earthmommy
- Reviewed on Saturday, February 23, 2008
- Grades Used: high school
- Dates used: 1989 and 2004
I completed high school with this curriculum in 1989 but I was very self-motivated as a student. I found a lot of the texts dry.
My oldest used it in 2004 and it wasn't a success at all.
A student who is very geared to text book learning and very self-motivated will do well with this option, but any student needing more individual attention or hands-on learning will need this to be heavily supplemented. I wouldn't recommend it for kids who are any type of learner except book learners.
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coffeygrounds
- Reviewed on Tuesday, May 01, 2007
- Grades Used: 9th-11th
- Dates used: 2003-2006
When our son was in junior high, we started investigating our options for high school. Since we also had two very young children, I was scared to try to do high school myself. After looking at a lot of options, and talking to people who had tried different things, we decided to try American School. I'm really sorry now that we did.
As some have mentioned, American is an inexpensive way to get a diploma. It is accredited (if this matters to you), they do the grading, and they do get the papers back to you in a reasonable amount of time.
However, some classes are too easy (especially Essential Mathematics 1 and 2 which are considered freshman and sophomore classes), some classes are too hard, and some are just plain boring. The biggest disadvantage to me was that while someone else was grading his papers for me, it wasn't always the same person for the same class. For example, in English 2 he had 8 tests and a total of 6 different people graded those tests.
This may work well if you have a highly motivated student who wants an accredited diploma, but I will be looking for something else for my other children.
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Susan
- Reviewed on Monday, March 07, 2005
- Grades Used: High School
- Dates used: 2004-present
My son is using American School to complete his high school studies. Overall, it has not been a good experience for him. Some of the courses, such as Accounting, are not explained satisfactorily, and my son was not permitted to speak with an instructor. My son finally had to withdraw from Accounting, and switch to Algebra. Since we switched a course, we were charged an additional $40.00.
They are affordable, as mentioned previously. I do agree that the textbooks are pretty bland, and have a liberal slant, particularly in the US History course.
For my other children, I will look into another program.
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Laura Schneberger
- Reviewed on Saturday, February 19, 2005
- Grades Used: High school
- Dates used: 10-2001-12-2003
My 16 year old daughter was behind when she started her high school course with American School. She had been using calvert school since kintergarten with all the structure and so many tests through calvert she was burned out and way behind. While I have heard American isn't a very good curriculum choice, my daughter did very well academically. She even completed the general diploma in two years and went on to community College with a 3.8 and now she is is maintaining a 3.4 as a sophmore in a major University. I had her deal with all the mailing and all the phone calls to the school for help. The school was very helpful but on occasion they would loose a test and we would ahve to re-do it. All in all, they were pretty diligent at getting grades back to us and more curriculum sent at the right time. The proof is in the pudding my daughter is doing fine and she is now a college sophmore. The cost is less than 900.00 for the full 4 year course and there is no limitation on how fast you may work as long as you send in the chapter tests. That is extremely reasonable and workable for a family with limited time and resources. For the Algebra we got help from teaching websites online one of the best is purplemath. But the teachers at American are willing to help by phone as well.
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