Open applications: Add the University of Kansas’s application to the list.
AP English summer work: @NerdMom88 wrote “I’ve never known an AP English class that didn’t have summer work.” Just as a FTR, my daughter’s didn’t—but there’s a districtwide policy forbidding summer work, so that’s only a kindasorta-style datapoint.
Summer work: My daughter babysits, and makes good money at it. Each year when she files her taxes (with the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend she consistently comes in over the filing threshold, but some years she would even without that), we’re surprised by how much she’s made. It’s a useful thing for her, if only because it means she has to be incredibly aware of her schedule at all times. (But yeah, with everything else going on, plus the fact that we remain a stubbornly one-car family, a regular job with a set schedule would be somewhere along the difficult to impossible part of the spectrum.) Also, Alaska’s a countercyclical state, so we’re in a recession (and getting worse) up here, so there’s not a lot of slack space in the job market for high-school kids (and most of the summer seasonal work here in tourism and fisheries requires you to be an adult if not 21, anyway), so a “normal” afterschool job just isn’t happening for her.
And yes, she files taxes on her non-W-2ed babysitting income. That’s just the kind of family we are, I suppose. But one interesting side effect is that some years she’s made enough from babysitting that, if Social Security survives to her retirement, she already has credits in that system.
Transcripts: For anyone having trouble getting transcripts from their schools, can you get them from your school district? That’s how we’d do it here. (Of course, if they’re in private school that isn’t an option.)
Is it a racist comment? I try very, very hard to not attribute to malice what can reasonably be attributed to ignorance, so I’d first off wonder whether they actually knew what a burka is. I mean, I’ve been to synagogues and so had to wear a yarmulke even though I’m not Jewish, and women visiting mosques in many locations are required to wear a hijab even though they’re not Muslim. Also, there are plenty of museums in the world, particularly those with a religious basis, that have dress expectations of various sorts. As a result I think that, if I were feeling properly invested in the exchange, I’d try to figure out if by burka the speaker actually meant hijab, but just didn’t know the right word, for starters.
Senior (and other school) trips: The D17 and D19 won’t have senior trips—their school is too small. D23 will have a middle school trip to Germany in a couple years (she’s in a language immersion program, and the trips alternate years: one year their sister schools in Frankfurt and Fulda come over here, and the next her school’s 7th and 8th graders go over there). The adult chaperones do generally drink on those trips, but it’s German-style public drinking (read: 400 or 500 ml of beer, or 200 or 300 ml of wine, and then you’re done); I have no problem with this. D23 and D25 will be in regular, large (~2,000 students) high schools, though, and so we’ll definitely have to deal with the senior trip question then. Our lean, I think, is to not have them participate and do something massive together as a family instead.
$-)