3 credits for NEM 1-4

[Reya]

Since NEM starts with a section of prealgebra and since it ends with review, I'm planning on assigning high school credit as follows:

 

Integrated Math I - NEM 1-first half of 2

IM II - NEM 2-first half of 3

IM III - NEM 3-4 (we likely won't work through the review)

IM IV - Additional Mathematics 1

IM V - Additional Mathematics 2

 

This works out to Alg I&II, geometry with proofs, trig, statistics (not AP) and Calc I (basically, Calculus AB). All of these are honors level credits.

 

Calc II, if we take it separately, will get its own credit.

 

Is this reasonable?

[KAR120C]

Since NEM starts with a section of prealgebra and since it ends with review, I'm planning on assigning high school credit as follows:

 

Integrated Math I - NEM 1-first half of 2

IM II - NEM 2-first half of 3

IM III - NEM 3-4 (we likely won't work through the review)

IM IV - Additional Mathematics 1

IM V - Additional Mathematics 2

 

This works out to Alg I&II, geometry with proofs, trig, statistics (not AP) and Calc I (basically, Calculus AB). All of these are honors level credits.

 

Calc II, if we take it separately, will get its own credit.

 

Is this reasonable?

There is only one Additional Math book -- I'm assuming you mean College Math 1 and 2? And Additional Math is generally used as a supplement concurrent with NEM 3 and/or 4

 

That would make it:

Integrated Math I - NEM 1-first half of 2

IM II - NEM 2-first half of 3

IM III - NEM 3-4 and Additional Mathematics 1

IM IV - College Math 1

IM V - College Math 2

 

I think those credits are reasonable, although there's also nothing wrong with crediting them the way they are scheduled (which would come out to six with college math). The geometry isn't "with proofs", so I wouldn't specify it that way unless you're supplementing. (There's nothing wrong with the geometry - plenty of critical thinking - but they don't have formal proofs.) And actually as much as I like Singapore, I'm not sure I'd say Honors. They're well done and rigorous... but they're not really "above and beyond" in the way I'd expect Honors to be, unless you mean because you're speeding it up a bit.

[Reya]

Whoops! Got AM/CM mixed up.

 

Proofs are in AM--that's why I added "with proofs." :-) I don't have that one in my hot little hands yet, so they may have mistyped on Sing's site....

 

Everywhere I've lived, "honors math" meant a calculus-bound track plus geometry with proofs...and, ahem, actually finishing the textbooks, starting algebra no later than 8th grade.

 

We are supplementing, though, with Gelfand's enrichment books, and we'll be going faster than normal, too, and starting way early.

 

DS is taking approximately 80-100 minutes to finish one section in NEM 1 right now (this first half doesn't count for anything, really), and we do math for 40 min a day right now, so we're moving a bit faster than normal even though the first chapters are really tedious. I've made two accommodations for his age. First, I've copied all the exercises to graph paper for him, and second, I read the section aloud and answer questions before the exercises--I'd prefer that he read it, so that he'd learn to read math textbooks on his own.

[KAR120C]

Proofs are in AM--that's why I added "with proofs." :-) I don't have that one in my hot little hands yet, so they may have mistyped on Sing's site....

I don't have that one myself, so it's possible.. but I'd be hesitant to describe it that way anyway, since it's a one-year supplement after you're done with the meat of geometry.

 

Everywhere I've lived, "honors math" meant a calculus-bound track plus geometry with proofs...and, ahem, actually finishing the textbooks, starting algebra no later than 8th grade.

If it fits with what the schools around you do, then it's probably fine... Around here I don't think that would fly.

[Mamagistra]

Wow, is he graduating already?! :001_huh:

[Reya]

If it fits with what the schools around you do, then it's probably fine... Around here I don't think that would fly.

 

What do you do that's extra, then? (I'm more than content with Gelfand's being plenty for any honors course; just curious.) The contents of Algebra I, barring a featherweight course, are usually pretty fixed, for example.

[Reya]

Wow, is he graduating already?! :001_huh:

 

Who, my stinker? Oh, no! He's transitioning up to late middle school/high school level in most subjects and is about to finish Singapore 6B. All except for composition, which is probably at early 3rd grade level. (I don't want littles writing too much!!!!!)

 

We got held up in math over a prolonged battle of the wills. :glare: DS wanted to accelerate more that I wanted to, soooo...he did as little as he could, and dragged his feet doing it. Now we've reached a compromise, and he's shooting forward again--so I don't have to shoot HIM. (I don't mind a kid working hard no matter how fast or slow they are. It's a kid fighting me with everything he's got that gets my teeth on edge.)

 

Anyhow, before April's out, he'll be well into NEM 1 and doing IMACs' Operational Systems on alternate days.

 

His reading skills lag behind math, and we're just drifting with history and science for another year ("second" grade). We'll do all the rest of the Apologia elementary books, all of God's Design Science, some fun labs, a huge stack of random sciencey books that I have, and maybe do the Snap Circuits course he really wants to take (he'll do that independently--he'll probably spend hours on it every day, and I'm opting OUT of that schedule). In history, he'll read the rest of the SOTW books, plus a big stack of supplemental reading.

 

We'll probably start "real" high school science in "third" grade and "real" high school level history in "fourth." He could do high school bio, physics, or chem I now, but I don't see the rush. What he wants to concentrate on is math and languages, and I'm fine with that. He couldn't do high school level history--not sophisticated enough.

 

His reading level has been frozen at 6th grade for over a year, mainly because I've been working on fluency rather than level. With all his speech processing problems and dyslexia, that's the one thing that really must be carefully TAUGHT. So now that his ease and speed are up, I'm giving him a jumpstart by having him read the Just So Stories, The Jungle Books, and then the Blue Fairy Book. They're carefully chosen as high vocab level/low sophistication, and so far, starting The Jungle Book, it seems to be working to aggressively raise his reading level. I'll continue to interleave books of a lexile level above 1100L (high school level) with his other reading to really get him solidly reading with a high vocab. Subject sophistication, though, is totally a matter of maturity.

 

I'm keeping this kid at home until he's 18 (commuting to college only) and out of college until he's got a lot of AP tests under his belt.

[KAR120C]

What do you do that's extra, then? (I'm more than content with Gelfand's being plenty for any honors course; just curious.) The contents of Algebra I, barring a featherweight course, are usually pretty fixed, for example.

We've done Gelfand's and a Mathematical Logic book (Suppes) to supplement, but I just don't call them honors anyway. The kid I tutor for Honors Algebra 2 (in PS) right now is getting into topics that I didn't see until Calculus. That's not what I want to do, but if we said "Honors" for Algebra 2 using NEM 3 and then showed up with that on the transcript, they would be expecting something else.

[Reya]

I guess I just don't see the point in that. If it covers calculus topics, it's calculus! Just out of curiosity, what were the topics? When I did calculus, I learned calculus, period. There wasn't anything that could be considered to be overlapping with algebra.

 

Singapore doesn't cover all of secondary algebra until Additional Mathematics, so NEM 3 wouldn't cover all of Alg II. (He'll also do all the optional challenge-y sections.)

 

It's also interesting that you said it wouldn't fly where you live. I got near-perfect scores on the math sections of the SAT and GRE (I always miss ONE easy one) and was the best student in my Calc III H course in college that was only open to students who made a 5 on the Calc AP AB test and was mostly full of math majors. I'm not saying this to brag--it's just that what I described above (early sequence, covering all topics in the book) was what I had, and if that's inferior, then surely some kid from somewhere would have come in better prepared than I was for Calc III. Sure, my college wasn't first-tier for math, but it was for engineering. According to your observation, I shouldn't have blown the top off the curve in that class because other students should have had such a better background.

 

If it were smarts alone, then I would have had some conceptual distance to cover to surpass the other students. But it was, in fact, the very first test--the review, basically--in which the gap between me and the other students was the biggest, and I didn't study for that class at all.

Edited March 30, 2010 by Reya

[KAR120C]

I guess I just don't see the point in that. If it covers calculus topics, it's calculus! Just out of curiosity, what were the topics? When I did calculus, I learned calculus, period. There wasn't anything that could be considered to be overlapping with algebra.

He's doing more with matrices and their determinants, partial fractions, sequences and series, parametric equations, half angle and double angle trig formulas... Not calculus, but a lot of the supporting details. I don't see as much of that in NEM and NAM.

 

I'm not saying the other way is a better idea, mind you. You'll notice we're still sticking with Singapore... For one thing, I keep having to wade into calculus to explain why he would care about any of these things (which are otherwise being taught in a vacuum). And then five bucks says they repeat the whole thing again in "Honors Precalculus" next year, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that after two rounds of that there are still a bunch of kids who don't get it. It's a ton of topics and not necessarily a whole lot of understanding... and that's why we're not doing it that way.

 

But my point about what you put on a transcript is that you're communicating with whoever it is you have to send the transcript to, and I'm just not sure that anyone would look at NEM and see that it was covering what they think we should mean by Honors. Since we homeschool, "Honors" is already suspect, so I tend to be very conservative with that kind of thing.

[Nan in Mass]

I'm not labelling NEM honours. I had honours math in high school and it covered more, even with NAM added in. I like Singapore and I, too, am sticking with it, but I was relieved to find NAM, which at least addresses some of those "missing" topics that I vaguely remember. My son won't have covered nearly as much math as I did by the time he graduates from high school, despite (hopefully) being through calculus, just as I was. I still can't decide if I am doing the right thing. My older one, who is using his math in an applied way in his college major, insisted that I stick with Singapore for his younger brother when I waffled at the beginning of high school. He says he "rocks" at applying his math compared to his classmates, so much so that the faculty has asked him if he is sure he wouldn't rather be an engineering major (!!!!! most of us are engineers in our family and our hair stands on end at the idea of this child being an engineer !!!!!). So, we are sticking with the Singapore and hoping that being able to apply some of math well will make up for not knowing lots of other things. I was retaught most of those missing bits my junior year of college, anyway. It is hard to know what to do...

 

Reya - none of that applies to you. Your son will have plenty of time to do it all. Mine struggles with his NEM and is over double your son's age.

-Nan

[Reya]

And then five bucks says they repeat the whole thing again in "Honors Precalculus" next year, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that after two rounds of that there are still a bunch of kids who don't get it. It's a ton of topics and not necessarily a whole lot of understanding... and that's why we're not doing it that way.

 

 

 

True enough. I don't remember a thing from pre-calc--don't even remember what it covered beyond a "big, disorganized mess." (Hence why we're doing NEM. Actually, with the "challenge" sections, it's the most challenging program I've found!)

[Reya]

I should probably grab a book and see what's missing, though... Or add in the AOPS books. Eeek. My kid's expensive to homeschool!

 

I just loooooove NEM so much. It's so CLEAR. It's so STRAIGHTFORWARD. I'm already able to just read the lesson, with very little elaboration, and DS can just do the work. This wouldn't be possible with other programs, especially not with his languaging processing difficulties and distractability when it comes to too much "stuff" on the page. We're definitely sticking with that as our current core!

 

We're using IMACs, too, but I haven't got a CLUE how I'm going to award credit for that. I haven't even found any other homeschoolers who have heavily used it. The institute used to give three full credits for every year of its program, as scheduled, but all that info's off the web now. I'm intensely frustrated that I didn't get the course names written down when I had the chance, as they use multiple books per course. For the most part, the program's dead in its original form, which is a true pity.

 

(I'm obviously NOT letting DS go to college as soon as he finished the Singapore College Math books. We'll do other stuff for a while. Give him a chance to be a bit more mature and strengthen his writing and reading skills.)

[Nan in Mass]

I didn't have pre-calc. I had something else between 10th grade geometry and 12th grade calculus. The entire thing seemed to consist of reteaching us our 9th grade math all over again using different notations, like function or matrix or polar coordinates. I'm not surprised if you don't remember it.

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

If the program is defunct anyway, couldn't you write to them and ask?