@honestmom If the kid does well in an AP course taken early, why would they not take the test? There are plenty of practice tests so you can judge how well you would score. I’d worry more about the risk of a low grade in the AP class hurting the GPA than about a low score on an AP test (which often doesn’t need to be reported to a college until after admission, and even then need not be reported if it is too low to get credit).
More advice: get to know the parents of kids similar to your kid in academics but a year or two older. Ask them for info about classes and instructors. Pass it forward by sharing info with the parents of younger kids.
“All this EC business is nice and yeah, AP’s are great. But more ink is spilled on CC by kids and parents who wait until senior year to understand how financial aid works”
ECs is for most are just conitnuation of the life before HS. If one was engaged in 3 activities (for example) since 5 - 6 y o , why would they stop? APs or not is just a pure choice of a kid. Financial side is easy - get straight As and decent scores and you will have many offers of full tuition / full ride / partial tuition. Research which schools are well known to offer Merit awards. In our case, word of mouth was the best since D. did not plan to be far from home, so talking to parents who had kids in colleges close by was the best, much better than any internet search. However, if the whole USA is considered, you have to figure out your own approach to this type of research.
We did not change anything when D. started HS, she just continued her life. The only big event at this stage of her life was actually choosing her HS. It took me the most of her 8th grade. I prevailed, slowly but surely and D. thanked me many times for convincing her to attend the HS that was perfect for her. Sometime (most of the times?) mom still knows the best. It is almost funny how they slowly realize it after certain age. Just yesterday, my D. who is 25 now (still a student, but almost done), told me that having only 2 rules in a house was great, straightforward and very helpful growing up and specifically in HS years. Rules were - no crying and be in bed by 10pm (on a weekdays). These are only advice that I have. If D. at 25 still remembers and appreciates these 2 simple rules, they must have been good for her.
Regarding coaches, there is ALWAYS known poblem with coaches. Looking back, it is actually an advantage for a kid to learn to deal with it, to move on no matter what, to withstand all this screaming (mostly unfair). Yes, life is unfair and learning it at 6, 8, 15, 17 over and over is much better than facing it at 25 and make all the wrong decisions based on this fact. Sprots definitely make person much stronger, and not just physically.
Do an SAT prep course or self-study the summer after sophomore year so you get any score-boosting benefits on the PSAT in the fall of junior year, thus increasing the likelihood of NMF status and scholarship $.
Plan to visit college campuses starting freshman year of high school whenever you are on vacation/visiting family in the area – no formal tours that early, but walking around and getting an idea of what you want/don’t want makes the college tour process more efficient in the junior and senior years.
@blossom: you wrote in post #8 "Don’t wait until winter of senior year to find out that you should have been putting the max into your 401K at work for the last few years. "
BG- if your employer matches your 401K contribution, that is free money. Literally free.You may not be in a position to fund your 401k fully when you are paying tuition- but if you’ve been maxing out your contributions PLUS getting your employer match, a couple of years without the max contribution isn’t going to hurt your retirement the way it will if you HAVEN’T been putting in your full contribution.
I have people on my team at work who have been spending every penny; kid is in HS now, all of a sudden they are looking at both funding retirement AND paying for college. The math is scary. If you’d been contributing the maximum to your retirement in your earlier years of working (plus my company matches) you’ve got a nice nest egg for retirement. And then you need to figure out your cash flow strategy for college- for sure- but you’re not showing up at work at age 61 and having zero to show for it. Plus you can invest in higher growth/somewhat riskier investments in your retirement account- you aren’t planning to need it next year so you’ve got time to let it grow AND bounce back from a market pullback. If you start funding retirement in your late 50’s you are looking at bonds and low risk/lower growth opportunities.
My homework. That’s what I’d do. I coasted all the way through high school, and didn’t develop the study skills I needed for college. My first year was rough and I felt like I wasted both time and my parents’ hard-earned tuition money.
@Barfly Thanks for your response. That makes sense.
@Massmomm wrote “My homework. That’s what I’d do. I coasted all the way through high school, and didn’t develop the study skills I needed for college. My first year was rough and I felt like I wasted both time and my parents’ hard-earned tuition money.”. Yes! This is why our highschoolers need to do their homework, even when it is stupid or boring or seemingly pointless.
“My homework. That’s what I’d do” -
-Agree 100%. Finally I saw somebody else realized that doing the homework is ALL that it takes to get all As in American k - 12. I told this to my D. when she was 5 y o, my S. told that to my grandkids. Worked every time so far. In fact D. never had a single B from kindergarten thru graduating from college. All of them are very busy people, many un-related activities. Even my 13 y o grandson commented: “Just doing my homework, grandma” I agree, too much in Americn HS is way too boring and pointless, it is not " seemingly pointless, it is plain pointless. Still do it and do not aks question “why?”.
" hard-earned tuition money" - in D’s case it was full tuition Merit (not too bad), with the result of us picking her tab for Med. School. Habit of going for an A in everything resulted in easy time getting accepted to Med. School also. Not every calss was easy and she absolutely disliked some. Just buckled up and spent more time preparing, believe it or not, the History was the biggest challenge. But guess what, her teacher would not even guess about it, his comments were that her History papers were higher quality than the papers he used to have form college kids when he was teaching at college. Effort will make a difference no mater what, talent can only bring you so far…
Let’s hope Miami’s D was paying attention during her neuro rotation to realize that not every kid is going to get A’s just by doing their homework. I’m assuming as a fourth year med student she has met kids with Downs syndrome, brain damage due to birth trauma, genetic disorders which impact the cerebral cortex, and a wide range of other medical and neurological conditions which make “doing the homework is all that it takes to get all As in American K-12” quite impossible.
In Miami’s, defense, she did not say anyone could get straight A’s in any advanced course just by doing his homework. I didn’t read her remarks as saying that a person with wide ranging medical or neurolgical conditions could take any AP or honors high school class and, simply by doing all the homework, get an A. It is absurd to imply that she meant that.
What she said was, “Effort will make a difference, no matter what what. Talent can only bring you so far.”
I think Miami meant (as expressed on many other threads) that American High Schools are so terrible with such low standards that a kid who just does the homework will excel. I submit that there are many high schools in this country where this is NOT the case. And then I think that Miami meant that to suggest that a kid focus on LEARNING vs. getting all A’s is a waste of time- she has posted her disdain for history, literature, etc. on many other threads. And Miami also hoped to remind those of us chumps who paid for our kids undergrad education that we are quite shortsighted (even if some of our kids launched directly into professional careers with wonderful jobs with no grad school required.)
Depends a little bit on the student’s own academic preferences and style, but for me, the 2 really important things I realized around senior year are:
Don't bother taking notes for anything that doesn't strictly require you to. I spent hours and hours of my life and trees worth of paper the first few years of HS taking notes in class and on reading assignments and then I never looked at the notes again. It takes a lot of extra time to take notes on readings and it also diverts your full attention from either the reading or the discussion in class. I was much happier, spent less time on work, and felt that I got the material better once I stopped taking notes and just read/listened and I still did well. In fact, senior year, the year where I both stopped taking notes and took all AP courses, was one of the best years I had in terms of grades. Other students might learn differently, but even if note taking helps you to some extent, you need to learn to limit yourself. You can't just copy everything in the book, so try to strip everything down to the bare minimum.
Take the harder track courses even if you don't like/aren't good at the subject. I kind of went two ways on this. I hate English but I typically got pretty good grades in it and I like Math but I was always a B or C student until my senior year. Every year, despite being recommended for honors English and regular Math, I did the opposite. I wanted to challenge myself in Math and couldn't accept the possibility that I wasn't amazing at it and I thought so little of English class that I didn't see the point in doing more work in a frivolous topic. In math my perseverance paid off when I finally got a good H Pre-Calc and AP BC Calc teacher and got an A in the AP class. In English, I finally got so fed up with the neanderthals in my regular classes that I took AP Lit just to be with my friends. Despite my frustrations with essay writing, I got an A in the class and found the teacher to be... well he was good for an English teacher. (although I think this may be just because he was actually a Social Studies teacher who ended up in the English department) And because I made these decisions, I learned more and it probably helped me get into better colleges.
Well what I’d suggest is impossible for you to follow and what I’d do is exactly the same as what I did. My kids got offers from a string of Ivy and Ivy+ schools with need based aid and offers from other schools with a ton of merit based aid. But that was just an unplanned outcome, not by design. I make the same suggestions to parents now.
This is the advice—if you have an eager, engaged academically inclined student, do nothing for the sole purpose of getting into college. {disclaimer: I am not saying this it best for every type of student or every family. I encourage you to simply consider it and decide if it might be best for your child and your family}
Encourage your child to make choices that will enhance him/her for life. Encourage him/her to delve into subjects and activities that are meaningful to him/her. Ignore what everyone else advises and does in favor of encouraging your child to do what makes most sense for him/her. High school is not just preparation for college. High school is 4 years of your child’s life. Use it meaningfully. Why would you let 4 college years drive everything you do for the 4 preceding years?
I had STEM enthusiast children. I never encouraged them to pursue straight A’s-even in STEM classes. I encouraged them to be fully involved in learning. I did encourage them to pursue outside the classroom what they learned inside it. I encouraged them to first think about what they wanted to accomplish and then consider how to do it. This contrasts with the approach of seeing what is available and then deciding what you want to pursue from the offerings. See the difference? When you first decide about what you want to accomplish you are not constrained by what everyone else does or what activity is readily available to you or even what your local school offers. Naturally it is easier to select among what is being offered. Easiest isn’t the same as best. So you want to study or achieve or do something but nobody else in your school does it and it’s not offered? OK, how can you make that happen? Go for it!
Some parents are now trying to craft high school outcomes for their kids that make it look like they used this strategy because some advisers are now writing about how kids need to show depth not breadth and should look like they “followed their passion”. But as soon as you, as a parent, are trying to craft your child’s high school endeavors in an effort to create an outcome to appeal to colleges, you are doing the antithesis of what I did and what I’d do again if my kids were just starting high school.
Re: “Rules were - no crying and be in bed by 10pm (on a weekdays).”
I actually secretly wish DS would be crying when it was good for him to do so. The last time he was crying might be when he was in the first grade and this is not good in my opinion. I think it might be better for him to feel free to cry at a age that is at least a little bit older, even better at any age. Bad behavior inheritance from me I guess, because I could hardly remember I was crying (but I heard I cried a lot when I was a baby but I somehow have zero memory about it.
Re: “Be bed by 10 pm”: I admit DS was unable to achieve that every night. (either he is “dumber” or his PUBLIC high school is ironically more challenging than your D’s PRIVATE high school? Another possibility is that, to some extent, some public schools could ask the students to do some mundane tasks that do not have much educational value - mostly due to the somewhat questionable “quality” of some (but not all) teachers. Do not know which one is true here.)
His high school was not even a super challenging high school, like some extremely challenging public high school in a more populated area like the Bay Area. We used to live in one of the “fly-over” states in the heartland of America and arguably speaking (and I myself agree this could be true and I could be flamed by making this non-PC statement), the concentration of “insanely academically intense” students could be somewhat lower in some of the fly-over countries. (A side note here: I heard from several sources that, even for the jobs of researcher or professors, if a professor or a researcher changes his job from another also well regarded research university to the one and only one Harvard, his/her job title level had to be lowered a notch or two, just because of the supply-and-demand. Why would you not see the same phenomenon at the high school level, except it would be at a much mild level?!)
We did try to steer our S to a course load such that he would not have sleep starvation - but he was still graduated with about 10 APs (all with 5) and 3 SAT subject tests (all with 800s). No lack of students at his high school had 12 or 13 APs before graduation from high school. DS did not try to compete on that front. 10 APs are enough for him.
However, we did ask him to learn more (than expected) in SOME (but not all) classes. For example, he was expected (by us, not by school’s teacher) to learn seriously how to officially prove geometry theorems (in middle and high school) and epsilon-delta proof in the limit/infinite series subject (in high school), the axiomatic treatment in Einstein’s Special Relativity in Physics (in both high school and college.) We emphasized the “true learning” in a few selected subject areas. Our job as parents was to hunt down the appropriate materials.
I could have written lostaccount’s post. Ironically, like her kids, mine had great end results in terms of admissions (also not “by design”), but we didn’t talk about college until we absolutely had to. We considered school sort of like people might think of boy or girl scouts. Their real interests and real work often were outside of school.
I am wondering why, specifically, you posted this question. Like lostaccount, I would suggest not doing anything solely for the purpose of getting into college. In fact, don’t even mention college for awhile I think the book others are suggesting may have a similar philosophy ( I read excerpts when it first came out).
Most of all, relax- both you and your son- and enjoy these years!
My S didn’t do anything specifically for college or obsess over grades, in spite of being in a competitive magnet program. It worked out fine–he was accepted to several elite schools, attended one, graduated last June with honors and now has a good job, even with a social science major (actually a double major in two social science fields).
However, I wish he had been a little more proactive when he started high school. He discovered some activities he really enjoyed his junior year and would have enjoyed them earlier, too. Also, I wish he had cared a little bit more about grades. If he could get an A- without caring about grades, he could have probably gotten the A without much additional effort or stress.
I had a grand total of 3 rules when I was in high school: don’t drink and drive, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t have a baby. Remarkably, I was able to follow all of them without complaint
I led the way. I picked out my classes. I made mistakes. Hell, I even got a C- in a class (the horror!). Still went on to have a fabulous college career and am going into a PhD program this fall.
I really, truly believe that high school is the time for a kid to EXPLORE, to make mistakes, to accomplish things without parental pushing.
No crying? You’re not taking enough risks if you never cry, IMO.
If I were back in high school, I would have taken the one course I truly wanted to take – but which I refused to take because I knew I could not get a high grade. That course was typing. I wanted to learn to type well, but the course was graded on speed, and I’m a klutz. I’m so uncoordinated that I could not possibly have gotten an A, and even a B might have been out of reach. And a B or C in typing would have meant that I wouldn’t be valedictorian. In fact, if I got a C, which was likely, I wouldn’t have been in the top 10 graduates.
But I would have learned something I really wanted to learn, and that’s what school is supposed to be about. I wish I had had the courage to make that choice.
My kids, on the other hand, seemed to make good choices in high school. I doubt there is anything they would have wanted to do differently.
I think the book others are suggesting may have a similar philosophy ( I read excerpts when it first came out).