Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources AP? update:places to look for summer courses

I wouldn't recommend that unless he strongly wants the social element. Most core courses move at a snail's pace. As a TA, I derived the entire course for a second year micro class on 4 pages of double sided paper and taught it (a full semester course) in a 2 hour lecture. I passed out the handouts, then I gave permission to everyone who felt they understood to skip class for the rest of the semester.

Point being, there's a lot of repetition and time wasting. A good tutor will get your son through the slog quickly and onto the more interesting material faster than a conventional class.

Oh boy... Thanks for the insider's info. This is so helpful. We are looking at an online "self-paced" course but with instructor facilitation. This still doesn't have the social component that DS is hoping for, but we may just have to find some social activities through other channels in the summer.

We are most likely going to go for the individually-paced AP course--didn't find many other options. So, question for aquinas and other experts in economics, if we pick a microeconomics course, it is usually fairly quantitative, right? Or do microeconomics courses vary a lot?

I would check your local colleges and community colleges as well. Quite a few of them offer classes for ages 7-17 during the summer these days - it's a big money-making market.

I can't speak to AP Micro, but college Micro 101 is not heavily quantitative in the formal sense. Very few equations. It is highly logical, though, and (depending on the teacher), there might be some mathematical relationships formalized (e.g., direct and inverse variation). The typical course uses a lot of graphs (upward-sloping supply, downward demand), and the concept of change (margins) is important. So it's math-y but not formalized. Undergraduate econ doesn't get very quantitative in the formal sense (I speak as a former econ major). They had us take Calc, but we rarely used it. Grad school is a whole different story!

We did. The timing doesn't work out for this summer.

This is a bit discouraging... Do you have suggestions for us on how to look for a quantitative economics course at the high school level? (DS14 has done a high school honors economics course which was not quantitative at all, and his math level exceeds high school graduation requirements.)

Could MIT OCW Scholar work for you?

Principles of Microeconomics

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-01sc-principles-of-microeconomics-fall-2011/

Principles of Microeconomics is an introductory undergraduate course that teaches the fundamentals of microeconomics. This course introduces microeconomic concepts and analysis, supply and demand analysis, theories of the firm and individual behavior, competition and monopoly, and welfare economics. Students will also be introduced to the use of microeconomic applications to address problems in current economic policy throughout the semester.

Instructor: Prof. Jonathan Gruber

Prerequisites and Preparation

This course will include some basic uni-variate calculus material, as taught in the MIT course 18.01 Single Variable Calculus or in a comparable high-school calculus course. There are no other prerequisites.

Visit 18.01SC Single Variable Calculus to learn or review this material.