Ugh, I so feel you on this… My S25 is so disengaged from school as well and acts like a little jerk when I ask how school’s going, did he finish x, etc. I haven’t checked on his grades all year and am now scared to… I have no advice, but hang in there, it’s almost over!
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S25 has his first IB exam tomorrow. I asked him when and where. He said he thinks it’s at his regular class time. No, these are international exams. Everyone follows the same schedule. S23’s were at an off campus location. He said, “Oh, I guess I’ll read the email that was sent.” I rolled my eyes so hard I think I may have hurt myself. 
Sigh.
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Oh, my, I just had a moment of laughing so hard I cried: had to tell my husband over the phone what my password was for an account, and it involved our 20+year habit of blaming our pet for farts. I think I lost it when he asked me to spell it out for him. 
It is such a stressful time that I was primed to truly lose it laughing at such a silly thing.
Reading how we are all managing so much these days, I hope everyone gets a similar kind of relief and release, though perhaps it doesn’t have to be at the expense of crude bodily functions, or animals.
Back to our regularly scheduled program…
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My kid never took courses at Harvard while they were a student at MIT, but they did have Harvard (and Wellesley) students in some of their intro-level undergrad MIT classes (the 3 schools allow cross-registration.)
The general consensus was that Harvard kids were universally overwhelmed by the difficulty, speed, and amount of work that was required for MIT stem courses (and complained loudly about it!) Wellesley ladies did fine, no complaining.
Rumor had it that if you needed an easy A to pad your GPA, take a course at Harvard.
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Right there with you. Yesterday was senior skip day and they went to beach for the night. He got back too late to get to his first class today but headed out to at least make it to the afternoon classes so he could attend track practice. He’s so done with classes. He’s got two more weeks of classes but with AP exams happening they are just in study mode. I’m hoping he has time to make up work he hasn’t turned in and retake some tests or extra credit or something to get his Stats and Calc grades up so he can average a b for the year. He’s sitting firmly with two C’s for the year at the moment and I just keep telling myself that it’s not the end of the world if that’s where it ends. He was a straight B student so hopefully the colleges won’t mind a one grade slip in both since he’s not a Stem major. Plus one is an AP class, so… I just want it all to be over with no more grade surprises. Maybe he CAN get them up like he swears he can?!? 
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Thank you all so much for sharing your own struggles with your students. I am feeling so emotional about everything. But leave it to my personal therapist ChatGPT to provide a grounding mantra. Sharing it, in case it’s helpful to anyone else.
Grounding Mantra for This Transition
“I am the steady heart in this season of change.
I don’t need to match his mood—I can meet it with compassion.
This week is not about perfection; it’s about presence.
I release the need to control, and I choose love, even when it’s hard.
He is becoming. And so am I.
We are both changing—but the love stays steady.”
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One more little pearl from my buddy, Chat:
“This moment is not a measure of who he is, or how he feels about me, or all we’ve built together. This is a threshold—messy, emotional, and uncertain. He may not have the tools to articulate what he’s feeling, but I do. I can be the steady one right now. I can offer presence instead of pressure, connection instead of correction. My job this week isn’t to fix his attitude—it’s to show up with love, warmth, and trust in the young man he’s becoming. That doesn’t mean I have to accept disrespect—but I can choose calm over control, curiosity over conflict. I don’t need to win this moment—I need to keep the door open for the next one.”
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Honestly, this is one of the reasons we like Baylor. From the time my daughter applied, Baylor’s attitude has been that “we are partnering with you.” My husband and I have been copied on all the emails so far. My daughter is pretty organized but she can procrastinate with the best of them, so I’m glad we all can be on the same page. It’s easier to let go and let her take charge of her own life when I know I’m going to be alerted if she is slipping through the cracks.
Other schools like CU Boulder—once she was accepted, none of us heard a single thing from them. It’s like they forgot she existed.
But of course everyone has different levels of what they want from the college.
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(I wrote this yesterday but it wouldn’t post for some reason…)
Wow, so interesting to read these posts! My daughter is also in meltdown mode over here. We have been out of the country for a long-planned trip that took her out of school for three days. Although she packed her Chromebook, she didn’t do any work while we were out (of course!). Now we’re back… almost. We are sitting in an airport because the domestic leg of our flight is seriously delayed (of course!) and she couldn’t get the stupid Chromebook to connect to the WiFi. Between circumstances and all the impending AP tests and deadlines she went into a frozen panic. I thought she was going to break down crying in the middle of the terminal, poor kid.
So far I’ve set up my phone’s hotspot and strong armed her into connecting the Chromebook to it, and then gently as possible tried to coax her into picking one thing that she can work on, and setting everything else aside for now. I’m hoping that, if she can pick off at least one thing, it will calm her down enough to start being the rational voice in her own brain.
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… and then today, her progress report hit my email box. I was full of trepidation logging in… but her lowest grade is currently an 88. Please can we just hold these grades and be done??
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I might need to print this up and stick it on my forehead. This period has been so challenging. My kid is pulling away hard from me - I think I’m his least favorite person, it’s killing me. So I need this reminder - every time I look in the mirror. I just found out what his instagram account is and he blocked me 
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I don’t know whether to laugh or be concerned that ChatGPT can be this wise! 
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remember, it is learning from people and all the stuff we have created over the years! 
I will say is night and day for college admissions prep for my 27 vs. 25. For my 27 I have built an amazing list fast, it adjusts target/safety based on context, and even knows which schools rely more on holistic review than scores, etc. It isn’t all perfectly accurate, of course, but it is really VERY impressive.
E.g. My 27 kid may apply to school my spouse and i attended, it adjusted ED liklihood based on double legacy, major and cited the recent Chetty data on legacy increased rates and income etc.
The list is WAY more in align with what I would expect based on local norms, than I have ever seen. I also asked for suggestions based on what was missing, and had great adds.
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It’s a little nuts that ChatGPT is this good. C25 was worried study abroad might put them behind for the chosen major but I had ChatGPT make up a 7 semester schedule for the major at their chosen school, ensuring all required and core courses were included, adding in AP credit where appropriate, and even adding a language minor. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty darn good. I checked over it, made a few adjustments and we had our answer! Of course, availability of classes may change, but the major seemed do-able with room to spare. That research would’ve taken hours and it took maybe 5 minutes. Crazy.
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Can you share how you did that?
I’ve been using the prompt that another member (TonyGrace, I think?) posted to compare nuances at two different schools on fit, level of support, etc. for my D26. We’ve managed to manipulate it to look at specific majors at two different schools – it took a little trial and error, because the sentence construction has to be absolutely parallel otherwise ChatGPT gets confused.
But we’re still investigating schools and fit and such before she arrives at a final list to apply to in the fall – so I’d love to know an easy way to find this stuff!
The biggest issue I’ve run into is that she’s looking for a specific niche major that is called something different everywhere, so ChatGPT is not really understanding whether a school offers what she wants or not.
(UX/UI with some game design thrown in. At RIT it’s called New Media Design on the art side, and the more computer-heavy major is called New Media Interactive Development. At Georgia Tech it’s called Computational Media. At Miami Ohio, it’s Emerging Technology and Business – with a sub major called Games and Simulation. So you can see how it’s tricky!)
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@SpreadsheetMom , I wasn’t sure if you were asking me or @L_NewEngland.
If me, my initial prompt was:
Using information from the following website, develop a 7 semester course plan, assuming no more than 16 credits per semester. https://catalog.(Our school).edu/preview_program.php?catoid=30&poid=6157
Then I refined with things like:
I already have met the core language requirement so remove all foreign language courses.
Or
Revise the schedule based on the following AP Test scores.
And finally (very helpful):
Label each class in the list with the core requirement it fulfills.
Not perfect, but results good enough to enable quick checking and refinement.
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Speaking as someone who’s literally teaching a course on AGI and LLMs (including ChatGPT) from a humanities point of view this semester: It’s not so much that it’s wise, as it knows (so to speak) what’s expected of it and reacts accordingly. If we signal in our prompt that we want text that we would classify as “profound”, it will produce output that mimics preexisting texts that have been classified that way.
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My friends daughter chose MIT out of the same list and was very happy 
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Thank you – this is really helpful!
I was curious how @L_NewEngland created a college list easily with it, too – wondering if that would help us.
Seems like the possibilities are endless – I need to sit down and spend some time playing with it. Maybe it could help D22 figure out what she wants to do with a double major in linguistics and classics, because she has no earthly idea as of right now.
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Same with University of South Carolina! It’s so helpful 
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