Mom Behind the Curtain

every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard

Success factors 4: Is the answer 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. 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. …

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Success factors: High school rankings released by U.S. News: What do they mean?

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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?…

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

This post may contain text and image affiliate links. You pay the same price, but I may receive a small commissions for purchases through those links.

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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?

This post may contain text and image affiliate links. You pay the same price, but I may receive a small commissions for purchases through those links.

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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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