The following will come as no surprise to folks familiar with home schooling:
Recently Albuquerque hosted the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). The top three competitors at ISEF ranged in age from 16 to 18 including the home schooled 16 year old Phillip Streich of Wisconsin whose project disproved the deeply held general assumption that carbon nano tubes were impervious to all solvents when he showed them to be soluble in methl-2-pyrrolidone. Each of these three top competitors won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award plus a $50,000 scholarship.
Re: Home schooled young scientist
[re: Pat]
06/23/07 05:02 AM
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Wow! Definitely some mentoring going on there, Pat. First identifying the aptitude for Science, and then finding the resources to create opportunities for the aptitude to flourish. Not an easy thing to do when home schooling. That parents deserve a lot of kudos for that. At the end of May I closed the door on another semester of teaching even as we were busy planting corn. I actually entered the kids' final grades by cell phone with the school administrator as I was driving that big John Deere pulling 30-feet of Great Plains Discovator at 6.2 MPH. Two perioods of Algebra and one period of Spanish kept me busy enough. The thing is...... you never know WHO has WHAT aptitude until you "open the door". I saw a kid just BLOSSOM in math once I fixed a few glitches that were in his skill set. He must have had the flu when they did fractions because here was a H.S. sophomore who could not tell me how many eighths there were in one. His parents wisely transferred him from a 3500-kid high school to a tiny parochial school where he could get the remedial help that he needed. What a difference that made!
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Wow! Definitely some mentoring going on there, Pat. First identifying the aptitude for Science, and then finding the resources to create opportunities for the aptitude to flourish. Not an easy thing to do when home schooling. That parents deserve a lot of kudos for that. 
His parents wisely transferred him from a 3500-kid high school to a tiny parochial school where he could get the remedial help that he needed. What a difference that made!