http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040803976.html

Another one to debate on....

That was very interesting. Thanks for sharing it. Homeschooling does sound better and better each day.

Yeah, I had just read that a few days before. Made my blood run a little cold especially in respect to DD5. She has the personality to tune out and turn off. I was able to get into college with a dismal GPA due to ACT scores. Evidently, that's not how it works nowadays.

I know nothing about this situation. I do, however, know something about the admissions process at a few colleges and the systems for making decisions are complex with many factors being considered. Each college has its own personality and the admissions folks are looking for a good fit between the personality of the student and the personality of the school. While this includes GPA and test scores, personal essay and letter of recommendation also are very important in the process. These are more intangible and harder to quantify, but very important.

There are many excellent colleges and they are not all looking for the same things. I suspect that any of the kids represented on this board will be able to get into a good college (assuming that that is what they want!), but sometimes it takes some leg work to find the college that is the best match for the student. You should not just assume that because a college is good on paper that it will necessarily be the right place for your child to thrive. I hope that the student in this article finds that he likes where he ends up and doesn't fret too much about the one that got away.

Not that the college noticed this in his applications, but the kid wasn't doing his assignments. I know plenty of very gifted kids who don't do their assignments-- and I am always concerned for them. Yes, there is a game to play in high school and college-- and some of that is work, regardless of whether you know the material or not! While it is possible that what the author says is true, that if she HSchooled her child he would have gotten into his choices they could afford; it is too far of a logic leap to make. Not all kids are suited for homeschooling.
My suggestion would be that the kid do community college for a year, do his assignments, get all A's and transfer to VT. It's not the end of the world, and maybe he'd improve his 'busy work' habits-- because college is full of that. This kid seems to have a nice stable ground for future endeavors.

good points acs and cali. It's easy to get bogged down when you see a worse case scenario like that.
Am I really worrying today about whether or not my five year old will get into the college of her choice?
Shame on me!!!!!!!!!

I just want to clear something up here. Homeschooling does allow a lot of freedom, but it is not the end all and be all of education. A child still has to be motivated and sometimes do things that they don't wholeheartedly enjoy. I *LOVE* homeschooling, but...

My oldest DS was homeschooled through high school and had about 50 college credits, Dean's list at the cc, great test scores (though his SAT math was only mid 600's, his other scores were near perfect) lots of community service, etc. He did not get into his top choice school, though he is doing well (academically at least) at his number two.

I think his major weakness was in group extracurriculars, and his letters of reference were written largely by people who didn't get to know him very well. I saw this coming, and encouraged him to build relationships with adults at the cc and his various jobs, internships, etc. He just couldn't do it. So the reference from the radio station owner where he interned for two years is very vague and basically says that J is really smart and a good kid. People can't write about what they don't know, and since James never let his great sense of humor show, nobody knew to mention it.

I drive James crazy with my organic and natural food preferences, but when I heard the folks on air discussing the old fashioned type of peanutbutter that you have to stir, James didn't think to pipe up that his Mom buys that kind and he hates it. He could have gone off about disliking my real maple syrup, or hummus and pita bread, etc. It would have extended the conversation and entertained, but he didn't even think of sharing. That's the way he is. He was comfortable reading news items and once faced off against the news anchor in a trivia contest on air, but he never spontaneously brought things up.

So yes, homeschooling does open up possibilities, but the student still needs to be a leader and a diligent worker. Positive relationships with tutors, instructors, coaches, and mentors need to be formed and to be nurtured. Test scores alone don't count for much at all.

Some kids just aren't good at playing the game. From what I've seen, those are the very ones who tend to make excellent engineers. (Said the daughter of an engineer, the best friend of an engineer, the wife of an engineer, and very probably the mom of at least one engineer...)

Following dumb rules doesn't usually appeal to a good problem solver. They tend to bristle and rebel against rules that the rest of us accept as just part of the way things are.

That's neither a pro or a con for the kid's choices, really, nor is it a recommendation for or against homeschooling. It's just an observation: if he won't play the game, then I'll bet the kid will make a really good, efficient, smart engineer.

Interesting. My stepson, like this boy, was probably able to read at a college level when he was 3rd or 4th grade age and this is one of the things my son has in common with his half-brother.

Public school didn't work for my stepson because even though he could pass all of the tests, he would not turn in his work. My husband said they tried all kinds of things to get him to turn in his work and he just wouldn't do it. The school refused to let him skip a grade because of this problem. My stepson even went to an expensive private school for a year and that didn't work either. He ended up dropping out and getting his GED.

We had a friend years ago whose daughter was the same age as my stepson. They made similar scores on the SAT. She went to MIT. My stepson dropped out of a community college.

My stepson is so smart. He is highly gifted but he never learned to work hard. When he tried college, it was the same story. This lack of a work ethic even carried into his adult life. He managed to get a really good job for a computer company that paid well without a college degree because he scored higher on their test than most of the college graduates. But he didn't keep that job, or the next one. He said he couldn't stand "office politics." He is now in his 30's, works in a convenience store, has no health or dental insurance and the last time we stopped in that store to visit him, we saw the computer manual he was reading for fun. I think he would be happy to not work at all. A few years ago, he lived with us for about 8 months without working and it didn't look like he was trying too hard to find a job. The situation affected my health and I had to be put on medication until he moved out.

I think we already knew the "dangers of not homeschooling" as we enrolled our son in public school kindergarten when he was five, because we hoped that it would be different for him. It wasn't. In fact it was probably worse, because my son has a mild disability that his half brother does not have and the school wanted to hold him back for not coloring in the lines, while not offering OT because he was reading and doing math above grade level. The first grade teacher I asked for advice was the mother of gifted sons and she told me if she had a son as highly gifted as mine she would homeschool. She also knew the dangers of not homeschooling.

Sometimes things work out for the best. My son can see for himself by watching adult siblings that intelligence alone will not make a person successful in life. We talk about those things that are likely to lead to success. We enjoy reading successful homeschool stories, but since we haven't found any good 2E homeschool stories lately, I guess we will just have to make our own.

We often talk about the qualities that colleges and employers look for. We had a family discussion about some of this recently when my husband got a promotion at work. We talked about the reasons he got the job instead of the competition who also had degrees--people skills, knowing how to play the office politics game and not quitting because you don't like dealing with it, volunteering to do more than you are asked to do instead of getting by with as little work as possible, etc.

As I had mentioned before, a lot is about finding the right fit between student and school. Here is a link to one of my favorite colleges. http://www.evergreen.edu/about/expectations.htm

I would have been miserable there because I like structure, but many of my non-rule-following friends have absolutely thrived here. These are the very smart folks who would have probably dropped out at a more traditional school for the reasons we have been talking about.

What if you can't afford to move to an area that has schools like this?

Well, Evergreen is a state college in Washington. Presumably, a student could move to Washington state for a year after high school to establish residency and then apply. I think that the tuition is pretty reasonable.

Ha, why didn't someone tell me I should have been an ENGINEER!!
I'm quite offended by arbitrary rules that aren't apparantly sensical!

I agree that work ethic is very important. We all have to do things that are "beneath" us. I don't quite like scrubbing the toilets and getting on my hands and knees to disinfect the bathroom floors. Hey, I used to manage millions of dollars and trade stocks for a living. But if I don't scrub the toilet, it will get really nasty and stinky around here!!!!

My father wanted to send me to Antioch in Yellow Springs Ohio, but we couldn't quite get the funds together. I went to a non-descript state college in the middle east. Not a bad school, certainly nothing to get excited about.

I went on to work on wall street at a very prestigous investment firm. For sure my little rinky dink state school diploma didn't get me there. By sheer will of who I was and what I wanted, that's what made it happen.

We have had family discussions about following rules and having to figure out when rules should be broken and when they shouldn't. My husband told us about a time when he worked as an army first sergeant and there was a rule that they had to stay out in the field for a certain number of days as part of training. There was an occasion when one of his soldiers got sick and he could tell by looking at him that he needed medical attention, but an officer refused to give him permission to take the soldier to the hospital because it was "against the rules" and threatened to court martial my husband if he disobeyed orders. My husband took the soldier to the hospital anyway and by doing so saved the soldier's life. The soldier's appendix had ruptured. He told our son that there are times when rules have to be broken. We hope that by talking about some of our life experiences and facilitating his education that he will acquire both the knowledge and the ability to make the right decisions in own life.

A frequent topic of discussion in our family is choices. We can choose to not follow rules and it works out okay for some people but from what I have seen, it more often doesn't work out very well. It also seems like there are a lot of unwritten rules where we live and as kind of an outside the box family in a small town in a state that still has cow chip throwing contests, we seem to already be breaking some of them without even trying.

It always looked to me like my stepson tried to defy all of those "unwritten rules" especially the ones about appearance. I know that appearance isn't supposed to matter, but where I live you are expected to look a certain way if you expect to get a job in anything except of course as an IT person. When my stepson live with us he wore his hair with green streaks in it, very long, tied in a pony tail. This pretty much guaranteed that he would not be able to find a job easily in our area.

I don't think my son would be happy living the way his half-brother is living. He wouldn't be able to afford video games or even think about saving money to visit Japan someday. He says he is willing to work for what he wants, of course he is not even ten years old yet so that might change. I sometimes wonder what my stepson will do to support himself later on in life when he is physically not able to work since he is not able to save money.

I probably look at some of this differently because of my life experiences, I studied accounting instead of engineering and I want to know that my son can some day can support himself and his family. Speaking from experience, life is harder when you are worried that you might not have enough money to pay all of your bills and have a decent standard of living.

I want my son to get a good college education whatever it takes, even if he has to follow rules that he doesn't like. If he gets a scholarship at a university that caters to outside the box people, that's great but otherwise it might be a good idea for him to try to live by the rules.

As a rule breaker and a system buster I agree that being unconventional can come at great personal cost. Also, some of the most important advances in science and industry have come out or unconventional thinking.
As we age, hopefully, we figure out when to stand up and when it's appropriate to go along to get along. I hope this ability will come to your stepson as he goes about experiencing his life.

Engineer is one of the three professions that people predict my son will end up in--either engineer, college professor or politician. I would like to make sure he gets the education to make all of these choices possible. Maybe he could do all three at different times in his life.

But I am hoping my son can maybe think of following the rules that he would rather not follow as playing a part in one of his plays. You have to follow the script but you also have to be prepared when something unexpected happens and be able to ad lib when you have to because the show must go on. At the end of the day you can go home and make your own rules.

My husband even talked about how he used to go into his "first sergeant act" or his "supervisor act." Those were roles he played very well, but that is not really him. He is not like that at home.

I LOVE that, kcab! I may steal that game idea for a future unit study on the US government! What a great way to learn about how tough it is to make laws and make them work.