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Thought you'd like this article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-homeschool_18apr18,0,4804863.story?page=1

I loved this quote.

While other students talk cynically about the admissions "game" and "r�sum�-building," Link seems propelled by a genuine intellectual curiosity that can't be faked.

Wow! What an amazing girl with obviously amazing parents.

And I'll just add this: I want to go to Tibet, Greece, and China too!

Sign me up for those trips too, Amy!

This girl certainly had an amazing upbringing. Good for her and her parents! Great story. Thanks for sharing.

There was (and still is) a heated discussion on CC re: the above mentioned article.
Here are some quotes from mom, which I am sure yo will find very interesting:
(it is long....)

(lifted from CC, with poster's permission)

CGM, I am in no way ashamed by anything we have done or by anything said in the Trib article. We presented ourselves as a home schooling family who took an alternative path to meet our daughter's needs, enjoyed every bit of our unique journey and were blessed with amazing college admissions success at the end of it. Why you find this so awful, I really cannot fathom. And it is similarly not my fault that your consistent denigrations of my family and disparagement of my daughter's achievements, saying they are not noteworthy and are somehow ill-gotten, are beginning to rub me the wrong way.

I will also submit to you that I think it is really my music room that rubs you the wrong way.

I will be happy to justify my daughter's coursework to you! I am happy to share information on what worked so well for us with anyone who would like to hear. I can't include the sixteen page document I created detailing every course from the transcript I also created for my daughter, or include the school profile we created for her college applications as well, but I'll try to give you the Cliff notes version.

Chelsea started begging to play the harp when she was four. She didn't get to start lessons until she was more than five and a half, because it took us that long to save up the money to buy her first harp. We were in the early years of starting our company, and that was during the days when we had to search the sofa for change to put together $20 so I'd have cash when I went to Virginia for my grandmother's funeral.

During those days, I looked at every school in our area to try to find a positive school situation for my little girl, who started talking at 17 weeks old, reading just after her second birthday, and solving systems of equations with three variables when she was 5. I found what I hoped would be a good place for her, and my husband and I scraped together the hefty private school tuition while still working to get our business off the ground. My husband and I, just to dispel myths about us being portrayed here, did not come from money. In fact, I am the the first generation in my family to go to four-year college. My grandfather went to third grade. Ross and I both won full need-based scholarships to Cornell, and didn't stop paying the college loans we took out for everything else, including the costs of a U of Chicago MBA, until we were in our forties. That's how privileged our background has been.

Kindergarten was horrible for Chelsea, on so many levels. Whoever posted before that we deprived a classroom of a good student for others to emulate - this is simply not the case. Chelsea was teaching herself to write cursive when she started kindergarten, and signed in each morning in cursive. The teachers became more and more angry and forbade her to do so, believing it would make the other students feel badly. Absolutely not - the other kids loved it and wanted to be shown how to do this themselves. So while the teachers forbade Chelsea to be advanced and punished her for it, Chelsea went underground and taught the kids to write cursive at recess and in the coat closet, and to spell (correctly, not inventedly).

After several weeks of this kind of thing (along with the daily, "OK, everyone come sit in the circle for a reading game - and Chelsea, you can't play") and so, so much more, Chelsea begged us to take her out and home school her. I decided to honor my daughter's gut intuition about what was right for her (especially as that is something it was important to me that she grow up honoring) and give it a shot. I was fairly terrified, but I just jumped in and tried to educate myself and do the best I could. I thought if she just reads and paints the rest of kindergarten, that will be fine, and I could look for another school. However, home schooling proved to be so absolutely fantastic, for Chelsea and for our family life, that we never looked back.

I decided to see what I could put together for the money I was spending on a traditional education that was literally failing my daughter at every level. Let's say I had kept her in that school, as Narcissa seems to believe would have been better. Tuition this year at that school would have cost me $21,000 base price - that's before the fees and add-ons. You might be surprised by what types of experiences and opportunities you can put together yourself for your children with this kind of money. Citygirlsmom, take one more look at my music room. Think of each of those instruments as a year's worth of private school tuition. Would you resent us less if Chelsea had a few years of misery in private schools for our money instead of these musical instruments?

I really wish the online article also included the closeup of Chelsea's face that was in the print version. You might have noticed the light coming from her face - it's brighter than the light coming through my music room's glorious windows (the light is why I bought this house!). If I had spent the money on private school tuition instead - which you might approve of more, who knows - I know in my heart that that light would not be shining from her face like it does today.

And that is what matters to me. You can judge my family harshly all you want, that's certainly your right. Fortunately, that has no bearing on who we really are.

I'm not sure what the limits are on posts, so I'll send this one along now providing some historical background and post later with answers to CGM's questioning of Chelsea's coursework. I'm very proud of it, and will delight in giving you the details you seek
****************************

I really do appreciate the many supportive posts here. I especially like hearing that the article about Chelsea has inspired another home schooler. That's why we did the interview!

Here is a bit about how we home schooled Chelsea. Chelsea had a lot to do with designing her curriculum. It was important to me to provide a rigorous liberal arts education, and we structured this around Chelsea's interests and passions. I am what would be known in home school circles as a sort of blend between an "eclectic" home schooler and a "classical" home schooler.

We always had a focus on reading Great Books. I've always thought foreign language was important, and that languages should be started early to coincide with the time when the brain is focused on language acquisition. Chelsea has studied French since we began home schooling up through the month she spent last July taking French at the Sorbonne, and is preparing to take the AP French Language exam next month. She's used a prep book, and taken a released exam and that's it for the AP, because she already knows so much French from living the rest of her life that that will be enough. In the early years she also learned a little Spanish, a little German, and then two years of high school Latin, done in middle school. She has a goal to learn Russian in college, because she has such a deep love of Russian literature.

We have always used a variety of online providers for distance learning. On Chelsea's high school transcript, she lists 16 high school level courses taken through Stanford's EPGY program, and four courses taken from Northwestern's LearningLinks. For these classes, she received credits and grades, as well as official transcripts from these (and four other) institutions. On the unified transcript my husband and I created, we only listed grades awarded by outside entities - we never graded Chelsea ourselves. She took many math courses through EPGY, through the current year when she is taking Multivariable Calculus from Stanford's School of Continuing Studies. For math, I also recommend The Art of Problem Solving. She took AP Physics with EPGY (only one of her 13 APs she didn't self-study), and she took writing and grammar classes from them as well. Latin and two fantastic vocabulary courses from CTD.

We also took advantage of colleges in our area. She took a Chemistry Lab class from Shimer College, but taught herself AP Chemistry using a variety of materials, including an online course from Oxford University (free! there is so much open courseware out there you can take advantage of - MIT, Yale and others). She also took eight live classroom courses at Northwestern's School of Continuing Studies, so she's had plenty of experience being in a college classroom, doing college work. These classes were in European History (and only required a trip through a prep book and a practice exam to do well on AP Euro), Astronomy, Psychology, Anatomy and Physiology, and the Human Brain. She's had to write papers, do projects, and take exams for all of the courses mentioned above.

Aside from this, we've used wonderful resources available on the internet (check out the resources from the Annenberg folks at learner.org for one example). I own a wall of Teaching Company courses, and cannot say enough about this company and how much their materials can enrich one's home schooling as well as one's life. I took full advantage of the incredible resources Chicago affords. I was blessed to be able to afford subscriptions to the Lyric Opera, a couple of symphonies, Joffrey Ballet, many great theater companies and memberships to many world-class museums. I took many classes with Chelsea through these museums. The list of local, national and international resources I dug up in the last 13 years is pretty much endless, so I'm trying to give you an idea.

I also networked with other home schooling families in the area to provide social and educational opportunities for our children. I organized a class for home schoolers to learn TV production at my local community TV station, for example. I started a mother-daughter book group, a science co-op, taught Junior Great Books. I taught an American history/civics class a couple of times. I founded a support group that today serves a hundred families. We have a Friday Co-op that runs multiple classes at a time for kids aged 5-18 ranging from HipHop to Ancient Americas to Human Anatomy to War and Peace. This is where Chelsea has discovered her love for Russian Literature, from another home schooling mother from Russia who is an extraordinary teacher for our home schooled children. This is where she has also learned about Bird Biology and comparative anatomy.

These are just some of the ways Chelsea has learned academically. In high school, we have used self-study for AP exams as a way of documenting her learning in a language with which admissions committees are familiar. To answer CGM's concern that Chelsea's entire coursework consisted of AP prep books - ummm, no. That would hardly have enticed Harvard to give her an academic likely letter. We used textbooks for some of those exams, yes. I put a lot of time into figuring out what textbooks AP teachers use, what prep books they recommend, how the exams work and are scored, etc. A lot of time. Then Chelsea would teach herself. However, for many of her exams, all she really needed was a prep book and a practice exam to understand *the exam* as she already knew the material covered from her day-to-day life. Chelsea's education was far lighter on textbooks, I think, than many people's. We chose primary sources wherever possible, believing them to be more interesting, accurate, and free of editorial bias.

Now, for the travel. This part has been really important to me, as I wanted my child to have firsthand experience with the rich cultural and geographical diversity of the planet. And I wanted to raise a citizen of the world. Yes, we went to Tibet and China instead of to a textbook about Buddhism and Taoism. We studied Greek philosophy for three weeks in Greece, tutored by Dr. Raymond Moody. We walked the ancient streets of Ephesus. Chelsea woke up on Macchu Picchu on her 13th birthday, having studied with Incan shamans and climbed Huayna Picchu the day before. We arrived in Cairo on September 10, 2001 and spent three extraordinary weeks in Egypt, where we attended the wedding of friends in between the paws of the Sphinx. We've had a sun rise service inside Stonehenge. I think this is a better way to learn about the world than through textbooks. This is what I did instead of pay private school tuition.

Please don't misunderstand me - I am grateful beyond belief that our hard work paid off and the company I started with my husband eventually did very well and we could afford to travel as we have. I completely understand that not everyone can do this. I also know that colleges will not penalize other applicants because they may not have the resources to travel as Chelsea did. I think, actually, that more is expected from people who have had these sorts of advantages.

Besides these types of things, we tried very hard to follow Chelsea's interests and to help her go as far as she could with the things she loved. For example, she wanted to found a nonprofit for kids to help animals, so we helped her do that when she was nine. We got the musical instruments she so longed to play, and found people to teach her. At 7, she became really interested in Irish music and dancing, so we found ways for her to learn that. When she was 11, she became the first child not from Ireland to win the world championship in Irish harp for her age group. She's won it four times. We spend the last half of every August in Ireland, where she goes to a music school and then competes. We've done this since she was ten, and consequently she has many friends in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland that she has "grown up with" each August. This has been a fantastic cultural as well as musical experience. Could she have done this and still gone to school? Possibly. Did we somehow buy her way to four world championship music titles? No. Chelsea's talent, connection to the music, and hard work are the only things that could earn that kind of recognition.

CGM, you asked if Chelsea had to do projects in her coursework. Yes. In fact, she did an independent study project in Shakespeare through her sophomore, junior and senior years. I started taking her to outdoor Shakespeare when she was three. We are fortunate in Chicago to have the fabulous Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, are near the Milwaukee Shakespeare Theatre and the American Players Theatre, along with many other fine theatre companies who produce Shakespeare from time to time. Chelsea turned out to be someone who LOVES theatre, and she took many, many classes and performed in many plays and acting troupes throughout Chicago for the last ten years. But she is truly, obsessively, in love with Shakespeare. For the last three years, she has been teaching Shakespeare classes, for free, to home schooled students, aged 7-17. She teaches 2 two-hour classes a week (currently has 42 students). Her classes are amazing, and not only do these kids get Shakespeare from the way she teaches, but they fall head over heels in love with him. When they leave Chelsea's class, they will accept no substitutes for great literature. She also produces a spring Shakespeare festival, which many of her students work on all year. She produces full-length Shakespeare plays, with very young actors. Last year she directed 10 students aged 10-14 in Taming of the Shrew. We just finished a highly-acclaimed run of As You Like It with 17 actors aged 8-16. She adapts the play, holds auditions, casts, directs, and supervises choreography, music, sound and lighting, costumes, props and scenery. Everything is created by the kids. These are not run-of-the-mill middle school productions. These are mature, heartfelt renderings of Shakespeare that repeatedly leave the audiences speechless and the kids empowered for the rest of their lives by rising to the bar Chelsea sets from them. And it is FUN!!!! Joyful and fun!!!!! In fact, I think this is probably what really set her apart in the eyes of admissions committees. The parents of 19 of her students submitted a group letter of recommendation for her singing her praises for the ways she has basically changed their children's lives through mentoring them in Shakespeare and directing them in productions, as well as providing them with such a positive role model.

These are some of the ways Chelsea was home schooled. I hope not to have offended anyone in my description, and I do hope to express how grateful I am to have been able to do these things with Chelsea. I also hope it will give you an idea of the kinds of educational experiences you can create for your children, and that they can create for themselves, by taking advantage of the freedom and possibility that home schooling provides. My agenda is not to push home schooling. My agenda is to inform. What you do with the information is up to you.

Best of luck to everyone, on whatever path you and your family may be traveling.

Ania - what is CC? I have seen a couple controversial posts on this topic on other newsgroups as well.

I think it's really sad that this family has to justify themselves to anyone. It's clear they've worked hard on all ends to get where they are at. They must have amazing work ethics.

I love what she says about spending $21K a year on private school! That's exactly how I feel after looking at a couple schools in that price range.

CC
www.collegeconfidential.com

the discussion is here
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com...hooled-teen-gets-into-top-ivies-etc.html

Ania, thanks for posting that. That was one of those things that was posted at the right place, right time. I've just found out over a series of events that began Friday night, that DD8 has been horribly bullied for the last few months by two girls. I have just gotten the school situation resolved (or moved toward resolution) for DD5 and now I find that this has been happening to DD8 and she never said a word. This is second grade, I just can't believe the extent to which the bullying has gotten.
I find myself questioning more and more why I am sending her to public school. This family sounds like they know exactly what they are doing. Maybe I should re-think.

Neato

Oh, 'Neato! I'm so sorry for your DD8!

If I can do anything to help, you know where to find me. I'm happy to do whatever I can.

Oh Neato, I'm so sorry. HOw horrible for your DD.

Dazey