For seniors, a college acceptance letter is not an irrevocable promise. That dream school you’ve been waiting to attend since second grade? They probably require you to send your final transcript. And they will not be happy to see a D in calculus. When you are accepted, they accept you assuming that the grades you have shown them reflect your work ethic and study habits all the time, not just when it’s important.

              Even if you’re not going to college next fall, the fate of your academic future may still be contingent upon your study habits during fourth marking period. With the month of May come HSAs and AP tests, for both of which it is imperative to pay attention in class to do well on. If you do poorly on an AP test it is just a waste of $85, but if you fail an HSA, you will have to take it over until you pass. You may even have to drop that elective you were so excited about taking next year to fit a passing the HSA class into your schedule.

              And remember, if you fail a class because of your fourth marking period grades, that is it. There is no next semester to retake the class, or its equivalent. Particularly for seniors, this is vital to remember – primarily because no one wants to spend the last summer before everyone moves away waking up early every morning to spend the day in a hot and stuffy classroom for summer school.

              So enjoy the weather and allow yourself to have some fun in the sun, but keep in mind– school’s not over yet!

Emalyn Embree, Co-Editor of Chief, Class of 2010

Applicationomics: Admissions Committee Incentives

“Unschooling” is a bad idea. It’s basically an excuse for lazy parents to be lazy but call themselves “cutting-edge”. The fact is, most kids don’t want to learn. Only the ones that really excel in school and enjoy the positive feedback that they get from A’s on their report card are hungry to learn more. Most kids, especially nowadays, would much rather sit around playing video games or surfing the net than writing a book report on Catcher in the Rye.

 I actually have some serious reservations about Homeschooling as well. When executed properly, the educational value of homeschool can exceed that of public or private schools, but many parents don’t have the ability to discipline their children and force them to study, so homeschool turns into something more similar to “unschool”.

They’re at home all day, but they’re not being homeschooled. They’re being “unschooled.” There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.

What’s more, that hands-off approach extends to other areas of the children’s lives: They make their own decisions, and don’t have chores or rules.

Christine Yablonski and Phil Biegler of Westford, Mass., are self-described “radical unschoolers.” They allow their teen daughter and son to decide what they want to learn, and when they want to learn it.

“They key there is that you’ve got to trust your kids to … find their own interests,” Yablonski told

Nationwide Homeschooling provider Citizens’ High School noticed an increase in enrollment. When they learned the source of the increased demand the school administrators where surprised. The 4-Hour Work Week has inspired parents to travel abroad with kids.

“All these customers where calling and saying how they wanted to homeschool their kids and travel the world”

Orange Park, Florida (PRWEB) April 19, 2010 — Citizens’ High School has been enjoying a surge in enrollments. The Homeschooling Materials Provider noticed during a marketing audit, that many new customers were the result of New York Times bestselling author Timothy Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week. Ryan Dallas who works in Citizens’ admissions department had never heard of the book previously. Mr. Dallas “All these customers where calling and saying how they wanted to homeschool their kids and travel the world”. This new lifestyle is made possible by the clever use of outsourcing, the 20/80 principle, and “income muses” that are described in the book.

At present there are about 2 million home schooled children in the USA according to the US Consensus Bureau. Estimates vary, but homeschooling may be increasing as much as 20% per year. This is due to a variety of reasons (not just Ferriss’ book). Another characteristic of home schooled kids is that their parents are likely to be married and above average income and education. This might also account for the increased travel as the parents may have more time because of the recent economy. If parents are partaking in long term travel abroad, then the children will benefit from the life experience of living someplace foreign.

The 4-Hour Work Week has become like a cult hit. The basics of the book are to use the Paretto Principle (or the 20/80 rule) that gives you 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. When this is applied to “income muses” via outsourcing, the result is that a lot of income can be made with only 20% of the current effort. This explains the attraction to the book as many people would love to earn 80% of their current income working only 20% as much. Having less income, may result in a better lifestyle if the reader uses a technique called “geo-arbitrage). Essentially it is earning income from one place, like the USA, while living in a place with a cheaper cost of living such as Argentina.

Citizens’ High School has been a DETC accredited High School since 1981. The DETC accreditation is considered the benchmark accreditation to have for educational institutions. Their office is located in an 8000 sq ft office in Orange Park Florida, but they serve student both nationally and internationally.

For all written correspondence address mail to: Citizens’ High School 188 College Drive P.O. Box 66089 Orange Park, FL 32065-6089

Contact Information: Citizens’ High School http://www.citizenschool.com/homeschooling.htm 1-800-736-4723

Psychology Today blogger, Laura Brodie, decided to give her daughter a break from the school routine:

Many lifelong homeschoolers will wince at the thought of short-term ventures. For them, homeschooling is a way of life, not a year off. The potential benefits of home education (strong family ties, increased academic achievement) develop gradually over time, and the first year of homeschooling can be especially hard-not an ideal sampling of the complete experience.

~~~
When Julia and I embarked upon our year of homeschooling, I thought we were doing something strange and rare, and so I was surprised at all the families I met along the way who were trying, or had tried, similar experiments. Their reasons ranged from a desire to supplement a public school’s curriculum, to the need to escape a persistent bully. And then there were the families who simply wanted to enjoy more unhurried time between parent and child.

One of the beauties of homeschooling is that each family can define what it means, and how it looks for their family. The cliche applies – you see one homeschool, you’ve seen one homeschool.

Brodie’s blog, Love in a Time of Homeschooling (also the title to her book) can be read here.

STOCKHOLM, March 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The government of Sweden is taking a hard line against homeschoolers, proposing a bill that will only allow home education under “extraordinary circumstances,” reports the Home School Legal Defense Association. The bill is expected to pass in the Swedish parliament, following a review by the Supreme Administrative Court, and will allow for homeschooling families to face criminal charges.

The court has asked only for the government to specify the definition of “extraordinary circumstances.”

Jonas Himmelstrand, president of the Swedish Association for Home Education (ROHUS), said the situation is changing rapidly for the worse for homeschoolers in the country.

“Just two years ago my family and many others received the permission of local municipal school boards to homeschool.”

Himmelstrand continued, “Last year we won our court case at trial, but the appeals court sided with the government against our homeschooling. The school year was over before the school officials could bring another case. This year the authorities are being much more aggressive. Families are being fined and the new law would allow for the imposition of criminal sanctions.”

The news of the socialist government’s hardening attitude toward homeschoolers comes following the state seizure eight months ago of seven year-old Dominic Johansson, whose parents were educating him at home. Since the removal of Dominic by police from a plane the family had boarded with the intention of moving to India, Christer and Annie Johansson have been allowed to see their son for one hour every five weeks.

Despite the seizure of Johansson, homeschooling is not officially illegal in Sweden. But the statist views of the current government are deeply antagonistic towards any movement of citizens away from the state control of education.

“The government’s quest for conformity produces troubling side effects: the criminalization of actions – such as a parent’s decision regarding the best form of education for his child – that ought to be the hallmarks of a free, democratic society,” said the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in a statement. The U.S.-based HSLDA and Alliance Defense Fund are assisting the family.

HSLDA said that while Sweden is often portrayed as a “social utopia,” what is not widely known is its antagonism toward homeschoolers, “and, in reality, anyone who deviates from what the Swedish government defines as ‘normal’.”

One American homeschooling mother, Lisa Angerstig, who is married to a Swede, said that the government is becoming “increasingly aggressive,” having already fined the family the equivalent of U.S. $1400.

“Sweden is a beautiful country,” she said, “and the people are very nice. But the government has become increasingly aggressive about education, trying to require that all children go to the state schools. For a country that prides itself on human rights, this type of aggressive behavior is quite shocking.”

Himmelstrand said there are only about a hundred homeschooling families in the whole country, but these are “one hundred too many for Swedish authorities.”

“They are preparing to pass this new law to make it harder, and it appears that local school boards are already enforcing the new law even though it hasn’t been passed through Parliament.”

Read related LSN coverage:

Socialist Sweden Moves to Ban Homeschooling for Religious or Philosophical Reasons
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/aug/09081104.html

GMAT Tip: “Layering” in Sentence Correction Questions

This week, we have another article from Chris Ryan, Manhattan GMAT’s Director of Instructor and Product Development. This week he tackles “layering” in Sentence Correction questions. Layering is a technique used by a test writer to make a question more difficult.

We all know that the GMAT is a computer adaptive test, and computer adaptive tests give us questions based on the difficulty level that we “earn” as we take the test. How do the test writers at ACT (the organization that writes the GMAT) determine which questions are harder than others?

First, ACT engages in a process called “normalization,” wherein all freshly written questions are tested by actual test takers to determine what percentage answer the questions correctly (we know these questions as “experimental” questions). If too many people answer correctly, the question may need to be toughened up. If too few people answer correctly, the question may need to be dumbed down. ACT is looking to assemble a pool of questions that covers a range of difficulty, from cakewalk to mind-bending, and the test takers help them do so.

How does ACT find these test takers? Easy. Everyone who takes the GMAT will end up answering up to 10 unscored “experimental” math questions and 10 unscored “experimental” verbal questions. These questions are interspersed with the actual, scored questions with no way to identify them as experimental.

Second, the writers at ETS have a general sense of what makes a 50th percentile question, or a 75th percentile question, or a 90th percentile question. Because each test is designed to evaluate proficiency in the same range of topics, the writers have to come up with ways to test the same concepts at different levels of difficulty. That’s where “layering” comes in.

So, in a nutshell, a simple problem is made increasingly complex by adding information to obscure the core issues. In Sentence Correction questions, you are given a sentence in which a portion has been underlined. Your task is to determine whether the underlined portion is correct as it stands or whether it needs to be replaced with one of the answer choices in order to make the sentence grammatical and clear.

For example, let’s consider the following sentence:

The dog are friendly.

It does not take much effort to see that this sentence is flawed: the noun (”dog”) is singular but the verb (”are”) is plural. This would be much too easy for the GMAT, so the test writers must camouflage the error. One simple way to do so is to insert a lot of unnecessary verbiage between the noun and verb. We call this verbiage the “middleman.” For example:

The dog, which was one of two puppies rescued from the shelter, are friendly.

The subject-verb flaw is a little harder to see now, but still fairly apparent on a first read. If we take out the “middleman” (the intervening clause), we are back to the original sentence (”The dog are friendly”). Notice, however, that the writers have inserted a plural noun (”puppies”) in the new clause so that you have plurality on the brain when you read “are friendly.” If you are already thinking in plural terms, you are much less likely to spot the error. Even on a visual level, the subject of the sentence (”dog”) is so far removed from the verb (”are”) that the eye quickly alights on “puppies” as a possible subject for the plural “are.” As tricky as this may already seem, the writers can put yet another kink in the rope:

Two puppies were rescued from the shelter, but neither of them are friendly.

The error in this sentence is significantly less apparent than those in the previous examples, though it is still the same error: subject-verb disagreement. Here the subject is “neither (of them),” which is singular (think of it as “neither one of them”). The verb, however, is still plural (”are”). The saga of the mismatched subject and verb goes on. Can the writers make the problem even harder to spot? Sure! Let’s take a look at the following example:

Neither of the two puppies that were rescued from the shelter are friendly.

If you compare this sentence with the previous examples, the error is almost completely camouflaged. We can see that the subject is “neither (one),” which is singular, but the verb “are” is still plural. The core is simply “neither (one) are friendly.” The test writers have managed to layer enough “junk” into the middle of the sentence to make it very difficult to spot the error. That junk, though, is just extra information about the subject: “Neither (one) <of the two puppies that were rescued from the shelter> are friendly.” Only those who really know the rules backwards and forwards are going to be able to avoid this trap.

We have gone from “The dog are friendly” to “Neither of the two puppies that were rescued from the shelter are friendly” in a few steps, obscuring the central subject-verb issue along the way. Breaking sentences down into their component parts and analyzing their relationships is the key to success in Sentence Correction.

Major take-aways from Chris’s article:

1. When studying, try to figure out how the author “layered” the sentence to make it more difficult. Can you write a simpler version of the sentence (perhaps with only the core information, not everything)? How did the author make this sentence so tricky?

2. If you can split out the core and understand how the different pieces of “extra” info fit into the core, then you won’t be as likely to fall into a trap on a “layered” question. (You still might fall into a trap – but you will have a much better chance of avoiding it!)

For more information on ManhattanGMAT, download Clear Admit’s independent guide to the leading test preparation companies here.  This FREE guide includes coupons for discounts on test prep services at ten different firms!

Legality — Can I Teach my Child from Home?

It is legal to homeschool your child in the U.S. and many other countries. Each state has different laws regarding homeschooling, which can range from simple guidelines to more formal legal requirements. Look for a local, state or regional home education organization to provide basic information on the laws that pertain to your state.

Finding the Support You Need

Some home education departments will also provide a list of support groups in your area. These support groups are usually run by volunteers who also homeschool their children. You can find a support group in your area to get the encouragement and information you need from experienced homeschooling families.

In addition to state and local support groups, private groups can be particularly helpful. Their services range from providing books, materials and other resources to consultation, testing and distance education programs. These groups are designed to serve homeschooling families and not only sell the supplies and services you need, but provide helpful information and referrals.

Additional Resources

There are many resources available to the new homeschooler. Get the information you need to get started on the right foot. Read books on homeschooling. Browse web pages and links and read different articles that are available to you.

Remember that the benefit of homeschooling is that you can customize the education to fit the needs of your children and your family. You can choose the educational methods that work best for you.

http://www.alliedhighschool.com

Heather Brunson
http://www.articlesbase.com/homeschooling-articles/homeschooling-how-to-get-started-106900.html