My niece is very ill this year from, thankfully, a non life threatening
condition.

My sister actually stumbled across a school, Linda Christas, to give
Tomeka both an AP Calculus and AP English course online this year. It's
a service evidently used by many "Hollywood types" who need to go to
school independently. Linda Christas was recommended in a casual
conversation by a public school counselor. Good for the counselor. I
wasn't aware that our high school counselors had those kinds of
options. That one recommendation in my mind justified my taxes for the
year. Evidently the public schools get to keep the money from the
average daily attendance number, and, at the same time, provide an
experience to the student of the highest quality. Seems like parents
and schools would be jumping on this wagon like crazy. It solves
everyone's problems.

As a matter of fact, I think it would be a great idea to use the same
kind of service to get kids out from under the negative influences of
schools that unfortunately must deal with so many students who are not
motivated to excel. That only brings the whole tone and level of
accomplishment of everyone down. And, the United States is now nearly
last in the developed world in accomplishment thanks to the past
"experts" who have tried to force angry, unruly children to do well in
school. That is no way to engender love for each other.

U.S. schools have the highest expulsion rate (and U.S. society the
highest incarceration rate) of any system in the world, and in the
process of identifying and removing kids, the rest are subjected to
very low quality instruction as teachers struggle to maintain any kind
of order and communicate something of quality to students. I think it
is neat that, I heard, Linda Christas guarantees their AP
courses.....guarantees?????

Evidently, if my niece doesn't score at least a 4 out of 5 on her AP
examination when she takes it, the school will assign a teacher to her
without charge for as long as it takes to accomplish that. The only
thing necessary to get the guarantee is to be willing to work with the
teacher. It's a student option kind of thing. Nothing forced on the
student.

That's probably the way to go for our entire school system. Make the
school voluntary all a person's life after, say, the sixth grade. Only
people who want to be there would be there. (Switzerland has a system
that is kind of similar.)

That would give everyone equal opportunity without forcing equal
result. Sounds good to me.

Terry

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