As far as I can tell, “parents of” threads have been started up by CC admin around March of 8th grade, but (presumably due to recent turnover) nobody has started one up for the class of 2025 parents—so here it is, post away!
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Thanks. I have a homeschool student who is straddling 8/9th. She is young and has the options to go either way. She has until the end of the year to decide.
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Noooo! Way too early! lol
@groundhog74, I know, right? But yep, time keeps somehow moving inexorably forward!
Mine is my fourth of four, so I’m feeling simultaneously like an old hand at this and like I know absolutely nothing. 9th grade has the following schedule (6 courses is the norm in our school district):
- Advanced Orchestra (plays double bass)
- IB Precalc
- Alaska Studies (one-semester course, will be Ancient Civ in the spring)
- Biology
- English I
- German III
The general policy in the school district here is no AP/IB courses 9th grade, but math placement can override that, as in this case.
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Well my oldest is a senior, so I’m just starting this. D25 is my baby.
She wants to know what colleges people suggest if she wants to study either technical theater or zookeeping. lol Just slightly different than my math obsessed kid.
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D25 is my baby. She’s already considering what she wants to do in college unlike her S23 brother. Oldest (S19) is in tech school 3 hours away going to school part time and working part time.
Right now she wants to work in the FBI while being a dance teacher and part time baker/cook. So tentative is criminiology major but a place where non dance majors could take classes as well. Oh to be young and have dreams! She wants to be “one state away” at least but then “maybe not too far”. Having a dance team might be a requirement, we shall see.
She is taking the normal courses, nothing honors or anything. She’s a pretty B average student. She’s trialed many EC’s in her middle school years but has settled on dance. She does both the school team and a competitive traveling group plus solo work. I need to push her to add something else but dance is year round so it’s difficult. She’s a very nice girl and does not include herself in any mean dance girl drama.
Likely would focus on FACHEX and TE schools but that could change.
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Things are proceeding onward here—kind of crazy to think that some kids are just starting school while mine is nearly a month into the year.
The child has been struggling emotionally (not entirely due to pandemic isolation, but seriously, it’s not like that’s helped, you know?), and our insurance’s teletherapy arm finally apparently worked through their backlog to the point where they’ve got a therapist lined up. So that’s a good thing, and we can hope that improves going forward.
Academically, though, things are going well. It was a particularly big shot of confidence that the electives (music and German) turned out to go much better than the child had feared. That boost has fed over into the stuff where the confidence—and, if we’re going to be completely honest, native competence—level is lower (bio, social studies), meaning there’s less and less stress overall about those, so that’s been very good.
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D25 is our eldest! Glad to get to be a part of all the wisdom here.
Last year was terrible and going to school in-person every day has been such an improvement. D25 is also a dancer, and has made varsity cheer, which has a heavy dance component. I’m hoping she finds a club on campus she’s interested in, too.
Academic-wise, she did a language camp last year and loves languages/linguistics. She’s taking Manadrin but loves them all. She gets mostly As, but would not take Honors Geometry, so is only in regular Geometry. Sigh. We’re in California and to be competitive to the UC system, she’ll have to take some AP classes, so I’m hoping next year.
Right now, we’re trying to shovel as much as we can into 529s to make up for lost time.
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Just a FWIW, but I’m a linguistic professor, with my bachelors and doctorate in linguistics. Can’t speak to the languages side of it (I’ve taken my share, but that wasn’t my focus), but if she gets more interested in the linguistics side, I can weigh in from the inside, so to speak.
Oof, I hear you. Staring fully into the upcoming cash outlay is scary.
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Thanks, that’s great! We’re obviously a long way off, but she has always been interested in languages and studies Koren and Mandarin–the latter through school and summer programs. She talks a lot about the differences between English and other languages, like some languages don’t have an alphabet (who knew?). Obviously, this is very premature to say she’ll major in Linguistics or a language like Mandarin, but when she says she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life–I tell her it is way early and she doesn’t have to know now. But I also say to think about things she’s interested in (and imo, is good at for her age), which is learning and talking about languages. I try to show her practical examples, like Amazon Alexa and Siri “talk”–someone has to help with that as their job and with the Internet of Things, this is only going to get more common.
I’ve researched Linguistics programs a bit and there seem to be specializations in ESL, translation, regional native languages (so cool! but does that lead to a job? I would worry), and computational linguistics. I think computational linguistics is most practical in terms of future career development, and there are two California schools with certificates (SDSU and SJSU). But I’d love to hear your thoughts on the discipline, what you know, what you’re seeing, and any schools you would recommend.
With one big exception (maybe two), a career in linguistics as linguistics requires a masters in the field. So yes, there are programs with focuses in things like endangered languages and language revitalization (one of the world’s best is just up the road from me, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks), but even if there’s coursework at the undergrad level you really need graduate-level work to do anything in it.
Of course, as with most of the humanities, just because you have the specialization doesn’t mean that you’ll be working within that. So yes, some people with degrees in language revitalization work with, say, Native groups to preserve their languages, but most people with those degrees are more likely to use them for jobs that do things like language planning for school districts or other groups, or devising surveys for the Census Bureau, or devising and breaking codes for security agencies, or language teaching, or translation, and so on.
(With a PhD in linguistics you can become a college professor, but while linguistics avoided the crash in the academic job market for longer than most other humanities, it hasn’t been a path I’d recommend to anyone for a decade and a half now.)
But I mentioned two exceptions at the outset, where linguistics-related jobs are available to holders of bachelors degrees. The clear one is educational linguistics, which largely but not exclusively means language teaching, generally the teaching of [insert language here] to speakers of other languages. In United States public (and some private) K–12 schools this also requires teacher certification, but those holding linguistics degrees (of whatever specialization, if any) from US universities are in decent demand as English teachers in other countries, particularly in Asia.
The less clear-cut case is computational linguistics (which, if you want to make bank as a linguist, is your clearest option). If you major in computational linguistics (or in linguistics with a computer science minor, or whatever other available combination) you can definitely find a job in the field with an undergraduate degree, but someone with a masters in it will still have a solid advantage in the job market over someone with a bachelors.
And, of course, lots of folks who get an undergraduate degree in linguistics use it as a path to professional school, particularly but not exclusively in audiology and speech-language pathology.
(And this has gotten too long, but one quick note about specific colleges: Linguistics is one of those fields where it’s worth applying a curriculum screen once there’s a medium-length list of possibilities—the core courses are generally pretty similar from program to program, but beyond that some are arch-theoretical, some are very application-oriented, some are cognitive science-focused, and so on.)
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A friend’s kid just started at UNCSA for tech theater. She’s doing rotations right now, will be working on 60 different productions this year and she loves it so far. Worth checking out in a few years…
I just dropped a math obsessed kid off at his new college. His sister? She’s a harder one to figure out.
Anyone have any good ideas for career exploration? When asked what she likes, she’ll say science, but outside of school interests lean more toward art and design. Probably some good careers that cover both.
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Where is your math kid?
Oof, this seems too early to get started. But I’m a bit obsessive (after all I’m checking this out a month into freshman year) and will at least introduce myself and follow along. I’m sure this will get more active in a couple years. It’s just pretty hard to know honestly at this point what path our kids will be on. We all have decent guesses of course, but sometimes things change. My '25 is our last and #4, and the others all ended up kind of where I would have expected, but also all threw me a few curveballs along the way.
Oldest '18 is on track to graduate from our state flagship this spring with a teaching degree. '19 is an Ivy League athlete who has legitimate post college athletic goals, although we will see when he is offered a real job with a real paycheck how he feels about putting off real life for a few more years after graduation (Olympic sport, not a $$ sport like football or basketball). '21 is a first year at Amherst.
The '25 is probably going to do a new path, because of course I can’t have 2 do the same thing to make my life easy. 
The current guess I have is that she is as smart as her sister at Amherst and will do as well in HS, but probably is not interested in working as hard as her sister will have to at a school like Amherst. She probably has a legitimate shot to be at or near the top of her class of 350-400 like her sister did, but will probably try to parlay that into good scholarship $$ at a slightly less selective school rather than admission into one of the super selective schools. Although, you know, 14 year old girl. Who knows who she will be in 3 years when we have to get serious about figuring this out.
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She doesn’t really know what she wants to do. Kind of likes science, but doesn’t think she wants to work in a lab or be a doctor. She is probably the best writer of my 4 (at this stage). Likes languages, her Spanish teacher told me last night at conferences that she has a real talent for it, for whatever that’s worth. She just missed the cutoff to apply for NSLI-Y online language classes. She will probably apply for summer and academic year programs with them. She would like to do a language immersion thing this summer, not sure what. She is looking at Concordia Language Villages in MN. If anyone has any other suggestions I would love to hear them. I know that’s a cheaper program, but still more than I really want to spend. If she does it, she will get a part time job and pay for some of it. I told her she would need to pay for most of it, but I’m actually thinking if she puts forth some effort into making it happen I will split it with her.
We have classes on a block system, 5 full classes each semester. So theoretically you can take 10 academic classes a year, which is a bit insane. No IB in the school, no AP’s available for freshmen. She will take honors for every class it is available, but some classes are not available as honors or AP, especially freshman year. She is using the schedule to double up and move ahead a year in math. Her classes for the year will be:
Geometry
Honors Algebra II
Honors English
Physical Science
Journalism
Geography (1 quarter)
Ceramics (1 quarter)
2 quarters of study hall
PE
Intro to Engineering
Spanish II
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Hello, parent of my one and only freshman daughter. Sigh, it’s come too fast. So far she loves high school. Our community is getting a new high school and it won’t be finished until next fall so all of the freshman are together in the very old school with 10-12th at the new school. Most of the major construction is done. Remote school was tough and this year we opted for advanced classes instead of the honors classes. My daughter misses being in class with the honors kids but I think it was the right choice and so does the counselor. It’s a block schedule:
Band A days and Gym/health B days - year round
Adv English
Adv world history
German
Next semester:
Adv geometry
Adv biology
Intro drawing
She’s not happy about the intro drawing class as it was the last pick for electives, she’s keeping it though. Living in NJ our state schools are expensive and don’t give much merit. DD is an A-B student and probably wants to be a teacher so if college will cost 30-35,000/yr locally we might as well check out some of the little private Pennsylvania schools. Thanks for reading this and I look forward to the next few years with you all!
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Hi, I have a S25 who unlike his sister '21 has NO clue about what he wants for his future. He’s an incredible self taught guitar player. He’s also has ADD/ADHD combined type. He has to work twice as hard academically which is so heartbreaking. When he puts in the work he’s mainly an A student, but he doesn’t want to grind 24/7 , so I’m predicting a healthy dose of B’s in the mix.
After the shakedown with covid and the college admissions process with D21 we have reevaluated what is important in life and have decided to forgo the rat race as much as we can. S25 isn’t cut out for what his sister went through grinding academics, sports, and a job maintaining straight A’s. To be fair his sister was really driven, so she willingly participated in that race.
During 8th grade he and some buddies started investing in the stock market and crypto. Because he was interested in it, he spent lots of time researching companies and learning about the market. It’s become a great hobby outside of school which has real life benefits. He just joined the investment club at his school so I’m excited he’s found that.
He’s already told me he doesn’t want to apply to the California public schools because it’s too competitive. That leaves us with WUE schools and some western state privates. He’s already talking about the possibility CC and then transferring. It’s obviously way too early, but we are laying the groundwork for a more balanced high school experience where he can enjoy his youth while also trying his best and honing in on things that are important to him.
He’s currently taking Algebra, Honors Biology. Honors English, Chinese II, Photography and XC. Freshman can not take AP except in a few rare instances you may take AP CS. He attends a large competitive HS in southern California.
I am grateful so to have been through one college admission season because I learned so much and will be better equipped to support my S25.
He’s followed his sister’s footsteps and made the XC team. He’s made lots of new friends and I really believe the daily exercise he gets from that sport really helps him focus on his studies. He’s really enjoying the sport and pushing himself. He’s come a long way in a short amount of time.
I am so excited to watch him do his thing and see what interests emerge as he gets older. I also look forward to following everyone else’s kids’ journeys on here!
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She might end up being glad for the intro to drawing class—having a fine arts class on your schedule is a plus for many colleges, and even a requirement for some (most famously the UCs, but there are others).
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Thanks I’m sure she’ll like it. She’s an artist and an intro class is below her ability but the teacher is great and I’m all for her having that one easier class. It’s also during the semester she has advanced geometry and isn’t looking forward to another math struggle. Algebra last year being taught remote was horrible and the teacher was very combative. He’d threaten to withhold notes from the class and other punishments. So this year is a recovery year to say the least. NJ requires students to have fine arts for graduation so we’re lucky in that respect!
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Well, last week was a struggle. The child was feeling emotionally down, exacerbated I think by generalized digestive pain (likely culprit: probably a stomach that’s producing too much acid, doctor said to try an OTC acid reducer for a couple weeks and it seems to be helping).
The stomach pain resulted in staying home from school Friday (and should have on Thursday—hard to go to school when standing upright hurts!), but that of course was the day two in-class presentations plus an exam were happening, and in the case of the exam the teacher is out the next two weeks, creating schedule weirdness. So some of the child’s friends were a bit suspicious that it was a simple laziness move to get out of deadlines, which now has created social friction and thus added to the overall stress.
Anyway, just mentioning all this in passing because I figure it’s good to normalize talking about the difficulties along with the moments to celebrate.
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