12th Grade
A full senior year, English 12, Precalculus or Statistics, Environmental Science, Government and Economics, with Philosophy and Logic as an elective. Plus the printable transcript that senior year is really about.
Start 30 days freeFive days from the opening week of 12th grade, taken from the lessons themselves rather than written to sound good.
The week opens with a model, not the text itself: one complete claim-evidence-analysis example built from a short fable your child hasn't studied, so the target structure is visible before Greek tragedy gets any harder to argue about.
Precalculus opens with no new instruction, a five-minute check that everyone's starting toolkit, graphing, evaluating and transforming familiar functions, is actually the same, before the unit asks your child to choose between families of functions on their own.
Environmental science opens with an ungraded, two-minute check: food chains, photosynthesis and respiration, conservation of matter, whatever your child already has, before a single new idea about energy flow gets introduced.
Government opens with the whole unit's tension stated plainly: the Constitution both gives and limits power at the same time, five minutes of framing before a single branch or amendment gets named.
Economics opens with a precise definition your child probably hasn't had to sit with before: scarcity is not the same as 'not enough right now,' worked out through one real example, a school with more demand for parking than it has spaces, before the unit gets to prices.
This is senior-year English built around one question: when someone has to justify a choice, what are they actually appealing to, fate, the law, reason, God, other people's opinion of them, or just themselves? Over the year your kid reads a Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, a satire, foundational American political writing, an existentialist novel, and a pile of speeches and op-eds, and they write about all of it, not just "what happened" essays but essays that take a real position and have to survive someone disagreeing with them. By spring they run their own research project from scratch, and the year ends with a novel-plus-current-events unit that asks them to use everything at once. It's the same amount of reading and writing you'd expect from a serious 12th grade English class, this just makes the connecting thread visible instead of leaving it implicit.
This is the year that takes everything your child learned about functions in Algebra II and trig in Geometry and welds it into one toolkit. Instead of learning "the quadratic chapter" then "the exponential chapter" as separate worlds, they learn to ask: given this data or this real situation, which kind of function actually fits, and how would I prove it? Along the way they pick up the unit circle version of trig (so sine and cosine work for any angle, not just triangle corners), vectors and matrices for quantities with more than one part, polar and parametric ways to describe curves, and they finish with conic sections and a first taste of limits, the exact ideas a calculus class opens with. By June they should be able to look at a new problem and reason out loud about which tool fits, not just execute a memorized recipe.
This is the non-calculus path to a real senior-year math credit, statistics and data science instead of Calculus. Your child learns to summarize data, spot when a relationship between two things is probably real versus coincidence, design a study that can actually support a "this causes that" claim, and use probability to say how confident anyone should be in a result. Every technique gets done by hand on a tiny dataset first (8-10 numbers), then redone in a free spreadsheet on real government and survey data, Census, CDC, World Bank, that kind of thing. It ends with your child running their own actual study from scratch: pick a question, collect or pull real data, analyze it, and defend in writing and out loud what the results do and don't prove.
This is a full year of environmental science that treats the subject as a set of connected systems, not a list of facts to memorize. Your senior will use biology and chemistry they already have to figure out how energy moves through a food web, why population and consumption aren't the same thing, how the greenhouse effect actually works at the molecular level, how scientists tell "caused by humans" from "just a coincidence" and how to weigh real tradeoffs in energy policy where there's no single right answer. Almost every unit ends with them collecting real data, from a backyard, a local pond, a park, or a window box, and writing an argument from that evidence, not repeating a conclusion you gave them. By June they should be able to look at a contested environmental claim and tell you specifically what evidence would need to exist to back it up, and what's missing.
This is a government course, but not the "name the three branches" kind your kid already sat through in middle school. It's about how power actually gets used, checked, and fought over, reading the Constitution and the arguments around it like legal documents instead of a list of facts, then testing that against real fights (should the president be able to send troops without Congress? does a state get to ignore a federal law it hates? does free speech have limits?). It ends with your kid picking a real, contested policy issue and writing the strongest possible case for BOTH sides, not picking a winner. The whole course is built to make them uncomfortable with easy answers on purpose.
This is a one-semester economics course for a senior. It builds one way of thinking"everything has a real cost, and that cost is what you gave up, not what you paid", and applies it three times, at three different zoom levels: personal decisions, markets, and then whole countries and the global economy. By the end your child should be able to read a news story about jobs, prices, or trade and tell you which parts are facts you could check and which parts are opinions dressed up as facts. That last skill, separating "what's true" from "what's fair", is the thing this course cares about most, more than any formula.
This is a one-semester high school philosophy course, and it has one real job: teaching your kid to rebuild someone else's argument in its strongest possible form before they're allowed to attack it. That's it. Everything else, the famous thought experiments, the dead philosophers, the debates about God and free will and trolleys, is that one skill applied to a new question every few weeks. First they learn what makes an argument logically solid versus just persuasive. Then they turn that tool on "can we know anything for certain" then "is the mind just the brain" then "what makes an action right." Nobody wins the debates in this course, your child learns to state both sides so well that a fair judge couldn't tell which one they actually believe.
Every course above is published in full, every unit, every module, every objective, and you can try a real lesson without an account.
Yes, and that is the part of senior year we already do well. Every course produces a printable transcript on Letters & Devotion letterhead with grades derived from mastery, hours logged per course, and a GPA weighted by the hours actually worked.
Both are full-year fourth-year math credits. Precalculus is the route if calculus or a STEM degree is likely; Statistics is the stronger choice for almost everyone else, and it is increasingly what colleges prefer to see for social science, business and health majors. A student can take either, or both across two years.