Posted on 01/13/2008 6:57:00 PM PST by K-oneTexas
“If I have only a limited amount of money with me at the time, I keep a running total of estimates in my head to see just how much I can buy on that trip.”
I think we need of definition of “estimate”. I add up items while shopping also, but mostly by rounding all cents to ten cents to avoid adding pennies in my head, and then rounding up to dollars fairly often. But then I add up the rounded numbers exactly (at least as well as I can in my head, which is usually accurate). But that’s not really an estimate, but the addition of several rounded numbers.
But this method of “estimating” was not taught in schools years ago. And, like “creative spelling”, and writing which does not count off for spelling, it’s just another method to give a passing grade to students who can’t, or don’t learn to do things correctly.
Oh so true........public education is very successful. It is meeting all of the goals the originators planned.
It’s worth it. Do with less if you have to and raise your own children. Make it a priority. It makes a difference! If not, someone else’s values and beliefs will be your child’s values and beliefs - plus kids need you. They really don’t want paid strangers who really don’t care about them pretending they care about them. No one is a effective as YOU, as their Mom. Off the soap box! ;)
One last comment ... the other day my daughter told me about a dilemma ... ;) and she told me, “Mom, I heard you in my head saying NOT to do .... and I didn’t ... then went on to say I make her nuts!!!!! :)
“How do you feel about Shurley English? This is my second year using it. Its great they are learning how to diagram sentences, but I’m not sure it is helping their writing.”
It’s okay ... dry but effective. I’d like to see her not doing labeling above the word, and a “pattern” thingie but rather the visual diagramming that looks like a horizontal branch with words hanging off of it - that’s how I learned diagramming. They won't be changing that ... I don't like the other books I've seen on grammar ... too many games and the "must be fun mentality" doesn't work for me. Sometimes learning is WORK and they might as well realize that.
It won’t help them with penmanship. They use Zaner Blosser for printing and cursive. They have books for each. Starting this month they must use cursive all the time rather than the option of printing or cursive.
She’s been getting letter grades since kindergarten!
In fact, I was stunned when they had her take the S.A.T. (NJ) in kindergarten! She went for a full day - 8:30am - 3PM but even still I was surprised.
bump for later read.
I’m beginning to feel better about it - thanks.
That sounds like a great school. I agree, I learned diagraming the way you did. I had to take an essay I wrote and diagram it. I then realized how badly even I wrote! When you can’t figure out how to diagram one of your sentences, its a bad deal.
Yah, this year I have cut back on Shurley, and going back to six trait writing. I still have taught the jingles and up to object of the preposition but thats it. The principal is okay with this, I am just suppose to still teach the jingles because the 8th grade teacher is only using the jingles.
“I don’t like the other books I’ve seen on grammar ... too many games and the “must be fun mentality” doesn’t work for me. Sometimes learning is WORK and they might as well realize that.”
Agreed!!! Stop the laziness!!
Yes,the NEA is nothing but a PC dominated wing of the Democratic Party.
Having said that,however,without a union you would have 45 kids in a class and teachers could be fired by tyrannical administrators for expressing unpopular vire points.
And,since most administrators are also dyed in the woll Leftists,it is CONSERVATIVE teachers who would be under the ideological gun.
If your daughter is using the Math 1, 2, or 3, I’ve heard they aren’t really that great, at least not worth them money they cost for what they taught. That could be the problem.
If you can, why don’t you see if you can find some of their Algebra level books to look at. The Algebra 1/2 is fairly easy but past that it gets hard fast.
My kids were also bored with the math they were doing at grade level (I don’t recall the curriculum, just not Saxon) so that’s why we pushed them, but you know, thinking about it, they would have been bored with Saxon if they were working at grade level, too.
The two main reasons we picked Saxon, is that it was inexpensive and so widely available used; and that it went right on through Calculus and Physics. We wanted a curriculum we could stick with for the long term. I was concerned that changing curriculum would result in them missing something if a topic was covered in different years with different curriculum.
I do know that there are some people who just don’t connect with Saxon for whatever reason and it could be that that’s the situation you’re in. But based on our success and the success I’ve seen others have with it, it is really worth checking out more thoroughly. I do know it’s the math curriculum of choice for virtually all the homeschoolers I know.
Good luck with your efforts. It’s tough when the kids are bored. They really lose interest in trying.
Oh, they also use the Four Square method for essay writing. I wish I had that when I learned to do that. My trouble was always how to START the essay and organize my thoughts. This method makes it easy when first learning to do this.
They use this in the lower grades.
Thank you for the advice. They do have her at grade level and she is bored. I think she wants to be challenged more ... . I’ll look into the next grade level - home school version.
Speaking of bad habits,lets take the tardiness issue as an example.
Kids wander into class five,ten,fifteen minutes late to class with no real consequences.After lunch,they tote bags of food and sodas into class and begin munching.Tell them they can’t come to class with food?Then you will find the VP or a security guard admonishing you for not admitting them.So why even bother enforcing “rules”?
Then these kids enter the job market and maintain those same habits of tardiness and irregular attendance.They get fired and are in shock.Hey,it was OK in high school so why are these employers”straight tripping”?
Pretty sad.
Signing off ... hoping we have off tomorrow.
They keep saying we’re getting snow but all I hear is rain.
Thanks to all with the advice!
Ditto for the Christian teachers filling the pews of too many Christian churches. Those ministers aren’t about to bite the hand that puts money in the collection plate.
However....Imderbyte is **completely** correct!
We will lose freedom in the voting booth! The liberal/Marxist will succeed in bring down this country by using our nation’s schools. In my opinion, Marxism is our nation’s MOST urgent and serious threat, and our schools are its most important weapon.
Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill OReilly...All of them! Seem to be completely clueless!
I will give Sean and Bill some partial credit. They do report on the some of the nuttiness in the government schools but both miss the boat on the cause ( Marxism), and neither call for the only solution possible ( Shut the indoctrination camps completely DOWN!)
INTREP
I agree with your point .... up to a point. However, I’d sum it up by saying — there aren’t enough good teachers to go around. And, as with any other profession, they go to where they can make the most money.
The Thing That will make it competitive is having a choice with the Money.. The Competition will make the Services and Curriculum even better ... Know the Manoppoly of Labor for Teachers just Pass the Buck! and who has Tenure in life?? Communist and Socialist!
There are any number of practical examples. You're about to split a tip among three people for a $57.98 restaurant meal. (The service was such that you've all decided to leave about a 20% tip.) One member of the group says "OK, each of us should leave a $10 bill." You can immediately know that he's wrong by quickly estimating that 20% of your approximate $20 share of the bill is about $4. The exact answer doesn't need to be calculated to know that your friend is off by more than a factor of two.
I’m still guessing the only practical application is to give a passing grade to students who can’t successfully calculate enough math problems correctly to earn a passing grade.
Any case where an exact answer isn't required is a candidate for estimating the result. You're about to pick up paint for a wall in your house. The paint covers 950 square feet per gallon. The wall is about 8 feet, 4 and 1/2 inches high by 19 feet wide. Do you need one quart can of paint? Two? Or should you buy a gallon can? The exact answer is 0.3536111... gallons but that doesn't really matter. A quick estimate is (8 x 20) / 500 = 0.32 gallons. You can easily determine that two quarts will be sufficient without doing the exact calculation.
Most real world calculations are checked with something called doubling checking, or methods built into computer programs or spreadsheets.
I'm a programmer. Believe me -- Bugs, like math errors, do happen. I've found that it can be very difficult to locate bugs in my own code since I put them there in the first place. The same thing happens with math errors.
NASA lost a Mars mission because someone sent them data in kilometers and NASA treated as if it were in miles (possibly vice versa). I don't know that it's possible to estimate what the calculation results should have been. If it is, though, you don't need to calculate the exact answers to realize that the computer-generated results are about 60% of the expected values or more than 1 and 1/2 times the estimated values.
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