I'd be interested to hear you boast about this in more detail, if you're game. Especially about writing. What are your sons capable of writing, and how did you teach them to do it? This is interesting:

Why not? I was a poor writer, or poorly trained one, in high school. I only suffered for it a little in college and not at all after — until now. Now I wish knew more about school writing for my 7-year-old's sake.

I'm looking for illustrations of stories from early Rome. I'd like to put them on flash cards. They don't necessarily have to be very faithful recreations. There are some of famous paintings — Cincinnatus, Coriolanus and his mother, Oath of the Horatii — that are good for this, but somehow fewer than I thought. I haven't found any painting about the Fabii, but I've only been searching the web. Maybe there are some nicely illustrated children's books on these topics? Another source of illustrations? Yesterday I found myself wishing I knew what the Campus Martius looked like (or anybody's speculation of what it looked like) in Cincinnatus's time.

Your list is really good. I think it raises a problem for kids in school. Going to school every day is enjoyable for some kids, but exhausting for all kids. You want your kids to learn that investing lots of time and energy in a project can really pay. But a 7-year-old going to school every day has most of her time and energy spoken for. Even if the school is not "challenging" her.

I'm not sure. My daughter will turn 7 shortly. I only have the cloudiest picture of what the next 7 will be like, just fantasies and anxieties. But I recognize 14 as a milestone year when lots of us have to decide whether to send them to high school or to keep on homeschooling. If "send them to college" is a third option, I assume it only makes sense in very special circumstances! I was just curious what your special circumstances are, maybe it is a nosy question.

That's really interesting. Can you tell us what your daughter was up to, or what she was like, in the year or two leading up to her early college start? It sounds like it was worth jumping through hoops.

You've identified the subject and the verb correctly. But verbs are part of the predicate, not part of the subject. The predicate of your sentence is "is what I see."

@Kyle TowerMy kid is too young and too inexperienced with computers, to offer up as a field-tester. But I'm interested in looking. I'm also very interested in hearing more about all of these experiences, if you'd like to tell us something:

You're not alone. And the scripted nature of the oral questions and immediate answers in these programs (DI) raises a lot of antipathy. I've been won over but I can't imagine trying to convince a schoolteacher to take it up. It can only work when all of the "oral questions" are extremely easy, and have only one reasonable answer. A typical Q&A in these programs goes like this: Now, it's not the case that this is an easy task for every child. But a common reason that a child would not answer correctly, is simply because they weren't listening. One thing the scripts are good for is getting information about how many of your students have drifted away and aren't listening — more of a concern in a big classroom than one-on-one at home. Another thing the scripts are good for is the opposite (sorry to be contrary) of what you suggest here: It looks like a lot when it's all written out, but the wording is very careful and economical. The examples I've posted took me only five or six minutes to go through with my daughter. I think if I had tried to improvise an explanation and you were there to transcribe it, it would be longer in text, longer in time, and wouldn't have cured or preempted my daughter of any misunderstandings about time-rate-and-distance.

Perhaps "writing program" is a more apt description, than "reading program." I've only seen a little of the landscape of language programs but I think it's quite unusual.

I copied the introductory lesson of the time-rate-and-distance track here. I reached that lesson with her last week and did similar exercises with her for a few days. But tomorrow starting something new according to the teachers guide: Here's lesson 51: The rest of the teacher's guide (on this topic) might give a sense of the pace of the program:

I haven't seen much of Saxon, can you tell some examples?

The textbooks cite goatsbeard genus as an example of speciation happening on a human timescale, Tragopogon miscellus.

Have you looked at mru.org? https://mru.org/learn

I analyze and obsess over them like LB Jefferies watching his neighbors in Rear Window. I'm going to go on letting her play with it. The program is charming and soothing in a way. It's no effort and I can dream of it teaching her something. How long did your son use it for?

One way to drive home what the Euclidean algorithm is for, is to try to find out the greatest common factor of two reasonably big numbers like 73,937 and 484,391 If you knew how they factored into primes, you would see right away what their common factor was. But by hand it can take you quite a while to find out how they factor.

Wendy it sounds like you've thought about this before. Have you encountered any "adaptive" ed software, in phonics or in any other subject, that impressed you? Also, do you think your criticisms for the Lalilo assessment test also extend to the Lalilo instructional sequence? I had my daughter take the assessment last night too. She tested poorly but had a good time (she's not too experienced with computer games) and went on to do more of the lessons. Is it (at worst) harmless to let her keep playing with it? I wonder if you have an opinion.

It's interesting to contrast math with other subjects, especially with reading. The rules of math are completely consistent and logical (though some of the procedures and conventions are not, watch out for those). A kid who knows a little bit of it can use reasoning to smooth his path to learning the next little bit. He can reinforce the new stuff by seeing how it fits in with what he already knows. Reading seems like the opposite. Seemingly thousands of rules, none of them universal, all of them overlapping and contradicting each other. To me it's a miracle that we're capable of it.

I think you're mistaken. E.g. the nytimes this august opened an article (this one) with "Hurricane Ida, which struck the Louisiana coast on Sunday with winds of 150 miles an hour..."

What makes you say that? I don't detect any mask at all, in that passage or elsewhere in the materials I've used and read. It's very up front and explicit about what it's doing and why.

I think it is just a little bit old-fashioned. I'm not sure how people in 2021 talk about their wages. "The lawyer charged 500 bucks an hour" rolls off my tongue a little better than any sentence with per in it. I honestly don't think my teacher's guide is decrying anything.

Here it is. Anything in italics is the expected student response to the script. What comes next:

I think this is just a fancy way to say kids usually have a lot to learn about it. My experience with the creators is that they mean no insult to the kids. Earlier in the teacher's guide:

I thought this excerpt from the teacher's guide for "Reasoning and Writing B" was interesting: This is from a program with 70 scripted lessons, the last 25 or so treat these concepts. An earlier track in the program treats map reading. I was interested to see this stuff addressed outside of a math class, in a "language program." I might copy that introductory exercise here later.

My thought about this is not too fleshed out and not based on too much experience, but: far far better to catch them in the act of getting things right, give lots of praise. My daughter can learn from her mistakes if I catch them in real time, and not so well if I catch and correct them a half hour after the fact. But sometimes I make up a worksheet that we pretend some other kid did, maybe a beast academy character. I put in mistakes that I know she's prone to make and ask her to find them. It's worked OK.