every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
School used to be so easy. Take the hardest classes possible. Do your best. Success will follow.
But have high schools (and the college boards who wrote up the advanced placement curriculum) succeeded in making advanced placement classes so challenging that a student can’t do it all? Or are they just leading to teen stress and anxiety with little to no affect on life-long success?…
As I’ve outlined in my previous posts, I’ve been pondering how to guide our kids to the best path of success, starting in high school by analyzing success factors. One answer might be that you try to move into a school district according to the high school ratings. Our school ranks well in U.S. News 2014 Best High Schools Rankings, but what does this mean?
I started thinking about this when we noticed that high school kids at our school seemed to have over-whelming schedules and then noted our own experiences with a full schedules of preAP and AP classes.
In my last post, I gave a quick rundown of my take on The Smartest Kids in the World: and how they got that way, by Amanda Ripley.
What I took from that was that was that based on the studies of Finland and Poland’s educational systems, stress, test, and retest might not be necessary for success. And South Korea’s school system shows that a high stress and test environment has some definite drawbacks.
So I was surprised that when I started reading Amanda Ripley’s blog, I kept running into statistics that used AP tests as a measure of whether of a high school was an academic success. She seems to agree with using AP tests as a way to determine school ratings….
As I’ve outlined in my previous posts, I was pondering how to guide our kids to the best path of success, starting in high school by analyzing what the success factors are. We’ve tried both a partial load of preAP/AP classes and a full load of preAP/AP classes. Our personal experience has been that both ways have their own drawbacks.
Then I came across, The Smartest Kids in the World: and how they got that way, by Amanda Ripley.
Of course, everyone would like to think that their kid is the smartest kid in the world,:) even if they don’t want to admit it. But that’s not really what this book is about. It’s an unfortunate title, because it might make most parents think that the book has nothing to offer for their “average smart” kids let alone their “average” kids, but it does….
For lots of reasons that I went over in some of my previous posts, we started questioning if our kid should be taking a full load of AP classes starting with this first post. We were wondering if a success factor in high school was taking a full AP load. So I continued asking more questions about AP classes and class rank at our school. Here are some of the things I learned.
Like a lot of schools, our students have essentially two GPAs.
The first is a straight GPA. Just an average of all your grades in all your classes.
Then they have another adjusted GPA that is used for their class rank, and they get extra points for preAP and AP classes. This means that even if you make a lower grade in a preAP or AP class, the grade used to compute you average is likely to be higher than you could possibly get in a ‘regular’ class. This makes sense, since it seems to avoid penalizing kids for taking harder classes. We’ll call their adjusted GPA, using this extra bump for harder classes, their class rank average.…
AP classes and SAT scores can both be thought of as measurements of success factors for high school. But does one have an affect on the other?
As I mentioned my last post, we noticed a couple of things about our school district that indicated that our school was not preparing students as well as it could to take the SAT and the PSAT. So I started trying to figure out why. Not that I think the SAT is a perfect measure for learning, but it seemed like the level of achievement should at least stay the same….
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….
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. So we decided that maybe the answer was just to not take a full load of advanced placement courses.
So through our start of middle school, taking only a partial load of preAP classes seemed to be turning out pretty well. …
U.S. News released its 2014 best high schools rankings this week.
You can see if your high school ranked here: U.S. News National Rankings Best High Schools.
Our own local high school is ranked, and moved up well in the rankings, but what does it mean?…
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….
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.)…