The trainer that I lesson with and show with has her program at a barn where the owner is a breeder. She has a warmblood breeding farm in Ocala, and keeps her personal horses at the TX barn. She is super sweet and will help anyone with anything. I could ask her about something like that!
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There is a focus on integrated educational experiences in some of the data and technology related classes.
However, a lot of parents and teachers use the STEM acronym to talk about educational tracks and programs of study certain students take in high school, so that they are prepared to pursue a college degree in engineering, science, technology (such as computer science or data science) or mathematics.
For instance, my son is interested in pursuing a college degree in specific engineering and computer science programs. So he will do two years of Calculus in high school and two years of physics, all through a dual enrollment program.
When it comes to the timing of Algebra 1, if he had been delayed taking it until 9th grade, there would have been no way he would have been able to fit in those Calculus and Physics courses in high school. He would not have had enough math proficiency by 11 th grade. And if that was the case, he would not have an adequate high school transcript to apply directly to many programs he is interested in. Which is not the end of the world. He could have taken more classes via community college for a year, and later apply to the engineering programs he is interested in⊠but⊠that would have been an unfortunate delay in education.
I know in my state that when they considered changing all mathematics tracks 3 years ago, and requiring all public school students to wait until 9th grade to take Algebra 1, there was a lot of talking in presentations provided by the Virginia Department of Education about the benefits of âde-emphasizingâ Calculus as a key high school class for high school seniors. The challenge with the logic was that it made sense for kids interested in pursuing degrees in English, History, Education, Communications, Law, etc⊠but for kids who wanted to eventually pursue degrees in fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics? They would be at a major disadvantage when applying to college programs related to these fields if they had not had 1 year of Calculus in high school. Competitive schools would not even consider see them.
Also, many competitive business related college programs also want applicants to have had one year of Calculus in high school.
Anyway, just a little more information about why the delay in Algebra 1 is a big issue for some students. It can really limit opportunities later on for these kids,
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test post
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No, I donât think youâre being contrarian. I do think that you had an extraordinary outside-of-high-school life compared to mine.
I did come out of high school with a huge amount of knowledge, the Jeopardy! television quiz show kind, and school (1970 HS grad) was pretty much my life. Lived in a rural area, had neighborhood friends, my job at the mall, which was part-time during the school year and full-time during summers and Christmas, and the horses. That was it.
We were borderline poor and my parents ignored me (having three other kids right after me was part of that).
I did get to show, all local shows within about 30 miles. My parentsâ only involvement was to arrange to go with a neighbor with a trailer. My father came, too, but I decided on the classes, signed up for and paid for them by myself, although he probably gave me the $2 or $3 per class it cost, got myself to the gate on time, and all else. My whole life has been a do-it-yourself experience, and the shows were no different.
So, I didnât have the wonderfully rich teenaged years you seem to have, and going to a high school in a school system that we kept being told was one of the three best in the country (MIT came to my high school recruiting for students) was really a shining star in my existence. It didnât shape my life skills, really, but it did give me the start in the right direction that kept me going and plenty of examples to show me what life would/should look like.
I do agree that OPâs parents are doing her a service with this exercise, and, hopefully, some of us in this thread have presented information, viewpoints, etc. that will sink in, now or in the future.
I donât consider most of what I took away from my high-school years to be book-smartness, but general knowledge and ways of doing things and thinking about things that really applied to an awful lot.
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You are selling yourself short. I bet it was Algebra II . Iâm with your mom on this.
I think that is the minimum requirement for most kids for high school graduation nation wide - to make it through Algebra II in high school.
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Iâm going to echo what most others have said here - I know it seems like we are a bunch of old meanies who do not want to help, but we have the advantage of experience and hindsight that is just not possible for most high school age teenagers.
It is just so very, very unlikely that you would be able to put away anywhere near the $50k that your parents have outlined as the number you need to contribute. Youâd never be able to ride or do ANYTHING else for the next 5 months and youâd still fall horribly and depressingly short of your goal. Let me put it again in the terms others have - to make $20k in 5 months youâd have to make about $175 (to cover the taxes youâll have to pay) a day EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next 5 months without a SINGLE day off. Thatâs $17.50 an hour for 10 hours a day. EVERY SINGLE DAY. More than double that amount for the $50k. And spent ZERO of that money on anything fun, including your horse or showing.
Also - the school saying they support any showing you might want to do - Iâll wager quite a bit of money that youâre footing the bill for any of this kind of showing. Do you have a reasonable grasp on just how much money it takes to qualify for finals? Youâre very likely paying for entries, nomination fees, stabling, hotels, travel for any coaches coming with you, transportation for the horse, etc, etc, etc, When I was showing at a higher level and further afield than any of my barnmates - I had my own truck and trailer, and was self-sufficient enough to go without trainer support. For championships, I contracted with a clinician that I regularly rode with for one-off coaching at the show that she was already at with a big group of clients to cut down on my expenses. I would have had to foot the entire bill for my local trainer (lodging, food, day fee, etcâŠ) if I brought her with me. So even though you want to show, could you realistically afford it?
Youâve said your parents are unwilling to let you even look for a working student position for even a short period of time. Why? I know several kids that absolutely excelled as a working student, taking their high school classes through a virtual school. Why are they willing to let you go to a boarding high school but not go work with a trainer. That alone tells me that they know you cannot possibly make the necessary money, but donât want to be the bad guys who flat out tell you no. There are horror stories from WS arrangements, of course, but also many excellent programs. Same goes for elite prep schools. And you easily may find you hate a boarding school as much as your rural TX school, just for different reasons. Youâre going to be very poor compared to most of your classmates and that gets old and potentially isolating very quickly.
Youâd be much further ahead focusing on your mare, seeing if you can work at some of the local barns - even though they are not H/J barns - as hands on experience is never a bad thing, even if you learn how NOT to do things.
Academically, really look into supplementing your local school with either community college or online classes. Prove to your parents how hard you are willing to work. Graduate early and then get the WS/groom position that will get you much further to your goal to be a pro. Frankly, if youâre even a freshman, let alone a sophomore and have not yet had Alegbra 1? Youâre behind on academics and probably would be overwhelmed by the workload and difficulty of the academics of a upper end boarding school. Those schools live and die by their Ivy League admission rate and your desire to do nothing but ride will fall to the side of making sure youâre keeping up academically.
That all being said - what does being a pro look like to you? What work would be your dream? Itâs not all just big sticks Saturday night classes under the lights. That is actually a tiny percentage of H/J pros. I have a friend (in the dressage world) that did something similar to this - finished high school, did a couple years of college and then took a WS position in Ocala. Sheâs quite successful 10-15 years later (likely going to be short-listed for Paris), but she is INSANELY talented, and will be the first to tell you she also got VERY lucky. And has parents that could afford to support her chosen path until she could support herself.
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I think the generational takes here are really interesting too. I was always TOLD how hard things would beâŠmostly from my schools themselves. In elementary school, junior high was going to be hard. Then high school was going to be âhardâ and then college would even harder! In reality, I did not find this to be the case, and it colored my view of doing something like post secondary education at one of our local college branches. I wish I would have because I think my college experience was actually less intense than my high school classes and I could have started working sooner than I did. All this said, I was never a straight A brainiac or anything. I was a solid 3.2 - 3.5 GPA.
I donât know when along the timeline schools started changing so much, maybe others can shed some more light there, but I have to imagine high in the 70âs was a different beast than when I was going. I know that school for kids now is night and day from when I was going too. At some point, teaching to standardized tests became a priority and itâs like we keep lowering expectations.
When I had my French exchange student, she was one of the top in ALL her classes, and we laughed extra hard that she got the best grade in her English class with it not being her first language. She ended up being pretty board with all her school work and did all her assignments with ease because of how much better the schools are she went to. I donât think the American education is what is used to be. With that said, I really donât know how it used to be before I was part of it!
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Even that is unrealistic for the average teenager whose parents donât have a string of riding horses or facilities to lease for a nominal amount 
For anyone else, the overhead would be too high to yield much of a profit. Braiding seems like the most lucrative option with the lowest barrier to entry. Even then, OP needs a real windfall, not just âsummer jobâ money.
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Thatâs very different from how it was when i was in college. They wanted you to have a well-rounded âgeneralâ education so everyone took basically the same courses our freshman and sophomore years .Towards your junior year you started really concentrating on your major. I envied the students at Oxbridge who AFAIK got to concentrate on their subject from the start and didnât have to take subjects for which they had no talent or academic need. I hated having to take unnecessary sciences (althoâ i actually enjoyed my one âMath for People Who Will Never Need to Do Mathâ course).
And Iâve needed algebra one whole time, and geometry never except when Iâm designing barns and then i use lined paper lol.
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Not the post youâre replying to, but speaking for myself as someone who went to a relatively fancy state school (UVA) after growing up under a rock in a southern Virginian backwater, it just changes your outlook and expectations in a way thatâs hard to explain. For example, I didnât know people could get internships that paid enough to support living in NYC or DC over the summer and result in a job offer before you even started your 4th year. It would never have occurred to me that those opportunities existed. I only knew about the internships that sent direct mail to my house, which required me to pay them. And I never would have heard of, let alone applied for, internships like that if it werenât for meeting friends and classmates who were in the same âpipeline,â so to speak. And I seriously doubt I would have gotten interviews if those companies werenât actively recruiting from UVA. My friends at other colleges just didnât seem to have the same awareness or feel the same pressure. I remember talking to them about my job interviews, and many of them were perplexed why I would be trying to get hired before I had even graduated. They didnât realize, at UVA, you were basically made to feel like a big loser if you didnât have an offer before spring semester 4th year. Not that âfeeling like a big loserâ is a great life experience⊠and you do get a LOT of that at competitive schools. But it does motivate you and push you to go farther than you might if you simply werenât aware of these opportunities that existed or the path to reach them. I certainly canât say I loved my college experience, but I do credit it with jumpstarting my life and putting me on a very different trajectory than the one I was headed for.
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Just want to say as a parent and teacher of a different subject that taking algebra in 9th grade is not automatically a bad thing and can be just right for ALL kinds of students: of course having OPTIONS is the best, which seems to be the problem here! For what its worth, Sidwell Friends, where Obamaâs kids went to middle and HS, still offers PRE-algebra for all 7th graders just like I had in 1992 at a Meh middle school on the west coast.
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Just want to be sure that her first name isnât Kate.
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OMG that would be the train wreck to end all COTH train wrecksâŠ
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Just add in Nicky P as the resident trainer specializing in Klassikal Dressage, and Lala Pop Rider ⊠who somehow found a reason to move herself, 5 horses and a laundry boy onto the property, and then refuses to leave.
THAT would the mother of all COTH train wrecks. A hat trick.
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Grand Salami Time ( to quote the great Dave Niehaus)
but honestly Joanne, you might want to privately IM the OP if your spidey sense is aroused
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Lol!!!
Omg. It could be a two-fer of braiding and breeding experience!
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I do actually! I have qualified for Pony Finals and Junior Hunter Finals, both at my first shows trying to qualify for them. I already show on the A circuit, but as I said earlier not very often. The shows with this school are over a thousand dollars less than what I pay for shows now.
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Greg Best? I heard he retired from coaching though?
I mean I have been to very expensive horse stables and boarded there⊠one of the girls my age owned an entire private jet and I got along with her very well and we were friends. Of course not everyone is the same but the school told me Iâd already be on the Varsity riding team, and only a select number of students get on to it. Already having an upper hand in riding can help you socially, whether or not Iâm âthe poorest person thereâ.
I have a question that you may already have answered, but I may have missed it.
Could your parents afford to pay your tuition at this school if they wanted to?
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