Home Schooling for Senior Year-How?

danas
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:39:12 +0000

If I were in your daughter’s shoes, I would use the year as an opportunity to dig deep into a subject or subjects that excite her, and to do things she couldn’t do if she had to go to school.
Just having the opportunity to read is a luxury often denied by school schedules. As to what to do without a school schedule, the opportunities are almost limitless. In my daughter’s case, she worked in the Mammal Department of our natural history museum taking apart tigers, wombats, bats and bobcats and reclassified the collection according to a new system.
The colleges both my son and daughter applied to accepted reading lists as evidence of involvement, without grades or GED, backed up by standardized tests. The SAT Subject Tests work well here. If you love a subject and have the opportunity to dig in to your heart’s content, the Subject Test system is like shooting fish in a barrel in competition with those poor souls who must go to school.
Good for you to trust your daughter and to entertain options to help her development.
In my opinion, a choice to forgo school senior year to pursue deep interests would be read as love of learning by any college admissions committee. Of course the most important benefit would be the experience itself.