We’re in a similar boat. There are a couple of short, routine drives that S19 always does, and he’s been on a highway for about an hour, but we’re a long way from the 45 hours he needs. I just want him to have his license before summer - he’s not antsy about it yet, but he ust turned 16 about 6 weeks ago.
We haven’t even started the learners permit stage. I’m planning to get that done this weekend - we were stymied until now because I didn’t have a physical social security card for the kid and they need that in this state.
Once they get the permit, it’s 54 hours of driving with the parents before they get the provisional, then 5 months before they can have anybody but family members in the car.
I want the kid to be able to get an internship this summer, and drive himself there and back, so we need the provisional by then. I hope that’s enough time. Considering the spring schedule, maybe not.
My D19 has had her learners since she was just barely 15 (later than all her friends—you can get a learners the moment you turn 14 here), but has shown pretty much no interest in learning to drive, and honestly we’ve not had the time or effort to teach her (work has been worse than insane for both my wife and me lately), and the local drivers ed companies won’t even take students who don’t already know the basics of driving and have had a little experience with things like traffic circles and highway driving.
Maybe she’ll live her life in New York City. 
I was just talking to my husband about this driving thing last night. I cannot even recall if I was on a highway before I got my license. S19 insists that his friends with their licenses spend no time on highways so it’s ok if he doesn’t have a lot of highway time before he gets his license. Ugh. I don’t know. Driving on highways in the Chicago area can be dangerous (well, just like any metropolitan highway) and merging on and off the highway near our house to get to the city is insanely difficult with tons of big trucks and a very short distance to merge. Not that I would let him drive to Chicago while living here. That’s what the train is for!
I didn’t own a car until I was 25. Until then, I used public transportation in college and while living in Chicago after that.
Crazy busy week for son19 continues, with school, robotics and soccer playoffs. His team won again yesterday in a crazy game, and son played a great game and helped his team get the victory. The kids played in a big stadium and several college coaches came to watch the game ( we did not know) and sent him complimentary notes today and wishing him good luck in rest of tournament. So that was encouraging for my son, and one of the schools he really wants to go to was in attendance.
Driving: son19 is really just driving the 5 miles between home and school everyday, and he’s taking a skid school and crash prevention course in a few weeks. He hopes to get his license in February.
@eh1234 at least you got a decent tour in at Pitt and that may open your kid’s eyes a bit. Sometimes it takes a while for the kids to get really vested in the whole process.
SAT: I’m hoping the SAT and ACT tests will be ridiculously easy in December 
Hopefully your kids aced the last test!
I’m hoping the December SAT is a little easier too (at least the reading!) I mean, there has to be an easier one eventually, right?!
D19 hasn’t driven in ages. I had told her she was going to start driving home from school (I pick her up every day) but she hadn’t really felt well this week with a bad cold. So I’ve let her get away without driving some more.
Hoping for easier reading on the Dec SAT for all of you and an easy Math 2 SAT for S19! Remember, though, that the College Board “curves” each of the tests. I have no idea how they can do that accurately before they actually give the exam. I know the curves seemed pretty accurate on the eight practice tests, meaning that when S19 thought the English was harder, the curve was more generous on the scoring.
S19 has done almost no studying for Math 2. He’s taken one practice test and got 10 wrong. I think I heard you can sometimes get up to seven wrong and still get that coveted 800. He does not seemed stressed about it and I guess that’s good because he hasn’t been able to find time to study. We keep thinking he will have a weekend to review the practice tests but then he always seems slammed with weekend homework.
This weekend, he’s going to run in a Nike sponsored XC race with some of his XC teammates. I didn’t look into it that closely when we signed him up and I just found out that he’s leaving Saturday at 10:00 and won’t be home until 6:00 on Sunday! So now he’s completely freaked and trying to do anything he can early before he leaves. Pretty much impossible with the five hours of nightly homework he has, but he’s trying. His APUSH teacher assigned Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass for the weekend. Not kidding. The whole book is to be read between Thursday night and Monday morning on top of the 40 pages of nightly reading in their textbook. I think the Math 2 studying will have to wait until Thanksgiving weekend. :((
S19 was scheduled to get his drivers license today but he’s sick so we rescheduled for next week. He’s driven to the mountains and back, all over the local highways, to the airport a couple of times. The driving school we’ve used takes the kids downtown at rush hour, through light rail zones, through the busiest terminal of the airport.
S took the PSAT in October but no SAT yet. I’ve checked every date and he has something already scheduled every time it’s offered until the June test date. It might be possible to take the ACT before that. Sigh.
Once again I am glad that S19 did not take APUSH. That class really does seem like more trouble than it’s worth at a lot of schools. His friends complain about it constantly.
S19 is off today so I suggested that he take a look at some ACT questions (he is taking it Dec. 9 and has never seen any part of it). “Why would I look at it if it’s a month away?” I mentioned the timing of the test being tighter than the SAT. “So I’ll just do it as fast as I can.” Well, I guess I can’t argue with that strategy.
He is a really frustrating combination of bright, lazy and stubborn. The ACT content seems similar to the SAT but a little easier, so maybe those 2 hours of prep he did for the October SAT in July will pay off. :-S
The ACT practice questions I looked at online for math seem to have a lot of geometry questions.
I have heard great things about Susquehanna, and also Messiah.
@eh1234 I swear I still think our children were separated at birth! D is also taking the ACT in December and hasn’t thought about it for one minute. I really wanted her to look over the science section before we did a practice test so I put sticky notes on those pages in the ACT book and gave it to her. A week later I asked if she had looked at it. She said, “Where wild i look at that, I don’t even have the book!” It’s in your room. “Oh, well I don’t know what to look at” I tabbed the pages for you. “Isn’t the practice test for me to practice that section - I’ll just do it then” So frustrating! She has been swamped with work lately though and I feel like I am on her every day to catch up and do more so I finally told her I won’t talk to her about the ACT until Thanksgiving break when maybe she can find a little time to look it over. And maybe that is when she can catch up on her online french class. And learn to drive. And clean her room… I’m afraid this is all wishful thinking! :))
I don’t know what D is thinking about distance from home. She would like to go to school outside of FL but we are so far south that any school out of FL is still very far away. She used to think she wanted northeast but the schools we looked at so far are all so hard to get to from FL that she may be changing her mind. I think she will have a better feel for it when we look at schools in the NC/SC/VA area.
Son19 is another kid who is now happy he skipped APUSH. His friends are complaining a lot. Son19 said he jus doesn’t see the point of taking a class like that, he doesn’t have a huge interest in the subject matter, and honors history is just fine. I think it might have been an AP to take to show strength of schedule, but he just wasn’t having it.
He got bumped from AP Chem, didn’t take APUSH, so all he was left with was AP Stats. He loves that class, go figure so it all ended up working out I guess.
My kid is in regular gifted and talented US History and is finding it dead easy. My husband and I are history nerds so we’ve been arguing historical controversies in front of him since he was a kid, vacationing at Jamestown and Gettysburg and archeological digs of 17th century farmhouses. Maybe I should have pushed him into APUSH (heh) but he has so much else on his plate that I’m glad we didn’t.
I think it depends on the school/teacher. My kid has not seemed overburdened by APUSH, but my understanding is that the teacher goes to great lengths to make the course as efficient as possible.
@evergreen5 Our school has three APUSH teachers and one of the teachers is super easy when it comes to grading. Lots of extra points for super easy work and everyone seems to get 5/5 for discussions every week which keeps kids’ up. Of course, S19 got the hard (but in my opinion best) teacher. No gimmes in this class. Extra reading, hard grading on DBQs. She’s super enthusiastic and he likes her, but the work load is just different than the other classes even though chapter tests are the same.
S19 had a ten minute breakdown last night telling me how unfair this was. I listened but then told him the pity party is limited to ten minutes and it was time to get back to work. I’ve struggled with not being able to control things out of my control but I want him to be able to move on better than I can. There’s nothing he can do about his teacher and he’s learning a lot. He needs to try to look at the bright side that she’s inspiring and he’s learning a ton in there. That plus her students supposedly do best on the AP.
APUSH is the biggest time suck at our school, and Honors Pre-Calc is the hardest class offered. The Pre_calc class basically weeds the kids out for AP Calc next year. The teacher is brutal, but nice. She just doesn’t offer any easy way to improve your grade, it’s either sink or swim. Out of 25-30 kids in a class, 3-5 will drop it, 8 kids will get a C, 8 get a B, and a few kids get A’s. So far son19 is doing OK, but last year that was a challenging class for my older son. I think he squeaked out a B-, his only B in HS.
My D19 is in APUSH too. Last year she started out taking AP World History, and dropped down to pre-AP world history and I think it pushed her back in class rankings. So this semester she has 4 AP classes and 2 pre-AP, and one “regular” graded class. She has hardly any spare time and is doing homework when I go to bed at night, I don’t really know when she finally goes to bed. She’s a night owl anyway. I feel bad, but she does have a good work ethic. I told her the plus side is when she gets to college/uni, most students only take 5 classes a semester, MAYBE 6, so college might be easy! She was sort of mad when she realized that, but it is what it is.
Our driving story: My D is a January baby. Last summer when she was 15 1/2, I heard someone tell someone else to just let their kid drive everywhere, all the time and they get used to it better. I was scared to death of her driving me and my D22 (she was 12 then!) on these Texas roads and highways. But I sucked it up and let her drive everywhere for two whole months of the summer. The first two weeks were tough, but then it got better. I was constantly talking to her about common sense things that veteran drivers do, etc. to keep myself sane. By the time she took her drivers test this January, she was all set. The only thing we had some stress over was parallel parking. But I taught her one day in a huge empty parking lot and she got the hang of it well enough. Parallel parking is the first thing on the driving test here, so if you don’t pass that, your test is over. The next day she drove off to school all by herself. That was a proud/sad moment for me, but she didn’t seem to worry about it at all.
My son is taking APUSH and LOVES it. He is definitely a history nerd , although he loves science as well. No regrets about taking it all, but he took it because it interested him, not to play the rankings game .
@jellybean24 kids take five or six classes in college? I thought it was more like four. At Carleton, it’s only three!
And I agree that most of our kids will have more free time in college (unless they are engineering or pre med). I told S19 that this year just might be the worst of his academic career. I hear senior year, even with a load of APs, is “easier” than the APs kids generally take junior year at our high school. The getting up at 6:15, going from class to class until 3:00, doing your sport and getting to your other EC stuff, and then doing tons of homework and getting only six hours of sleep almost every night is a high school thing. It’s such a grind. In college, you might only have two hours of class on any given day. And might not start until 10:00 or later. He can’t wait.
My S19 struggled in AP English at the start of the year. I think part of it is…he simply hates English. Anyhow, we ended up dropping the English class a few weeks into it. I was tempted to make him stay because of the rigor, but his gpa/rank would have suffered. He also takes APUSH & AP Physics, Honors PreCalc (no AP offered), orchestra and athletics. We were worried about APUSH since others have said the workload would be too much, but it is actually one of his favorites. He was just accepted into NASA’s h.s. Aerospace scholars program so now has to make time for even more homework. Also, his football team made it into the playoffs so the season has been extended.
Regarding driving, S got his license on his bday after a year of parent taught/virtual courses. Things are so much easier with him driving. We can actually relax because we aren’t chauffeurs anymore!
On another note, does anyone know when the we should receive the qas from the oct. 7th SAT?