<p>collegealum314, you’re applying your high school experience to all high school students. Things that are ECs with minor time commitments in one school can be ECs with major time commitments elsewhere, and can be classes in yet other places. </p>
<p>Orchestra might not have been a major time commitment at your school, but at my older daughter’s school the combo of fall Marching Band and spring Orchestra was an enormous time sink, even though the students weren’t of the practice 6 hours a day aiming at conservatory variety. Quite the contrary <smiley making="" pained="" face="" ;)=""></smiley></p>
<p>Not to mention the huge variation in difficulty of AP courses, depending on how the teacher runs the class. And the aptitude of the student for the material. Take a poll here on CC about which people thought was harder, AP Calc AB or AP US History. You’ll get a whole range of opinions.</p>
<p>Again, collegealum, 314, you are extrapolating your own experiences. In both my high school many moons ago and my children’s high school, theater was a class. Journalism was a class. Debate was a class. As for fine arts, there were tons of fine arts classes - drawing, painting, sculpting, as well as band, orchestra, chorus / choir. Some schools offer art history, though ours didn’t. Again, it is often not possible to carry AP in all 5 core subjects if you have another interest.</p>
<p>^Point taken. I thought my home high school was fairly typical of the course offering of a decent/good high school, but maybe not. Your daughter’s high school has outstanding breadth in the arts; she’s very lucky to have gone there.</p>
<p>Photography is another example of a class that a student might want to take. Woodworking / carpentry is another. And frankly I think there is plenty of benefit for a student who is academically inclined to take woodworking / carpentry and stand out from the crowd a little bit in the sea of all-the-same.</p>
<p>My D is lucky enough to go to a school that offers a semester-long course in philosophy. Did it sharpen her skills as a critical thinker? You bet. It also expanded her way of looking at the world and taught her the importance of making explicit the rationale behind one’s implicit beliefs. In spite of the absence of calculus A/B or AP bio (she opted for AP stats and anatomy/physiology instead), I’d say my D’s schedule last semester was pretty rigorous, insofar as she had to wrap her brain around such topics as free will, the mind-body problem, the question of evil, justice and the state, etc. We had lots of lively dinner conversations, I can assure you.</p>
<p>In addition to the academic requirements*, we were also required to take 1 year of drafting(sophomore year rite of passage), 4 years of PE/Health unless we can produce a doctor’s note, and at least 2 shop classes. </p>
<p>For shop classes, took Engineering technology, wood, and metal shops. Shop classes gave me a great respect for carpentry/engineering modeling and provided skills for metallic modeling hobby I still sometimes engage in to the present. </p>
<ul>
<li>4 years of science(bio, chem, & phys with lab and 1 year of science electives such as psychopharmacology or computer programming), 4 years of World/Euro History/US govt/US History, 1 semester of econ, 1 semester social science elective, 1 semester each minimum for Art/Music, 3 years of math minimum(strong preference for 4), 3 years of foreign language(preference for 4), 4 years for English lit/writing/debate, and a mandatory 20 page English thesis.</li>
</ul>
<p>FWIW, as a secondary ed teacher I see the importance of pushing kids to explore STEM rather than pushing kids “into” STEM. Technology and engineering electives are a good place to start. Kids really have no clue what those classes involve until they actually take them. Girls seem to lack confidence in STEM courses but I’ve seen them thrive when taught by a female teacher.</p>
<p>HKLincoln, I think you’re exactly right. Exploring STEM vs. pushing STEM seems wise. I know several kids who earned good grades freshman year as engineering majors but who chose to switch to business or econ because they simply didn’t like engineering enough. One of these is now gainfully employed at a big financial company. As a motivated, hard working guy, he would have done well whatever major he chose. Conversely, I know of a senior who is miserable at the moment realizing that engineering isn’t his vocation despite his hard-earned degree. Pairing kids’ abilities with their interests seems like the good objective for parents.</p>
<p>I think it’s worth pushing kids to excel at math. Everyone will have a financial life. People who fear math will have to pay others to do it for them and it’s pretty easy to get taken advantage off. </p>
<p>Aside from that, they should be able to do what they want.</p>
<p>I used to fear math. Then I discovered Mathematica and things got a LOT better…</p>
<p>EC’s don’t always make good career selections in my view. My high school EC’s were photography and model airplanes (almost made the national team once in a country that takes the sport rather seriously). Took me 30 minutes or so to figure out aerospace engineering had a finite shelf life (what with the Berlin Wall coming down and such, tho we knew the outcome a decade earlier) and another 30 minutes to figure out I was good with a camera, but not good enough to make serious money.</p>
<p>A few comments. As I posted earlier, I would encourage some science education but wouldn’t push. I would push for:</p>
<p>A real understanding of statistics/data analysis. Statistics is probably as important as anything kids can learn. We all need to learn how to make decisions under uncertainty and understand the plethora of studies that appear. But, many HS stats classes don’t go that much beyond the formulaic – kids plug in numbers into formulas and aren’t learning to think. In such cases, taking stats will not help with critical thinking.</p>
<p>In addition to thinking about uncertainty, everyone should understand the scientific method, which is probably counter-intuitive to most people. Most of our non-STEM congressmen, senators and presidential candidates seem particularly challenged in this area. [Most of them are lawyers, I suspect].</p>
<p>A few other comments: To the person who said computer science probably is not an EC. It may not be an organized activity, but anyone who is passionate about CS is more than likely programming and/or getting employed to do it.</p>
<p>Some people on this thread seem to be equating STEM with engineering. I’m a big picture thinker with a STEM PhD. So is my son. Math, physics, probability, statistics, game theory are interesting. Engineering not so much. I took a couple of engineering courses and found them way too detail-oriented. People who need to make things work do need to be detail-oriented. It is just not for someone like me. I have tried to guide my son to things that would use his interests as twopence suggests. And I hire detail-oriented people to work for me.</p>
<p>I had dinner with a senior philosophy major writing a thesis on morality. He has been trained to argue smoothly and to use philosophical buzzwords, but I am not convinced he has been trained to reason clearly. I don’t know if he really got the full dose of critical thinking that one would hope he would get from philosophy. In a lot of cases, I would think a philosophy degree would teach people to reason clearly from premises to conclusions. In some cases, a bit more math might help as the glib can use cleverness with words to avoid really thinking clearly.</p>
<p>Yeah, exactly. I took statistics in college and found it took a lot of time to think through things. The fact that people take AP stats because it is apparently easier to AP calculus tells me that stats must be really watered down. I probably spent more time thinking in stats than I did in calc. It’s a very subtle subject. </p>
<p>By the way, I agree with the rest of your post although it’s going to be ripped apart by some as “STEM uber alles.”</p>
<p>I think every school in my city, maybe my county, offers exactly 8 APs. There is one IB program in the county. At my kids school, I believe one class of each of 8 APs, one is music, one is studio art, and all with pre reqs and minimum grades, and scheduling difficulties (64 kids in graduating class). Did not find CC world until the oldest was almost through junior year! What about those who NEVER find it?</p>
<p>^^^^^ They attend the state flagship and still succeed in life, leaving the Ivies and elite privates to their rightful 1% dwellers :)</p>
<p>Our HS offers virtually every AP course there is, the entire IB programme (IB recess also), enough off-the-wall honors and non-honors electives to make a community college pale by comparison, yet we send 1% of our kids a year to the Ivies/top20 schools…</p>
<p>I think certain folks on here get upset when others don’t share their opinions which is what most of these threads are. Now as for facts, this country no longer produces the number of jobs in a variety of LA majors to support the number of kids graduating with these degrees. Facts industry leaders in STEM including Bill Gates repeatedly testify before Congress of the impending shortage of qualifed candiates in the STEM fields in the next 15 years and the disastarous effect it will have on our economy. So for a child who is unsure of a major or their path in life, what is the harm of SUGGESTING that they consider a STEM path if they are so inclined to do so. It gives that kid a chance to see if it is for him or her and if they decide to pursue it a pretty good chance of obtaining a job once they graduate. Rant over I apologize for cluttering these boards with common sense.</p>
<p>One caveat here. Biology counts as STEM, but current job prospects for biology majors with just a bachelor’s degree are not particularly promising.</p>
<p>On CC, I do not believe I see the word “balance” often enough. Wouldn’t it just make sense to balance a kid’s interests with a kid’s abilities and with the apparent job prospects related to different fields of study?</p>
<p>I would add that I also agree with shawbridge. Some understanding of Probability and Satistics is very helpful in creating a reasonably useful model of the world one operates in, though I believe that some understanding of a number of other areas of mathematics could prove quite useful in a great many different fields of endeavor.</p>
<p>I was a math major, and married a biology major, and one of my kids is likely going to be a chemistry or a neuroscience major, so it’s hardly as though I’m against STEM. </p>
<p>I do think that for the vast majority of people, the emphasis on higher-level calculus is silly – statistics is far more useful, and I think the whole concept of thinking that STEM should be "pushed’ any more than English, language, history, humanities is completely asinine, as it’s all important.</p>
and things got a LOT better…</p>