@peachActuary73 Yikes on the Starbucks! S19’s calc teacher is having a breakfast for them before the test. I told him not to eat some big sugar-bomb donut…that would NOT be good before the test! He seemed pretty relaxed. The teacher insists that she’s prepared them well. Fingers crossed. Good luck to all of the Calc AP kids today!
I just signed up for the July ACT. They don’t have a nearby test center for this date, and kiddo will be performing the night before until late. So, I don’t have high hopes for the best score for this sitting. On the other hand, if he goes into it relaxed then he could get a better score, right? Anyhow, he had a good enough score at the first sitting so this one is just for chasing scholarships and for confirmation.
Kiddo apparently sat down with my husband last night and talked over strategy for who to ask for letters of recommendation. Which is… good? I suppose? He had better get a move on actually doing it, rather than just talking about it with us, or it will be summer. His favorite teacher has a baby due in August and won’t be back for the first month of next year, so if he wants her recommendation he’s got to ask now. She looks just about ready to pop now and is getting that tired around the eyes, I-am-so-done-with-this-pregnancy look that I remember so well even 18 years later.
D is a pretty quiet kid in school. She is not one to smalltalk or make friends with teachers so we are having a hard time deciding who to ask for her letters. Her APUSH teacher is a great guy, very outgoing and funny -I think he would write a nice letter but I also think lots of other kids will ask him as well. I have been telling D to go ask him for a few weeks now and she still has;y done it. She left saying she wanted to wait until after the AP exam because he was so busy and seemed stressed. Yesterday I sent her two texts reminding her and she came home saying she did;t do it because he was in a terrible mood and threatening to kick some kids out of class. I told her to ask before class but she said he comes in after the bell has rung and has to start teaching right away. I’m about to send her another reminder right now.
Still not sure who we will ask for the second letter. Her chemistry teacher might be ok but it is only an honors class not AP. Her AP English teacher came in half way through the year but she might work as D does very well in that class. Although D is worried because overall her class is not good, according to D there are a bunch of kids who annoy the teacher and she likes the other class better. 8-|
D doesn’t even want to think about rec letters yet.
Last AP test for her today - AP Calc. I expect she will be shell-shocked. She’s not very mathy.
Gotta say, someone who is taking AP Calc as a junior has got to be mathy. Both my kids were in Algebra 2 as juniors, and took/are planning to take precalc as seniors. No one in our high school takes calculus as juniors. Not even the best of the best.
D2 is finally done with APs! Every day I’m thankful I’m not in high school now.
My understanding is that there is no more weight for an AP teacher over an honors teacher. Nor does the best grade in a class necessarily get the best recommendation.
The most important factor is the recommender’s ability to write a letter show casing the kid’s strong points. An honors teacher would be just as capable of doing that as an AP teacher.
I do think the whole letter thing can be stressful and definitely not fair for some kids from what I’ve been reading. Fortunately, S is pretty talkative in class and really likes the discussion in the classes where he has asked for recommendations. But it would be more difficult for kids who are shy by still deserve good recommendations. In our school, one of the two IB lang teachers for junior year is known to say she doesn’t write recommendations, and both my kids have had her class. That seems kind of ridiculous to make a big deal about being an IB school and if you are not a STEM-type kid, you can’t get a recommendation from your junior year lang. teacher? My D was one of her best students and made an impassioned plea via e-mail during the summer after junior year. The teacher agreed and I’m assuming she wrote a good letter but who knows? S decided to ask two other teachers instead of her.
That is good to know - for some reason I thought I had read it is best to get the most recent teachers and the advanced class ones were preferred. D thinks the chemistry teacher wouldn’t write a great letter (not anything bad about her but she seems to think he wouldn’t be a great letter writer in general) but I am going to ask her about it again. Her only other options are pre-calc (her worst subject and her only C ever), AP Photo (he’s kind of spacey and she says no way), French (online class os that wouldn’t work) or go back to a teacher from sophomore year.
Ooh - I just remembered AICE Sociology - she would probably be good but it is not a core class so will have to find out how that looks.
One of my daughter’s recommendations will be from her sophomore science research teacher. Although she is great at STEM, most of her personal connections have been with non-stem teachers. Unfortunately, she needs at least one STEM for the program she wants. She feels that the sophomore teacher knows her best. Thats where her personality stood out. In the other STEM classes, she was just a normal good student, who showed up and good good grades.
@momtogkc Totally get the “letter writing impression”. The CS teacher has been a club advisor since 9th grade. I help transport the kids some weekends, so we chat and I know he likes D. But both of us just had a gut feeling that he doesn’t write well. Awful of us, and with no solid basis. It’s like we extrapolated certain quirks into letter writing ability. So we avoided him for summer programs. But, I think we will ask him to do a couple college, and make sure D provides him a good sketch highlighting stuff from the last few years.
I think kids in our school are encouraged to ask teachers about rec letters before the end of junior year, but they aren’t expected to give the teacher a resume/activity list or anything prior to the start of the next school year.
S19 is currently planning to ask his orchestra teacher for a LOR - I’m still trying to figure out if he’ll need some combination of music and academic LORs if applying to music. He likes his pre-calc teacher, he’s had her for two years, and he actually talks to her. He has a B in the class, but I don’t know if it matters as long as she knows him and has something positive she can say. I don’t think he will apply anywhere his LORs would make or break his application so I don’t want him to stress too much about it.
@eh1234 When we met our college counselor if we should ask the teachers by the end of this year she acted like that was a totally new idea. She said, “oh, I don’t know, they might be too busy over the summer.” I said that I didn’t expect them to write it over the summer, I just thought it would be nice to give them a heads up in case they did want to work on them over the summer. Then again she is the same person who told us not to worry about the price of any schools, nobody pays full price anyway. 
Nice weather here all week, but then this weekend son19 has a big track meet and prom and it’s supposed to be cold, dreary, rain and gray. Sometimes life gives you lemons. Maybe the forecasters will be totally wrong??
I don’t think any kids take AP Calc as juniors in our school either, unless there are a couple of “gifted” kids who took pre-calc in 7th grade or something. My son is on the varsity math team, and he said there is a kid in Jr High on their team and he is the smartest math kid by far. So maybe 1 kid per grade has the ability to take AP Calc before senior year. I’d say most take some form of pre-calc senior year, and if you are a very good math student you can be accepted into AP Calc AB or BC as a senior. Again, not many kids as seniors even take that. You need to be pretty strong in math.
I wish that my son had not taken AP calc as a junior. He’s not a math kid in any sense of the word and it’s been the biggest source of misery this year. Only a couple of kids are taking the AP test from his class. The teacher said without perceptible irony that none of her students had ever gotten over a 2 on the test, so we decided not to waste our money. In retrospect, we should have gone to the guidance counselor last year and asked for APUSH and regular honors math instead of AP Calc and honors history.
Since the history teacher was out on maternity leave for most of the spring the class is a bit behind schedule. They’re racing through the '70s and '80s now. They covered first wave feminism, the AIDS crisis, and environmentalism over the last couple of days. It feels very strange to have things that I lived through covered as history.
Next class they’re going over the fall of the Berlin Wall. I lived in Europe while that was happening, so I was telling the kiddo stories from that time in my life last night. He got all excited and wrote some notes, I think he’s planning to tell one of my stories to class.
The juniors in BC calc at our school were accelerated in math back in sixth grade. They took algebra in seventh grade and the Geometry Honors class from the high school as eighth graders. Then Algebra 2/Trig as freshman, Pre Calc as sophs, and BC Calc as juniors (which includes AB and BC material).
Our HS (just over 2,000 kids) is crazy competitive with the AP classes. They offered 29 different AP tests. I just pulled up the records for the 2017 AP tests. The school had 1,244 kids take a total of 2,509 AP tests. They achieved scores of 5 - 37% of tests, 4 - 31%, 3 - 21%. They do not break down the number of tests taken by class.
Top Categories:
US Gov’t & Politics - 421
Psych - 250
Env Sci - 180
Eng Lang - 160
Calc AB - 135
Eng Lit - 127
Stats - 125
Bio - 117
Chem - 87
US History - 80
Calc BC - 76
Lots of kids at our school are in AP Calc as sophomores and juniors. They start pushing them in middle school - the best math students get pushed into Algebra 1 in 6th grade, they tried to make my kids take it in 7th. I fought back and said no way. They said, “But she does so well in math and if she stays in regular 7th grade math it is basically a repeat of 6th grade.” (she was in 6th grade gifted math and there is no 7th grade gifted, just Algebra 1) I said I didn’t care - she got As but those administrators were not at my house when she would wake up in the night stressing about the math exams!
The kids who took Algebra 1 in 6th grade were in AICE Math (advanced pre calc) as freshman, AP Calc AB as sophomores and are in AP Calc BC this year. D’s best friend is on that track - normally they would have to do dual enrollment with a local college for senior year but our friend decided to do AP Stats instead.
Oh, and our school does not offer regular classes for pre-calc or calc - only the AP classes are offered. I did see that it looks like they will finally offer a normal pre calc class next year - too late for D19 who got a C in AICE Math, but maybe there will be hope for my other two kids.
Our county accelerates the kids in Middle School, but they take algebra in 8th grade. Then they can either choose to take an honors route or accelerated honors route, which lands them in Calc in either 11th or 12th grade.
D didn’t come from a feeder school, so had to placement test into 9th grade Geometry, then took Algebra II online to catch up to the Accel Honors kids. Accel Pre-calc leads to BC Calc or IB Math HL, both of whom take BC Calc. She did it because you have to choose 3 Higher Level IB classes for the diploma and it made sense to pick subjects of strength.
Had to fight repeatedly with the school because they kept saying, “no you can’t”; had a GC who accidentally enrolled D in regular Pre-calc for 3 months before it was caught; then GC couldn’t find the external Alg II transcript. The teachers are awesome, though!!