Just wondering. For those of you with kids who will probably graduate from high school 2+ years ahead of schedule, do you or your kids have ideas in mind for what they'd do next?
Would you let your child go off to college very early? If so, would you let him/her go if the college was close to home or would a distant college or university be okay?
I know that there's no single right answer to this question and that everything depends completely on each child, but I thought I'd ask as a way to solicit exchange of ideas. Here are a few of ours for our child:
* Do a high-school abroad year or two with a program like AFS.
* Get a p/t job and take random classes at a community college (astronomy, ceramics, etc. etc. etc.).
* Do an exotic internship (e.g. Marine Biology in the Bahamas). There are many experiences like this aimed at high school-aged kids.
* Other.
I hope nobody minds if I bring back the first post for a minute--Frenchie and I have been mulling over ideas similar to Val's for a while, and I wondered if I might just pop a couple of thoughts out there. We're a few years away yet from facing these kinds of decisions, but it never hurts to do a little advance research!
(Frenchie and I both headed to university a couple of years early ourselves--he lived at home, while I was seven hours from my folks--we both had good experiences, but we find it helpful to think over a wide range of possibilities, given that we have three kids who are very different from one another, and, like most people here, I'm sure, we may well need more than one solution.)
We've wondered about some online university classes as a way to get feet wet, or taking a course or two at the university where I taught until Harpo was born. Although we're in Canada, we're also wondering about maybe doing some A-levels--Harpo likes the looks of some of the subject areas, and thinks he might really enjoy digging into some of those topics in depth. (Since we homeschool, a regular "high-school diploma" is not really happening here anyway, unless we change our minds and decide to enroll them, so we are possibly looking for some other kinds of potential credentials, as well as learning experiences.)
Some other possibilities are a year or two away, with programs like United World Colleges (
http://www.uwc.org/) or Katimavik (
http://www.katimavik.org/ ; this program is just for Canadians, I think, because of the way it is funded) or some kind of language immersion experience (
http://www.learningfrenchinquebec.com/academic_year.aspx); we think Groucho in particular would love this kind of thing.
We have also wondered about helping the boys find some mentors; we know a lot of people with pretty interesting work, and we wonder if somehow we might set up some kind of apprenticeship, as it were. Harpo, for instance, is very interested in endangered languages and in archaeology, and I could see some kind of extended "field school" possibilities there, maybe? Groucho is theatre-mad (at least at the moment); if that interest continues, we know people with whom he could engage in an extended job-shadowing/apprenticing type of situation. (David Albert's books are quite interesting in this regard, I think--I loved the way he and his wife found mentors for their daughters over the years.) Chico at the moment, however, wants to be the first man on Mars, so I don't think I can help too much there!
Groucho also likes the idea of taking a year or two first and getting really good at a trade, so that he can always pay his bills, even if the acting work dries up--that kid thinks ahead!
Anyway, just thought I'd toss a couple of ideas into the mix...
peace
minnie
