Mom Behind the Curtain

every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard

Success factors 5: Should you take the high school advice to take all the AP courses you possible can?

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So after deciding that we thought the full advanced placement courses class load was a treadmill to no-where that was increasing in speed, we started out with recommending our kids take partial AP loads. But, we found that our kids weren’t getting as much out of their classes. Maybe the path the school was recommending for top students – a full AP load – was the right one after all.

The problem is that the standard advice – given by all high schools – is to take as many preAP/AP courses as you possibly can. This means that most of the serious students are in the preAP/AP classes….

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Print Publishing’s Answer to Ebooks

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I’ve seen print publishing’s answer to ebooks.

Many have predicted the end of paper books, that they’ll go the way of the stone tablet. Others have suggested they’ll persist only as expensive collector’s editions – elaborate coffee table books with burnished gold edges.

I was lucky enough to attend a book signing at Book People in Austin for Richard Peck’s new book, The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail. The future is already here. Richard Peck himself was quite pleased with the design of the book. I think he’s got ebooks to thank for it. For their Newbery Award winner, Penguin has turned out a stunning book….

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Why is required school reading so depressing?

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book stack

book stack (Photo credit: sarah_browning)

With the end of the school year approaching it may seem like an odd time to be thinking about what the required reading novels will be next year. But we recently had to fill out course selection sheets for all three kids, and the same questions always comes up. Do we let our kids sign up for preAP English knowing that the reading selections will be more “challenging”? Because in effect we have found what it really means is that the novels will be more disturbing….

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