Senior High School AP courses

HNH
Fri, 19 Apr 2024 12:28:51 +0000

Whether a kid should be “forced” to take more math rebounds onto whether you believe in “authenticity”. Ostensibly the reason you want kids to only take what they want to explore.

If a kid accelerates in math, he’s (possibly inadvertently) showing he has interest in that subject. If he takes a year away from a subject he is “passionate” about, then many would discount his math work as irrelevant and insincere for the sake of admissions - which might sound okay for someone who doesn’t do anything for the sake of college, but a tough reality for the kid.

Fortunately for those who accelerate now, there are myriad online and other resources available for continued authentic study. Those include many completely free resources like Khan academy, MIT Open Courseware, YouTube, CTY (where many can receive a need-based scholarship). With all of this information online, and if you believe in the true passions of a 16 year old, what your high school offers, parents income, geography and a lot of other factors become less relevant to a kid’s choice of rigor. If a kid has passion enough to find PROMYS academy, he probably has enough time to find one of the 5+ entirely free online courses on linear algebra on Youtube.

The flip side to “diversity” is that colleges are looking for students to be more packaged so they can build a class community both socially and academically. So why introduce a self-inflicted disadvantage by accelerating in math one year and then appearing to find another passion the next? Then the story possibly looks like the kid who eats his broccoli first so that he can get to the stuff he really likes. And that’s too bad if the kid authentically likes broccoli.