HS grade trend: up, down or steady?

LeastComplicated
Wed, 08 Nov 2017 05:48:26 +0000

@Mathmom I just afraid that it will vary depending on subject and teacher. She has done fine in her science and stats AP’s but we had to pull her out of AP World History last year because she wasn’t getting to bed until 1:30am - it did involve WAY too much busy work - practically paraphrasing a whole chapter every two days (with a text font of about 8!). We found out too late that the teacher was well known for being difficult. Since she’ll be a senior next year, maybe she’ll be able to talk to some students and teachers to get a feel for how difficult the AP courses would be. She wasn’t savvy enough I don’t think at the end of her freshman year in selecting her sophomore schedule.

That worked well for her this year as her current AP Stats teacher was her Honors Algebra II teacher and she had a talk with her and got her opinion on whether she could do well in the class. She was confident in taking AP Bio as she does very well in Science courses.

Her reading ability is a problem. She really doesn’t read at all except for her school textbooks and required school reading. It’s getting better, but I was helping her a few weeks ago with an English annotation assignment where the class had to annotate the Declaration of Independence and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty” speech, and she didn’t even know what “idle” meant! She absorbs material like a sponge though - I was telling her that I didn’t think the Bible ever mentioned that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a God given right, and she told me, “Mom, I think that’s a reference from John Locke.” So she was obviously paying attention and learning in World History last year, but I worry about how she’d fare in AP Lit and AP USGov’t next year with all the reading and writing - along with AP Calc (no regular calc- or does she even need calc if she’s already taken four math courses?), AP Chem (she made the highest score on the 10th grade Chem SOL test last year and really wants to take this course), and then she still needs to take physics also (but regular physics is offered - whew!). That’s a crazy courseload isn’t it for a kid who’s only taken three AP’s in the prior three years?

She is not aiming for highly ranked schools at all, but our state publics are pretty competitive and I do want her to go to college as prepared as possible. What do you think??