Classics: Electra Festival at Stanford University

Miss C and I finished our study of The Iliad and found the whole thing exhausting. However, now that we're reading some later Greek plays, we're glad we have that background and context!

We joined a group of homeschoolers for a literature club that is starting up this summer by reading Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, Sophocles' Electra, and Aeschylus's Oresteia. Then we're seeing some live performances as well as some filmed versions of these and other Greek plays at Stanford University's Electra Festival this summer. It's quite an intriguing project!

As usual, we're wrapping some culture, history, and geography around the literature and theater. We watched Michael Wood's video series, "In Search of the Trojan War," are now watching the PBS documentary series "Greeks: Crucible of Civilization," and picked up The Teaching Company's audio course "Greece and Rome: An Integrated History of the Ancient Mediterranean" to listen to in the car. I'm expecting that will mostly happen on our twice-weekly trips to Berkeley for her Latin class this fall. We are enjoying our peek into the classical world!

Book: The New Global Student

My 4th of July weekend reading was The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, by Maya Frost. Very interesting!

The tone is often over-bubbly for my taste and it is broken up into too many small visual bites (boxes/sidebars, quotations, and underlined "smart moves" in case you missed the point described in body text), but I learned to overlook these to get to the good parts. Those good parts were the many first-person case histories of young students (or formerly young students) who took non-traditional routes through high school and college education, usually with at least a year spent abroad on their own, and most often finishing college at younger-than-usual ages.

One idea occurred to me repeatedly while reading this book -- how odd that Frost's family did not homeschool! So many of the family's values would be right at home in the homeschool world: creativity over fill-in-the-blank "achievement," spending lots of time together as a family, accelerating past the boring parts, and so on. Frost does include the story of one homeschooling family that sailed the Caribbean for four-and-a-half years, but all the other examples involve school (often high school, sometimes college courses) in another country. The family's favorite recommendation is for high school juniors to spend a year abroad alone through the Rotary Foundation, a long-established and low-cost program. Frost's husband, Tom Frost, participated in that program as a teenager himself, so it's not surprising the parents would want their daughters to try it.

Besides sending their teenage daughters on solo programs abroad, the family also spent a year living in Mexico, and then moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they live now. Besides providing a creative route to educating their daughters, all of whom are bilingual or multilingual and graduated college early, the Frosts claim that their overseas living has saved the family a lot of money that they've been able to use to send their four daughters to college.

In our seven years of homeschooling, we've been able to travel a lot and to experience many of the benefits the Frosts describe by being unplugged from institutional education. But we're still just getting into the years they discuss. Their emphasis is on rejecting the "four-by-four" plan of 4 years of high school and 4 years of college as the best route for educating America's young people. They claim travel is "not enough," that at least a year of living abroad as a teenager without her family delivers the best and longest-lasting impact on a maturing young person, one which will enable her to not only become a true global citizen but a well-qualified member of the "creative class." They tell a pretty convincing story.

Frost's book is not just about education in other countries. She touts the benefits of community college education for teens and sharply criticizes the amount of time high schoolers spend preparing for the SAT, taking AP courses and tests, and the like, in a mad scramble for the finite number of spaces at America's most selective universities. She says all ambitious students are doing the same thing, so they don't differentiate themselves. By taking an alternative route, living in another country before college age, becoming bilingual or multilingual as well as preparing for college, a student stands a better chance of distinguishing herself not only for college admissions but beyond that, for jobs and a career.

My favorite example of the many students who told their stories is a young man who is surely destined to become U.S. Surgeon General or head of the World Health Organization or something like that. He graduated from a Texas high school, and Vanderbilt University deferred his scholarship for a year while he went to Argentina to learn Spanish and study the culture. He arrived there, he said, with little more than a cowboy hat and a grin, and everyone laughed at his poor Spanish and his accent. But by the end of the year he was fluent, and they called him "just another Argentine." He went on to learn several more languages while studying biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt. After college, he received a scholarship that allowed him to study in Australia and earn a master's in public health; then he studied French in Senegal. At the writing, he had just graduated from medical school at Johns Hopkins University.

I can't say we'd be willing to let my daughter skip the SAT and AP courses, but since she's so advanced at a young age, she should have time both for that sort of thing and adventurous learning abroad. I'm very intrigued about investigating the programs Frost describes.

Frost's Web site introduces us to the twenty students profiled in the book. They have each taken a different path; that's the whole point. Lots of food for thought.

Pre-reading Biology

One of the moms on the Homeschool to College (hs2coll) list said that Pennsylvania Homeschoolers' AP Biology course requires the students to pre-read Campbell's Biology over the summer, before class starts in the fall. Wow! Only 1,267 pages. We're running behind already and we haven't even started. (smile)

Buy Your Campbell's Biology from Pearson, or Else...

...Or else you will not be able to get the online access for teachers that "goes with" the book (published by Pearson).

I bought Campbell's Biology, 8th Edition, through Amazon.com for $135, and also the Student Study Guide for it and the Investigating Biology Laboratory Manual. But when I requested online access for teachers, I received the message from Pearson Customer Service:

"We are sorry but to qualify for online password protected support you must purchase the textbook directly from Pearson."

This is even though I sent them the Amazon receipts for all I purchased of their products. I wish I had known earlier that I could buy the book directly from Pearson; once I got clearance to see their prices, they want $114 for it (it's now $140 at Amazon.com). So, I paid more for it, and am also denied the online access I should have with it.

Don't make the same mistake as I did!

UPDATE: Pearson Education reconsidered my case, and granted an exception (thank you!), but advised, "Please note that any future requests for online support will require that the purchase be made from Pearson." Good to know! If you want to order Campbell's Biology for an AP class, and/or any of the supplementary products in the program, see Pearson's product page.

The Chemistry of Biology

Continuing preparation for AP Biology... The amount of chemistry in a biology-for-majors college course today, or in an AP Biology course, is astonishing. I majored in biology, graduating almost 30 years ago, and I still have my (large) general biology book. It's a very different book than Campbell's Biology, 8th edition, the one we are using for AP Biology. I literally did not get to most of the chemistry included in Campbell until I took biochemistry as a junior in college.

Since I'm just starting out in organizing our course, I'll point you to the more-experienced words of "Jane in NC" on a "Well Trained Mind Forum" from 2008. She wrote, "I am a member of the AP Biology teachers listserv where teachers regularly comment that they were not exposed to all of this biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, etc. until later in college, grad school or at all!"

Glad to know we aren't the only ones.

The Evolution of Our AP Biology Course

As I wrote earlier, I'm planning an AP Biology course for the fall, to homeschool the subject with my daughter. From what I gather, this is an unusual choice; most homeschoolers seem to use one of the online or video courses available as a base for their study. I'd love to hear from others who are homeschooling AP Biology.

Of course, we too will make use of (free) online and video content and the complementary Web site to Campbell's Biology. I've started a Web site for our course, and this is where I'll plan and schedule our course of study. So far, I have a pretty great Links page (I think!) with many great resources available online. And, I've discussed my purchase of a compound microscope with an adapter for my Nikon D70 digital camera.

Between this blog and the course Web site, I'll discuss the "evolution" of our course. This summer, while Miss C is in a completely different world (mostly, performing arts camps), I'm preparing for the biology course. Almost 30 years ago, I graduated college with a degree in biology and was certified to teach high school science, but I never used it in my professional life. Yet I have always loved biology. I have been an avid birder through the years, and when I needed to research my thyroid disease and learn how to get well, I was happy I could understand what I was reading.

But am I up to the task of facilitating an AP Biology course for my daughter, all these years later? I guess we'll soon find out!

7 years...where did they go?

The first of June marks 7 full years of homeschooling for Miss C and me. It's been an amazing experience that has gone by all too fast. I was an "accidental homeschooler," backing into it when I couldn't get her into a "good" private school for kindergarten. But if I had it to do over again, knowing everything I do now, I would do it again with even more enthusiasm, if possible, than I did the first time.

We're still homeschooling, but with Miss C turning 12, having passed the CHSPE, taking the SAT next week, and planning to take two community college classes in the fall, I feel like the "basic" phase of her education is complete. And I'm very, very satisfied with all we've been able to accomplish. I'm especially happy that we have the great relationship we have, and so many wonderful shared learning experiences in our memories!

I'll still be her mom and I'll still be guiding her learning and teaching her a couple of subjects, going forward. But significantly, she has asked me not to audit the CC classes she'll take this fall (accompanying her in the class). I had thought I would do so until she was, oh, 14 or so. But Miss C is so independent and so confident that she apparently doesn't need me.

I assume I will still be useful as a driver for a few more years. So I will be working on my laptop in the library while she's in classes -- I guess I don't have any further excuse not to write my first book!

Visiting/honoring the Roosevelts

Our family reveres Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their values, both personal and political, are guideposts for us. And my husband's uncle was a good friend to Eleanor, an immigration lawyer who assisted her in her advocacy of displaced Europeans after World War II. We love the lady.


We were happy to visit the home, presidential library, and museum of FDR in Hyde Park, New York this week. But we were even happier to stand within the realm of Val-Kill, Eleanor's very own home, her personal space carved out in which she did her work as ambassador to the United Nations, birthmother to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, as Harry Truman called her, "First Lady of the World." We are in awe.

With all due respect, Eleanor Roosevelt, we honor you.