01.11.08

and exhale

Posted in COLLEGE, The nuts and bolts of it at 10:06 am by Meg

and that leaves me with Boy’s status -

Academically is a mixed bag. He’s had a busy, busy fall and that has slowed down what he has accomplished for his courses. He has accomplished a lot though. College entrance testing had a major impact on his fall. In October he retook the SAT I test (it was a good move and raised his scores a total of 200 points) and then finally retook the missing AP statistics test. In November he took 2 SAT Subject tests - literature and US history, and then in December he took 2 more - world history and math 2.

Studying for the subject tests did take a chunk of time out of his day. Lit. wasn’t too bad, I think he did about 3 practice exams to get the format down, but he hadn’t touched US history since 9th grade and needed to review the whole thing. The tests in December needed even more. We had planned on world history as taking the entire year with him reading through the spine that I had picked up used a few years ago and augmenting it with some interesting reading. Needing to take an end of year subject test in it on December 1 didn’t fit that plan. LOL - he spent much of November reading quickly through the spine. The math 2 test also took some review. Since he had spent last year doing discrete math and statistics, his algebra skills needed some quick review and brushing up.

Why’d he take so many? Well, one school, Columbia, wanted homeschoolers to have taken 4 tests and a bunch of schools wanted 3. The only school that we haven’t perfectly pleased was Tulane, after we had signed up for the second set of tests we discovered that they not only want 4 subject tests - they want the subject tests to include one science, one math, and one foreign language. Oh well. They are private, if they decide that Boy is the student for them they can ask us to take the tests later (to cross off their t’s) or ignore the whole requirement in the flood of other testing results. They aren’t high enough on our list to change our plans and January testing dates are too late for their submittal dates anyway.

His AP calculus is coming. It hit a snag in December that Hubby and he are still working out - essentially he misunderstood something and carried it not only through the 10 sections of that chapter but into the next. But once that is fixed and understood he should get back on track. No decision has been made yet about the May AP tests, but we’ll have to decide before the middle of February.

The bulk of his remaining ‘courses’ is all reading and I think he’s enjoying it generally. He’s read some interesting stuff already (in no particular order here, though there is a rhyme and reason to what he’s reading):

• Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman
• The Americas by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
• The Unofficial U.S. Census by Tom Heymann
• Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
• The Mask of Command by John Keegan Democritus by Paul Cartledge
• The Koran: A very Short Introduction by Michael Cook
• The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• Giving up the Gun by Noel Perrin
• Longitude by Dava Sobel
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weather Ford
• Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs by Adrienne Mayor
• On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Dewey Robert Talisse
• Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarate
• The History Buff’s Guide to WWII by Thomas R. Flagel
• Everyday Life in Traditional Japan by Charles J. Dunn
• Bullshit and Philosophy edited by Gary Hardcastle and George Reisch
• A Harvard Education in a Book by Editors of the Harvard Lampoon
• The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
• The Inferno by Dante Translated by John Ciarda
• The Purgatorio by Dante Translated by John Ciarda
• The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Translated by Edward FitzGerald
• Beowulf Translated by Seamus Heaney

Then there’s the college application game - At this point we have eliminated the school in London because it doesn’t actually participate in the tuition program, so that cuts Boy down to 20 schools (still a LOT). Of the 20 applications, he’s submitted 18 and plans on finishing the last two this weekend. He’s heard back from 2 schools with acceptances - YEAH!. They are both back up schools - one here in town and one is the state university, but it’s very nice to have them in his pocket while he waits for these other guys. Even with all the supplements and such, the Common Application has been wonderful. Once you have the basic info entered, you don’t need to keep doing it over and over again and having to check that everything is correct.

The essays requirements have been interesting. I think he is royally sick of dealing with ‘why are you interested in our school/city’ questions. Though he enjoyed Chicago’s request that he write a script using a quote from Ulysses by James Joyce and 4 things from a list of props. It’s funny too. I think it was USC who wanted an essay about something he’s read that’s made an impact on him - he talked about his nearly life-long love of Calvin and Hobbes and how his appreciation of the comic has grown with him. It ought to at least give the reviewer something different to read.

And lastly there his health - It’s hard to not start to feel frustrated. I’ve been kind of silent on it because how do you say - he’s not right, but he’s not having a distinct problem - more than once? Everything was going great until about Thanksgiving. That was the middle of our first 8 week cycle of the miracle drug. The scans in October were a mixed result, but I had had high hopes that improvement would continue. Over Thanksgiving weekend, gut pains came back and over the next 3ish weeks they went from occasional stabs to a constant low drone. At our December phone conversation with Dr. M, we decided to move the miracle drug up to it’s higher dosage. When we saw her the next week, she also decided to schedule a sonogram to check for both another abscess forming and to look at his liver (his liver has been giving some weird results at his monthly blood test) . The hope was that a higher dose will moving the healing along faster and a sonogram would let us look at little without the added radiation of yet another CAT scan.

Well, the sonogram didn’t show anything to worry about and his liver looked fine. But now it’s another 2/3 weeks and he’s still having low grade pains (better than a month ago, but not gone) and his last blood work is still pointing to his liver. It would be nice for him to be painfree sometime in the near future, wouldn’t it?

Permalink