Mom Behind the Curtain

every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard

Success factors 6: Is there a connection between AP courses, reading, and SAT scores?

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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….

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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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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?

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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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