" Would it be more intellectual if they just spend the whole 3 months video gaming?" OK, I’ll bite. Yes, my first kid spent some of her free time over the summers gaming as well as fiddling around writing her own games. That helped influence her decision to major in CS.
But this is a straw man. It’s not a choice between 24/7 gaming and pretaking courses.
Both my kids participated in summer sports, which has nothing to do with college admissions but was good for their health, a lot better than sitting in classrooms for 4 hours a day. They both took care of driver’s ed over the summer. Would have been difficult to schedule around their activities during the school year. They both read very extensively, and I’m not talking about the textbooks for their upcoming courses. My writer kid currently has a stack of poetry and fiction books almost 2 ft high next to her bed. Yes, she’s done some organized summer activities, she’s into writing camps and has all kinds of literary projects going. She’d be furious if I tried to make her pre-take courses, but she isn’t gaming either–just not her thing, she’s way too busy with sports, writing and friends.
I was not suggesting that they are the only viable Summer options. I was only suggesting that one is better than the other.
Because, based on my experience and knowledge, it is the most likely thing to happen to substantial percentage of students who were going to take the preview Summer course, if they don’t.
I am sure @PrimeMeridian and @mathyone 's and most of students with caring, informed and/or unbusy parents will use Summers well, including playing video games but for positive impacts. In fact, they were not going to take the preview Summer course in the first place, were they? I know my child wouldn’t take the preview course and still won’t play Video games all Summer. But the same cannot be said to the average U.S. kids as I know, or even the average kids in the competitive districts.
Let’s see. What did my kids do during high school summers?
A job at a library. A job at a store. Band camp. An internship at a museum. Volunteer work at a day camp to accumulate required community service hours. Summer school to get some annoying nonacademic courses out of the way and, in one instance, to get a second try at a course in which the kid had had difficulty. College visits. Visits to grandparents. SAT prep courses. Driver ed. Getting wisdom teeth pulled. And yes, one of them played video games quite a lot. The other watched TV quite a lot.
It never occurred to us that either of them should preview a course, although we knew people who did that.
Most of the high school kids I’ve known have been like my two kids. They split their summers between doing constructive things – often stuff that was hard to schedule during the school year – and goofing off.
I do know a few who did nothing but goof off. Usually, this was because both parents worked full time and the family did not live near a bus line, so the kids couldn’t go anywhere during the day. In such instances, video games might actually be a nice antidote to boredom.
Then you must associate with parents with very limited experience or imagination.
Since middle school my kids have spent their summers going to athletic camps, travelling, visiting relatives, or working a paid job. It never entered our minds to have them do “more school” in the summer. And playing video games all summer also wasn’t on the table.
probably only because birds of a feather flock together. I am unsure if the kids you have known are the average kids that their parents were sending to pretake an entire course that they were going to retake in the following year.
I think they are just over worked dual-income parents who believe that they are doing the best for their kids with the given resource. And only incidentally so if they have indeed very limited experience or imagination.
And they might be right. Getting a good grade and going to a decent college and ending up with a stable job would be way better than not getting a good grade to start with. for a “not very smart but still is willing to work twice as others to get ahead” type kids.
My definition of “working twice as hard” doesn’t include doing something completely over twice.
In the work place, I wouldn’t promote someone who took twice as long to get to the 100% solution. I’d reward the person who has the pragmatism to get the 80% solution in a timely manner and then can move on to achieve other things.
Would you rather hire someone without a degree? I would rather get unpromoted than unimployed. Wait, would it be a cheating to work too hard to get a good job that I couldn’t have gotten with working only fairly hard?
@VickiSoCal “They use the term Ivy+3 extensively in their literature, which means Ivy, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley…not getting in to one of those schools is failure.”
On what planet is MIT a regularly discussed dream school? I know a lot of very wealthy California people, and from what I see I think I’d sub Northwestern for MIT. Gobs end up at USC and UMich, too.
The negative people in this thread don’t realize how much fun ambitious kids are having at these programs. Yes, they’re at a challenging pace, but it’s also away from home, nobody is being bullied for being smart, it’s a bunch of peers that like learning. For shame! My kids cry when they leave these boarding camps. They love them! It’s likely the highlight of their year.
The way we’ve done it is take one interesting course & then one STEM course they’re going to see the upcoming year.
What did the high-schoolers in our neighborhood do all summer? Some worked part-time as babysitters or lifeguards or pizza joints. (My D17 lasted 3 weeks at a dreadful fast food place, with high turnover and had phone stolen second day on job and it was a good learning experience as it showed her what jobs are available for 2osomethings without college degrees. And she volunteered a few hours a weeks for an environmental non-profit.) And some others continued their year-round non-stop sports travel teams, many families with dreams of athletic scholarships, with pictures of coaches and parents and graduate in the local paper, superstars getting partial soccer or football scholarships to colleges with freshman retention rates under 60%.
Maybe some read some books. Maybe some went to bed before midnight. I didn’t hear about any teen taking up photography or starting a food bank. No doubt the largest amount of teen time was given to iphones: texting and tweeting and Netflix. I don’t know of any who previewed classes but kudos to any who did. Wish my kids were interested. We’re in a small NC town not too far from a city. Ordinary America. That there are motivated/driven parents and kids out there in the wealthy suburbs, what is wrong with them pushing forward? After all, who goes not just to the HYPSM I am so sick of hearing about, but to med schools at the flagships? It’s the kids who study hard, who push themselves or are pushed. Not a complaint or deference from me, it’s just the reality. Why not binge watch Orange Is The New Black? Plenty of smart kids still going to good colleges and getting good jobs. You just will never be on the Supreme Court unless you are Harvard or Yale.
Step 4: Colleges automatically accept anyone whose essay deals with a life-changing experience of some kind.
"I watched the Olympics with Mom and Dad and Great Aunt Doris. When the girl wrestler from India finally won her nation a medal, I cried. Next summer I will feed Venezuela. After I preview AP Astrology.’
Reading threads like this I feel sorry for the kids living on the left and right coasts. They have to hit books so so hard. Kids in my midwestern town have it easy, with little out of school extra studying. Somehow the top handful students still manage to have good grades, perfect or near perfect test scores, and end up getting into the top 1-20 schools. These kids are often the top kids early on, and not the work extra hard type. Many of them are kids of east European or Asian immigrants. I wonder how much the kind of extra effort the coast kids make helps them. It seems little if any and maybe harmful to their physical health let alone psychological. Good luck to your kids. Good luck.
"MIT is a dream school for parents enrolling their kids in a STEM focused summer/after school program.
Michigan and Northwestern, they would scoff at such places."
Amazing how some people can be so book-smart and common-sense stupid, isn’t it? All the SAT points and advanced physics in the world can’t make up for the stupidity of believing there are only “Ivy plus 3” colleges worth caring about.