’m not sure now - not sure her school is doing it or that I’m going to bother with it (she’s 100% remote school for 1st semester).
But I think that in a normal year, taking it as a 10th grader to get a baseline and to allow her to get some familiarity with it are both useful things. My S21 did not do that (homeschooled which makes it very hard to get a PSAT since they are school based rather than center based and he wasn’t going to be applying to schools as selective as this one of my D23s, so it wasn’t any kind of priority for him).
I had my D23 take a practice SAT at home this past May (before she forgot math over the summer) to see how it compared to the PSAT she took last Fall at school. Again, no special prep. I recall her math climbed 60 points…I honestly can’t remember the verbal difference. She won’t start prepping until next summer before she takes both PSAT for real and an actual SAT.
We’re still waiting to hear if our school will offer it. They usually have all the 10th and 11th graders take it during the school day. I think it is useful to take it cold as a baseline and don’t really want to start test-prep pressure in 10th grade. My S21 didn’t prep at all for 10th or 11th PSATs since he had no expectation that he’d make the threshold for national merit. He did however get a high score on the SAT after a prep course so maybe he could have made NMSF if he’d put the time in. D23 tends to be more academically motivated so I probably will encourage her to put in prep time for the 11th grade PSAT.
Extracurriculars they enjoy, which may be any or none of the above
Case studies:
[ul][]My D23 is running cross-country this fall. She didn’t do it 9th grade, she won’t do it in future years (and she is, very seriously, one of the slowest kids on the no-cut team)—she’s doing it this semester because it forces her to get out of the house, which she needs for her own mental health.
[]My D25 plays the banjo, has been taking lessons since 5th grade. It doesn’t give back to society in any meaningful way, it has no corporate sponsorship, there are no transferable skills (unless I guess she wanted to play bluegrass guitar or something, which she doesn’t), and isn’t really a bunch of small projects (unless you count learning an individual piece of music as a project, which strains the definition). But she likes it, and it gives her a feeling of accomplishment, as well as a distraction from academic pressures.[/ul]
I’ve said it before, I will continue to say it: Extracurriculars aren’t really all that important in college admissions. In fact, for most colleges they mean precisely and exactly nothing—and for those colleges where they do count for something, it’s the fact that they exist, not what they specifically were.
I think that we focus on them so much because it’s one of the few pieces of the high-end college admissions process that students and (especially) parents have any control over, and that’s comforting in a near-random universe—but really, it’s not worth any of the agonizing you frequently see on places like this site.
By the way, y’all, I just poked around and discovered that @Armaanaggu made that exact same post on multiple boards, including the parents of the classes of 2020, 2021, and 2023. (Don’t know why 2022 was skipped.) Not sure what to conclude from that, but it does lead one to go ?.
In person 5 day a week school started today. Lets see how this goes.
Although hes been lifting 4 days a week and working at a restaurant/bar all summer as well. So far so good, knocking on wood.
D23 is back in school , 5days, distancing and all of that. It is going well so far, APChem seems as though it will be the hardest , but she can handle it. She is a very efficient student and juggles way more than most. It helps to have done APStat last year , so she is not new to the AP situation. Dance starts back in person soon–with masks, etc–so that will be fun. Hopefully school and dance stay in-person as long as possible, if no major outbreaks.
@dfbdfb That’s so funny about the stickers. D23 is the same way, though she has not yet received stickers in the mail from colleges. She just likes stickers.
Just hoping they don’t pull/punish the other sports because of it. We’ve already been told no spectators allowed for swim meets since indoors (even though volleyball is allowing it) - but they still need volunteer timers and to run the computer (my job) He’s trying to figure out what ECs are even going to be available to be active in besides sports … slim picking on volunteer opportunities in the area and we don’t want to really travel/mission trip now so… hoping AOs realize that in 2 years!