Mom Behind the Curtain

every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard

Success factors 3: Is the answer to not take a full load of advanced placement courses?

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In past posts about success factors, I talked about when my kids were still young I learned that taking a full load of advanced placement classes at a moderately competitive high school means ridiculous homework loads. I started wondering if there was a better way for success, and noted some information such as that can be found on the blog, Study Hacks.

By the time our oldest was entering middle school, I thought I had it all figured out. (Hah! Cue laughter here. As a parent can we ever have it all figured out?)

We decided that the best option was just to not take a full load of preAP/AP classes. We would just resist getting on the ever-speeding treadmill in the first place….

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Success Factors 2: Is a heavy load of Advanced Placement Courses the Best Path to Success?

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In my last post about success factors, I talked about the glimpse I got into the homework load of a student taking advanced classes at a moderately competitive high school. It started me wondering, is there a reason for high school students to have tremendously heavy workloads?

At the time, my kids were still in elementary school. Their homework load usually wasn’t unreasonable. There were a few times that it did get heavy, but there were always parents who complained louder than we did, and for the most part things worked out fine. But I continued to think about how we were going to tackle high school. (And I noticed that I just said “we,” just like the mom talking about how “we” had homework to do. Still, this isn’t doing our kids work.)…

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Success factors 1: What’s the Best Way to Guide Your Child Through High School to be a Success in College and in Life?

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What is the best way to guide your child through high school to be a success in college and in life? What are the success factors you need to instill in your kid?

I don’t know.

If that’s not the best way to get you to quit reading right now, I don’t know what is. But I’ll follow that by saying that these posts are about my looking for the best way to guide my kids through high school. And as with anything I do, I always research it. Thoroughly….

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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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