Jump to content

Menu

tdeveson

Banned
  • Posts

    955
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by tdeveson

  1. :w00t: He said it. He said MCT! Just kidding. I'm tempted to take a closer look. Have you used it?
  2. You mean that by seventh grade CW still hasn't covered how to write an essay? I'm using CW and I'm looking for a different curriculum because it's so awkward to teach. If CW hasn't taught essay writing by middle school, that's yet another reason to drop it. :(
  3. You're killing me. I'm dropping CW for the same reason, and I was hoping IEW was crafted with a little more common sense. What a shame. :(
  4. I chose CW because I did not want my son to learn formula writing. I have a friend who was a writing professor at a Tier 1 university in the northeast. She had to read student essays for admissions process each year. She used to take all the five paragraph essays, ever carefully crafted according to the prevailing formula, and throw them away with barely a glance. Unfortunately CW is so cumbersome and awkward to teach, that I'm shopping for a different program for next year. It's a pity. I love the program, but I'm not willing to spend half an hour or more each week trying to figure out what to teach and how to do it. I'm looking at IEW.
  5. The teacher's guide schedules your lesson, but a) you can't see what's in the student book, so you have to constantly refer to that, and b) the instructions for teaching the actual lessons are in a third book. Lesson planning requires me to clear off the table, lay out three books, and start jumping around between them. It's ridiculous.
  6. It's nuts. And such a good program too. I wonder if they have any plans to fix it. It's such a pity that it's so unnecessarily difficult to teach.
  7. Working out will not make you lose weight. That was debunked with replicated studies in the past few years. So do anything you enjoy without fear of losing weight.
  8. I get your drift -- and something like that has occurred to me too. We evolved in a very different world than we live in. That's why I have two full-spectrum lights. While we may have evolved naturally to be depressed and lethargic in the winter, I can't run a house or teach school that way. ;) Twenty minutes in the morning while I read and have my morning coffee, and 20 minutes in the afternoon while at my desk. It makes a huge difference. As an aside, I live in South Florida where summers are hot, muggy, and miserable. That is the time of year when I'm lethargic and down. The oppressive heat just sucks the life out of me, even with the AC running. I find the whole season stupefying and can't wait for winter which makes me very energetic. And since I use the lamps, I haven't been blue in the winter in ages.
  9. Every Wednesday (Thursday is grocery day). Stuff gets thrown out and the shelves and drawers get cleaned out. It takes 10 minutes. If I let it go, then it's a big gross job.
  10. Don't go. People plan activities for when it's convenient to them. If you'd like fewer activities, simply don't go. If you'd like activities during more convenient times, then step up and organize those activities.
  11. I'm shopping for next year's writing program. Currently we're doing CW Aesop B. Next year we either move on to Homer or swap to IEW. Here's my dilemma. Ds and I like CW. He's really learning, and that should be the bottom line for a curriculum. But I hate the amount of time I have to spend preparing lessons. I'm really not willing to spend an hour sorting through three different books so I can put one lesson together. It's awkward and time consuming. (Is it too hard to ask for the instructions for teaching a lesson to be in the same book as the lesson plan that tells you to teach the lesson?) While the material is good, I keep feeling that it was put together in pieces and nobody ever bothered to integrate it. I've heard good things about IEW, but I don't know if it would be more of the same. It's a lot of money and I would only consider it if it saved me considerable time. If you're using IEW, would you tell me how long you spend preparing your lessons for the week? If you've used both, would you compare them for me? Thanks so much.
  12. I ran into exactly this sort of thing three years ago in our old group. The conservative Christians were so put off by some choices that were given to the group that they left. While we miss our old friends, the group is a far more congenial place now. They have their own little group and we wish them well doing whatever they're comfortable and happy doing. The rest of us enjoy the many choices available to us.
  13. :iagree: The last thing these children need is to be torn away from the one thing left to them: familiar surroundings. We'll do far more good by funding reputable orphanages and child care organizations locally, than by uprooting them "for their own good." Those who have no family left will still be far better off being adopted by local families. Helping these local families pick up the slack is a better option in my opinion.
  14. I'd like to supplement our study of the French Revolution and Napoleon with a couple of movies. Can you recommend something appropriate for an almost-eleven year old boy who loves history?
  15. In our town, even if no one writes an obit, the funeral home publishes the name and dates. I think it's very thoughtful to try to find something to put in the dc's life book.
  16. Mexican food will work too. I could tell you a story, but I'll just get banned again. ;) I'm so glad I'm done with this part of my life.
  17. A tablespoon of olive oil in the morning, and two servings of oatmeal every day. One in the morning, and one in the afternoon. I learned this during my first pregnancy 28 years ago. When I had my second 11 years ago and started feeling constipated (yet one more reason to fund research on artificial wombs), I did it again and it worked fine.
  18. If so, what proportion of protein (meat/eggs), and veggies (carrots, etc.), and starch (rice or pasta) do you use?
  19. A state (or maybe county) biologist was out in the Everglades for a few days putting down boas which have become a huge problem. They were easy to catch because they're all trancing on the cold. They also inserted trackers in 10 and cut them lose to see how they fare during the cold weather. There's a chance it will kill them which, while sad for the boas, would restore the balance in the Everglades. They're not native, have no natural predators, and have become dangerous to animals and people. Last year there was a photo of a huge boa with an exploded head and half a small alligator hanging out. The thing had tried to eat the gator which was about it's same size and it ripped out. That's what I call binge eating.
×
×
  • Create New...