although, this cousin oddly hasn’t posted anything at all on fb in almost a year, so maybe she just quit facebook for something cooler and is living it up.
Right, teach the real world application of series since over half the population will have a mortgage and/or annuity at some point.
I don’t think that’s what school is supposed to be about though…otherwise we’d be teaching kids about how to do taxes. It’s supposed to be about critical thinking, not how to adult.
I think it’s more of a continuum than that. Personal finance and basic accounting is just a form of applied math. Is economics too at risk of being applicable to be worth teaching?
My niece (age 8) seems to have just rolled with everything, including remote school. I’m not qualified to make a diagnosis that she may be a little sociopathic, but maybe she’s just indifferent to real-life interaction with other kids. 
How many of them are simply taking advantage of remote school to cheat?
I love how this has devolved from “what are your experiences with distance learning” to we should just throw kids in a library and let them sink or swim on their own without instruction.
1 Like
I’m going to guess “none”. For a number of reasons. But if you don’t care for the numeric indication, he says that his kids are very engaged and that teaching is going well. And he gets very close to his kids – he was the “one phone call” his student got when arrested at the border, for instance.
1 Like
I got a phone call from someone arrested at the border (Mexico/Belize) once and went down there and bribed the guard to let them across.
1 Like
Not much more to it. He, an American, crossed the border into Belize, which you can just do, without any id or passport on him like an idiot. There is a place just after the Mexico border they call “the free zone” where Belize lets you sell whatever you want, no taxes or oversight. It’s like a one square mile area. Tons of knockoffs, counterfeits, and stolen goods. Super cheap and popular for people that live near the border to go and buy smart phones or gaming devices for dirt cheap and hope they work when they get home. Anyway, when this guy went to come back in to Mexico they asked for his passport. He didn’t have one. They detained him for trying to enter the country illegally. He called me, so I came down and told the border guard casually that I brought the fee required for him forgetting his passport and gave him a US $20. He accepted the “fee” and let him cross.
Wow, cool story. I went to Belize once briefly on a cruise, seemed a cool place. I’d be pretty paranoid about having ID/passport on me at all times in Mexico though. Amazing it just took $20.
Uh, yeah… that’s why they drop out. 
What if you were in 7th grade?
So much this. Kids make suboptimal decisions. Hell, adults make suboptimal decisions, but at some point you have to let people go ahead and make those suboptimal decisions. Childhood is not that time for decisions about education, IMO.
I can remember begging and pleading with my parents to let me quit piano lessons. They were really resistant but eventually, after like a year, they finally caved. I really wish they’d forced me to stay with it and I really regret not taking more piano.
One year in elementary school my gym teacher noticed several of the kids, including me, who completely sucked at anything related to balls: throwing balls, catching balls, kicking balls, hitting balls… we sucked. So he decided to set up a special “ball handling” class for us remedial PE kids. But it was voluntary. We’d be pulled out of class like the kids who needed speech therapy. I figured it would be embarrassing and then I’d have to do more of my school work at home, leaving less time for cartoons and bike-riding. So I decided not to do it.
So instead of being embarrassed for like the first two weeks or so before the kids got used to me being pulled out of class, I’ve been embarrassed for like 40 years by the fact that I still to this day cannot throw/hit/catch/kick a ball of any kind. I should not have been allowed to make that decision and it kind of pisses me off that I was. It was incredibly awesome of that PE teacher to offer that, and I missed out on a great opportunity.
My cousin, on the other hand, was a terrible stutterer when she was a kid. So she was one of the kids who was pulled out of class for speech therapy. And she hated it and it was embarrassing. But now that she’s an adult you’d never ever know she was a stutterer. (Well, if you spent a LOT of time with her when she’d been drinking you might notice that she stutters a little more than the average drunk person, but you probably wouldn’t conclude that she had a severe speech impediment through most of her elementary years.) She wasn’t allowed to make the choice, and it was a good thing because she absolutely would have made the wrong one.
Hell my sexist Pre-Calculus teacher told me that I didn’t have what it takes to take AP Calculus and I was ready to call it quits and not take it. My father wouldn’t hear of it: I was absolutely positively required (by him) to take the hardest math class the school would let me take. So into AP Calculus I went.
First semester I had the only A in the class, and I managed to get an actuarial credential, so I guess it’s a good thing my Dad forced me to take AP Calculus.
To be slightly fair to my Pre-Calc teacher, I wasn’t exactly stellar in the trigonometry portion of Pre-Calc. I was struggling hard to get B-minuses and sometimes Cs. He taught us to memorize everything and I am not a memorizer at all.
To be slightly fair to myself, he also refused to answer my questions, but if a boy in the class would ask the same question then he would answer. Like:
Me: Mr. Daniels, I don’t understand the answer to number 7. If A then why don’t you do B to get C? How did you wind up with D instead of C?
Mr. Daniels: twig, why do you ask so many questions? Please stop bothering me.
Boy: Mr. Daniels, I don’t understand the answer to number 7 either. I got C because I thought you’d do B. How do you get to D for the answer?
Mr. Daniels: Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t explain that very well. You can’t do B in this case because of E. You have to do F instead. That’s how you get to D.
me: why in the heck will you answer the exact same question when a boy asks it but not when I ask it??? 
So basically, I had to hope that a boy in the class would have the same question I did and not be afraid to ask it.
Must resist making crass joke…
Must resist making crass joke…
Yes. Algebra and pretending to understand Foucault isn’t really going to help them towards where they want to go, so they leave. It probably helped you get to where you wanted to be, so you stayed.
When you need to make money right now to get the water turned back on, that’s what you do. You go out and make money to get the water turned back on.
You can take piano lessons once you actually want to take piano lessons. You can take them like, right now if you want. And you will be happier that you are taking them when you want to take them. The kids who are forced into it wind up having psychological and other problems as adults. A teacher does not need to force or coerce you or abuse you in order for you to get good.
You made the choice to quit and I don’t think you should blame your parents for that. You learned the natural consequence of quitting something and that’s a lesson in itself. Had your parents not let you made your own decision, you wouldn’t have learned the cause/effect nature of decision making and being autonomous until later in life, when greater things are at stake. Now you can go learn the natural consequence of resuming something that you quit.