My dh's older sister is 14 years older than him and his brother is 13 years older than him. Growing up, he had his little 5-year-old friends, ask why he had "2 mommies and 2 daddies". By about the age of 25, he became much closer with both his brother and sister in more of a sibling sort of way. And now at 50, he is very close to his brother in particular, and to his nieces and nephew who are actually closer to him in age.

Ever since covid, I have a strict don't-come-if-you-are-sick policy. And guess what, I quit getting sick all the time. If a kid is sick, I make up the lessons online at the same time slot (either with them at school or at home but both online away from me). If they show up sick, or with 'allergies', I make a stink about it, and then we both wear masks and I open all the windows and we put jackets on. They don't usually do it a second time. I make space for 1 very sick, cancels-all-the-time student each year (migraines, leukemia, etc), but I only can do this for 1 student because it is just too hard to have constant moving around kids. I know you are in music, so clearly not as easy as for me in math, but my older boy does online music lessons, so I know it can work, just not as good. The goal is to say you canNOT come sick (no exceptions), but then to make the make-up option not great, so they only use it if they are actually sick. If a kid is *really* sick, I will organize with the kid directly to make-up when they are better. In contrast, I have flexible policy for school trips/sports/work/medical appointments. If you give me 3 days notice, I will switch you into an open slot. The kids work directly with me by text to do this. Some kids move a lot, others never. But if they all give me 3 days notice, then I know about open slots.

In my field in NZ, it is very hard to get funding for a PhD without a masters to prove you can do research. I have no idea what a terminal vs non-terminal masters is and don't think its a thing in NZ.

I have more to say about the years from 16-20, but will have to do it another time. Basically, I continued to work intensively (3 hours per day side by side on the sofa) for his last 2 years of high school. Then in the first year of university, I tutoring him by phone for about 20 hours per paper he had to write. In the second year, it was about 10 hours per paper. Now in the third year, I am more like a typical university writing tutor, and work with him about 2 hours per week. We are almost there! He still loves writing. He keeps a list of new fancy words he is learning, and continues to improve his spelling by fixing errors without the spell check. His style is beautiful, and he is getting faster (although still not fast). He cannot, however, physically write with any ease as he cannot remember how to form the letters. Last year, he worked as a writer for the Sustainability Trust blog. So putting to practice all he learned and fought for. The math has been completely remediated, and he earned an A+ in both statistics and chemistry at university, even though the average was a B- (there is no grade inflation here). This has been a lot, but I hope it is helpful. I'm happy to answer questions. Ruth in NZ

Here is what I've written up about how dysgraphia was integrated with his math. This question was about 'showing your work' in math, but it still has some fascinating stuff in it about how disgraphia hit so many aspects of my ds's academic life On 4/18/2019 at 4:01 AM, Runningmom80 said: She is the type of kid who will read a 3 step word problem and tell us the correct answer but when we ask her to show her work, she rolls around on the floor like we asked her to write a PhD thesis. MY RESPONSE Hope it is ok that I quoted this tiny piece of the OP. I have not read all the responses, but wanted to respond to this one in particular. I am a math tutor, and my ds15 has dysgraphia; and writing out proper workings is a hill I am willing to die on. It has been a long three year process to get to where we are now, which is about half of the progress we need by graduation. Slow and stead wins the race, and I put on my big-girl panties every day and get the job done. I wrote this up back in October, and thought I couldn't probably say it as well again, so I've just copied it. Hope that is OK. An event 3 years ago really impacted how I perceive of showing your mathematical workings. My younger son was struggling to write, so we took him in to get tested for dysgraphia. They worked him through a battery of tests that took 2 days and about 5 hours. I was in the room because he wanted me to be. He was 11 at the time. For the math section, the final question was something like you have 5 oranges and 8 apples costing $20, and 8 bananas and 6 oranges cost $18, and 9 applies and 3 bananas cost $21. How much does each fruit cost? (this is not the question, just something like it). I got out a piece of paper and simply coded it as three equations and three unknowns, but then realized I was going to get fractional answers. Yuck! Well, my ds had not started algebra certainly had never done simultaneous equations, had never seen a problem remotely like this, plus he could not write. Although he was allowed to use paper, he did not touch it. It took him 15 minutes to get the answer. He did it in his head. To say that the examiner and I were flabbergasted, would be to undersell our response. Neither of us could figure out how he did it. It was an amazing display of both raw intelligence and memory. When we got home, I was really curious about how he did it. So we talked. I pulled out a piece of paper so I could actually write down what he did since he could not write, and what he explained made no sense. Clearly, he was using ratios in some way. But we had not yet covered ratios, so he had no words to describe his intuition. His 15 minutes of insight could not be coded into standard mathematical language. At least not by me. I was at a loss. Because my ds could not write, he did all of his math in his head, and had for years. I often scribed for him, but it was more me showing him what to write down rather than just writing verbatim what he told me to write. So that week during math, I tried to scribe for him by just writing exactly what he told me to write, and it became very clear that he had no idea. None. He could get the answer because of his mathematical insight, but he could not code it. Over the next year I came to understand that this was a piece of his dysgraphia. He could not *code* his thinking into mathematical language of expressions and equations. He thinking was web-like and based on intuition, it was not linear or really logical, and certainly not structured in a standard way. And I came to believe that this was going to be a bigger and bigger problem as he advanced in math. Given his amazing mathematical intuition, it would be sad for him to be limited in math because he could not write it down. His mathematical insight needed a strong linear, logical foundation of writing to be put to great use in higher math. This was the beginning of my journey to *teach* him *how* to show his work. It was absolutely not about showing *his* work because *his* work was a jumble of insight that could not be written down. It was about rewiring a piece of his brain so that he could take that jumble and code in into linear logical steps. This took 3 years. But this process showed me that there is more than one reason why students don't show *their* work. My son had to be trained not just which steps to write, but how to *think* like a mathematician. Intuition is a wonderful ability to have, but it simply won't get you far in math without proper mathematical thinking. And writing is thinking made clear. If you cannot write it, you are not thinking it. My point is, to ask a student to show *her* work, is the wrong approach in my opinion. You need to train a student to write the workings in a certain way, and that certain way when repeated day after day, year after year, will train a student to see math differently. It is no different than practicing scales in violin, over many years you train the ear to hear if notes are out of tune. Drill is what is required. So for my son, he had to drill proper workings to be able to train his brain to think linearly and logically. To do it the other way -- show your jumbled workings so I can see what you are thinking -- is to miss half of what teaching kids math is all about. Ruth in NZ

Dysgraphia as described by my son at the age of about 14: It is not a processing speed problem. It is as if I'm missing a piece of my brains that allows it to make automated movements. Each different letter is not a single sign, it is a collect of strokes that I have to do. Y is 2 strokes; other people have a letter as 1 stroke, they even have whole words as a single movement. I tell my hand to write 'the.' It has no idea how to write 'the'. It tells my brain that. My brain say write a 't'. My hand says which stroke. I say the down stroke. Then it asks what's next. I say the up hook to connect to the h.... I am not drawing letters. I remember when I used to do this when writing thank you notes to grandma, I'm not doing that now. Each letter is composed of 2 or 3 different movements. Some letters are only 1 easy movement like a,e,d. O is hard for me as I do an o as an 'a-stop'. If I don't say stop, I write an a - so an 'o' is two movements. A's are one of the only letters that is automated. N and r are difficult. I naturally do an r, and have to think to extend it to an n. So an n is two steps - an r plus an extension.... The problem is not just in the hand. I have no indecisiveness in my drawings. I want to draw a tree, and I imagine it and it appears on paper. Also, numbers are one stroke, even zeros. Zeros are not like o's as zeros are only 1 movement. They are not an 'a-stop.' For math, I'm not thinking of writing it. An equation in my mind is made incarnate. I think 'x=5', and it appears on paper. I've never had a problem writing numbers. There has never been a mismatch..... It is as if I am on a moving walkway in the airport. My thoughts are like when I walk on the super fast moving walkway. Writing for me is like when you step off. There a physical shock of stepping off and feeling like you are wading through molasses. It is distracting..... When I try to write faster, my hand panics, and it starts to jitter and sends signals to my brain saying 'panic.' This negatively impacts my brain, making it unable to send better and clearer signals to my hand."

I also wrote this post 4 years ago to a question I got: Maintaining a positive attitude and motivation : On 4/21/2019 at 10:38 AM, maikon said: @lewelma, you and your son have put in tremendous effort to achieve these targets in a positive way. Whenever I make any such effort to remediate my son's (9 year old) skills, I face huge protests from him. He would gladly work on it for the first few days or weeks. Gradually he throws tantrums and arguments. He finishes the task with a lot of complaints or bad behaviour that I eventually give up. As you mentioned, it is hard work for both teacher and student. Have you faced any such troubles with your DS while continuing with a task for over several years? How do you maintain your student's motivation and attention for such long periods of time. Most importantly, how do you not lose your patience and up your motivation levels? Can you please share some of your strategies? My response Yes, I have definitely struggled with motivation and with being very discouraged, and yes, I so has my ds. But I think in the end we feel like we are in this together, and we remind each other that bad attitude is not ok. He reminds me as much as I remind him. The most important thing I think I did was to let his strengths run. This approach convinced him that he had skills and talent. So all the stuff I talked about in my previous post was only a small part of his day. We did high-end math orally; he read difficult science books every day; he learned to play the violin; I scribed for him his amazing stories; and his dad read and discussed complex books on numerous topics. Most days he felt like a smart, accomplished kid who had the world in front of him. For the remediation part, I did everything I could to make him feel empowered. I found techniques to try, but I encouraged him to decide what was working and what was not. We focused on metacognition - how does he learn, how can he use his skills to shore up his weaknesses, how long should he work, when can he identify that he is becoming less effective, how can he use the Charlotte Mason habit of "The Way of the Will" - if you don't like a thought, then change it. He was empowered. Everyday. And on days that he could just not do something, we just didn't do it. But we always made a plan to do it later. When he mentioned his older brother and wondered why he had things so good, we would discuss the idea that you cannot be some hybrid person - the best of you and the best of him. You are either ALL your brother or you are yourself. Do you really want all the negatives that your brother has in order to get the positives? The answer was always no. So we focused on him being him. We celebrated what he offered the world that others can't. He has so much charisma that I made sure that he was in lots of activities with lots of positive interactions every day, just check out my siggy. And these activities were not in academics, so he was focusing on *life* not academics, focusing on what he was good at. Basically, I've made sure that his life is 90% positive and uplifting, and 10% remediation and long, difficult, sometimes discouraging work. I also followed his lead on what he needed, and in the end he needed *me*. For a long time, he could not do *anything* on his own. I think there just was a fear of failure, but also simply the inability to write. So for all remediation work, we did it together. I never assigned him something to do on his own that would be hard, because he just wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it. He could write his math, but I had to sit with him. He could read his books, but I had to sit with him. I had to do the dictation, I had to scribe, I had to help him outline. I had to hold his hand all the time. I read posts from people saying 'what can your 9 year do independently?' And I laugh, because only at 13 could my ds play the violin and read his science independently, every single other thing he needed me for. Luckily for me, I only had two children. So I worked 4 hours with my younger before doing 3 hours with my older, then tutoring for 2 hours. If I had had many kids, I'm not sure how this would have played out. People talk about helicopter parenting, and doing too much for a child so they don't become independent. But I have decided those people can just stick their comments where the sun don't shine, because they don't know me and they don't know my kid. As for me, I very much have felt that every day I have to put on my big-girl panties and get the job done. I have found the last 4 years very difficult and draining. But when I signed up to homeschool, I signed up to work. I despised tying-dictation as much as he loved it. And every morning, I would get my cup of tea and my chocolate, and find it in myself to tolerate 30 minutes of correcting word for word his spelling. I just did it because I had to, and I put a smile on my face and joy in my voice no matter what I was feeling inside. And luckily for me I read posts early on from some of the old timers on this board who discussed how kids pick up speed in high school, and how a 13 year old is a very different learner from a 17 year old, which helped me trust that he would pick up speed as he matured. I focused on keeping track of the very small improvements that I saw over the months. It is easy to lose track of incremental change when you have a project that you have broken down into 1000 pieces for 1000 days. Can you actually see 1/1000th of an improvement each day? Well, I tried to. And whatever I saw that was positive step forward each day, I would tell my ds to let him see his improvement, to help him believe in himself and in the work we were doing. I kept a journal with ideas and success stories, reviewed every term what we had accomplished, and then made a plan for the next term to build on our successes. Once a year, I would make a huge list of everything we had done, so although the daily improvements were small and often hard to see, the annual improvements were huge. When I got blue, I would remember how far we had come the previous year, and trust that my incremental daily program would produce similar results in the current year. Some days, I kept myself going by thinking about the boy my son would have been had he attended school. The boy who would have failed everything, who would think he was stupid, who likely would have dropped out by now. This is the alternative reality that existed for my son, and I remind myself that it is through my hard work and dedication that it is a fate he avoided. Ruth in NZ

I have written a lot about our journey over the years, and I've saved the posts. So I'm about to give you a lot. lol. Hope it helps... Remediation program I did from the age of 11- 16 (I wrote this when he was 16, he is now 20 so I have more to say!) I did not know that younger ds had dysgraphia until about the age of 11. Before that I think I was just scaffolding so much that I simply couldn't see it. I finally had him tested at age 12. His dysgraphia falls into 5 categories: 1) Spelling: When ds was first learning to spell in primary school, I didn't realize he had dysgraphia. Because I had already used SWR with my older, I used it with my younger to made sure that his phonological skills were excellent, that he knew every single letter combination, that he knew every single rule for adding endings. All of this was like the back of his hand. SWR is a powerful program. But younger ds could still not spell. What was lacking was automation. So after 3 years of SWR, we tried 7 other spelling programs! Clearly, my head was end the sand, as I never even considered getting him tested. At the age of 12, he was still sounding every single word out. The problem was automation. I think 'cat' and write 'cat' without thinking, this was not true for him for any word except 'the.' And while sounding out every single word, he would completely loose what he was trying to say in his writing. He would also spell the same word three different ways in the same paragraph, all of which followed the rules he had learned so were valid combinations. And he still struggled with recognizing that words he was using in speech were a base word with an ending. So "hiding" was just one thing, not the word 'hide' with the ending 'ing' that he would know the rules for. So if you asked him to add an ending to a word, he could, but if you spoke a word that already had an ending, he would not know how to spell it because he could not see that there was a base word inside it. 2) Punctuation: In addition, at the age of 12, he still had no sense of what a sentence was so was completely unable to add periods let alone commas. We had done grammar with MCT and another program whose name I forget, but he still could not identify a subject or even a verb unless it was an exercise in a textbook. And his language was so complex that it was not easy to show him in his own writing, but practicing punctuating simpler writing never translated into his own because his structure was way more advanced. 3) Physical handwriting: Even today at age 15, he can write numbers, but cannot write words. Basically, his brain is not automating the creation of letters. So an 'o' is an a-stop as he calls it. A's are automated, so to make an 'o' he has to make an a, and then remember to stop the motion to make an 'o'. But interestingly, his brain is fine to make a zero, it is not an a-stop, even though it is the same exact shape. Most of his letters are a combination of 2 strokes that he must recall. Once again, nothing is automated. This means that to physically write a word, not only must he sound it out, he also must recall how to form each letter. Currently at the age of 15.5 he can write very legible handwriting at a top speed of 9 words per minute. 4) Organizing ideas: He has always had beautiful adult-level creative writing, but his report and argumentation writing was impossibly difficult for him. We used IEW for a while, hoping that it would help him with the basics of structure, but he just couldn't implement any system. He couldn't seem to get his thoughts into a set structure. He couldn't remember that he needed an intro sentence and then supporting points and then a conclusion. It wasn't that sentences were jumbled or unclear -- as I said, he has adult-level style with participle phrases, clauses, noun absolutes, advanced vocabulary etc. And if he was on a 'roll', he could produce amazing non-fiction writing. But if ever he was uncertain what to write, he had nothing to fall back on. He could not get anything down. The web of ideas could not be structured into linear form through intellectual effort or outlining. Either he had intuition and flow, or he could write absolutely nothing. There was nothing in the middle. 5) coding mental math into written form: I wrote this in a different post. My solutions: 1) At the age of 11, we decided to do a big push with handwritten work for a full year. The goal was to increase speed. I dictated to him sentences that he had written in previous work. We set timers, we charted progress, we celebrated every small success..... This was an absolute waste of time. He never picked up speed, there was no way to rush him, his spelling did not improve, and all it did was create stress. At the age of 12, we decided to abandon handwriting with the exception of math, and I only wished I had done it sooner. During that year, he had concurrently learned to touch type, but because he could not spell any of the words, he could not go faster than 10 words per minute. People would tell me that spell check would be his friend, but he still had to get the general idea of spelling 'helicopter' for spell check to recognize it. He still had to sound out every. single. word. Words like cat, with, boy... let alone all the big words. He could type 30 words a minute if he was copying, but only 10 if he was having to spell the words. 2) At the age of 12, we abandoned all spelling programs (we had tried about 8 by that time) and switched to typing dictation. I had considered Speech to Text at that point, but my ds and I decided together that we were not ready to go that way as a permanent solution. The goal of typing dictation (as we called it) was to automate the basic words. This dictation was not SWB's dictation where the kid is supposed to hold the sentence in her head; nor was is studied dictation like Spelling Wisdom (which we also tried). The goal of our dictation was automation of spelling. We started to 'Cat in the Hat' because he still could not spell the top 100 words. I would dictate a phrase of like 3-5 words, (I kept to the language groupings to help him begin to hear them), and as he typed I would correct word for word. During this time, I taught him 'think-to-spell' where you purposely mispronounce a word so that the spelling becomes regular (he knew all the rules); we created sounds for all schwas in words; I would help with spelling by simply breaking the words into syllables; I would remind him of basic ending rules, etc. Not a lecture, just as we went with a few words as possible so I didn't break the flow. We worked like this for 30 minutes per day 5 days a week, 45 weeks a year, for 3 years. He loved it. Go figure. Basically, I came to believe that he just needed to put spelling in context of writing, and that he needed immediate feedback when the word was spelling wrong, and that he just needed to do this for many many sentences. Over the years, we slowly moved up the book level to Frog and Toad, then older readers, then Narnia, then other fantasy novels he liked. By the second year, I started punctuation study. I would tell him after a clause "add a comma because its an introductory clause." I would use official grammar words, and not make a lecture, just something quick. But over and over and over. What had been lacking in spelling was automation, and what had been lacking in punctuation was both real world application and drill drill drill. This process worked! It worked beyond all my expectations. And best of all, he loved it. During these years of typing dictation, we also trialed every possible combination to help him organize his ideas (#4 above). We tried a dictaphone, mind-mapping, list making, speech-to-text. We tried me scribing; we tried me scribing only every other paragraph; we tried him verbally saying what he wanted to say 3 times before writing; we tried funny speed games "why is this item the 'best'"; we tried easy topics; we tried hard topics; we tried research; we tried studying other writing; we tried outlining other writing; we tried Ben Franklin's approach of rewrites. We we tried Every. Single. Thing. I could think of. And I just felt like we got nowhere. It was very discouraging for me, although I was very encouraging to him and he never knew that I thought we were spinning our wheels. We were making progress, but it was very very slow. 3) At the age of 15, we quit the typing dictation because I felt that we had made very good progress. He was typing now at about 25 words a minute, he was spelling 80% of words correctly even in difficult books, and could mostly punctuate complex sentences. This was huge given where we started from!! And best of all, ds was feeling good about himself and the progress he had made. Thus, we moved full focus into writing his own content. We started this new focus 6 months ago. Because he is interested in being a geographer and studying complex issues, he wants to be able to research and write up creative solutions to complex problems. He has a goal, and this has been very motivating. We decided to go after deep complex topics with high interest and work with engaging questions which required research and processing and organizing. This seems like a backwards approach, going for difficult writing projects when we had had little success with organizing ideas, but the high interest was the key to the motivation. I figured we would get further with lots of scaffolding for hard projects, than focusing on independence for easy projects. I will admit, however, that I was nervous about taking this approach, because I knew it would be difficult to tell how much of the work was his work vs mine. Now 6 months later, he has written 3 research papers: 1) The causes and consequences of the 2004 Tsunami in Ache Indonesia from a cultural and environmental point of view. 2) An analysis of why the population demographic transitions of Maori vs Europeans in NZ were so different over the past 180 years. 3) the cultural and environmental causes and consequences of the 55-year Wataki Dam Scheme in the South Island. It is hard for me to overstate the success we have had with these 3 projects. Massive massive success. It is as if the three years from 12-15 where we separated out all the skills and worked on them individually, have all come together in a cohesive whole. All those years of working on organizing his ideas that felt like a waste of time, were not. It was seeping in, just not showing up because he could not yet write it all down. I am still scaffolding, and I still have to sit next to him sometimes when he writes, and I have scribed for him a few paragraphs in these reports when he is just too tired but wants to keep the momentum up. However, the scaffolding required for the last paper has been way less than the first paper. And with 2.5 years to go until graduation, I feel that we are finally on track. I will still be remediating and accomodating, but now we are doing this *at level* rather than years behind. 4) The future: we will continue with these large-scale, high-interest projects. I will continue to be highly involved with the research, outlining, writing, and editing -- strongly scaffolding where needed, but slowly ever so slowly backing off and encouraging independence. At this point, we are going to start 2 new ventures into the world of dysgraphia: 1) trying to write up chemistry and physics explanations which he will need to do for his national exams. Scientific explanations are a different type of writing, with different language that he has to learn, but I think he is ready. 2) We are going to actually try to get him to physically write again. He has been writing his math all this time, so his hand is reasonably strong. We are going to start by drilling letters (we did this the other day with lots of giggles given he is 15), and we are going to see if he can write a sentence each day, and see where this leads us. No pressure, but he wants to try. Now, I know I have written a book here. I have done it for two reasons. 1) once I got going I really wanted to document our path as I have never written it all out before. 2) I am hoping to give you a realistic vision of what remediating dysgraphia looks like over the long haul. There is no way around it, dysgraphia is a bitch and impacts all aspects of a child's education. Remediating it is long hard work for both teacher and student, but it can be done in a way that is positive and good for a child's self-esteem. I have never regretted the time and effort I have put into this project. And I had a friend just yesterday say to me that it is amazing that ds is so proud of himself, that he doesn't feel stupid, and that I never discuss him in a negative way. DS does not mind me talking about his dysgraphia because he feels it is a part of who he is, and overcoming its is a testament to his hard persistent work over many many years. I also want you to know that you will likely make many wrong turns, and that you will be wandering in the dark, wondering if your approach is the most optimal. This is just the nature of the beast. As I tried to show, there were things that I did that I shouldn't have done, and there were things that at the time seemed to make no difference, but then later were shown to be incredibly helpful. Good luck to you and your dd. Slow and steady wins the race. Ruth in NZ

We have one boarding school here in Wellington, Scots College. It has a very strong international program and is considered one of the top schools in the country. Here is a link: https://www.scotscollege.school.nz/admissions/international

I use bra extenders. My rib cage is very large due to all the vaulting in gymnastics I did as a kid, and there is no way a standard bra strap will not cut me in half. Bra extenders are cheap and have lots of colours, and I've been know to wear two of them so I can extend the strap out by 4 inches.

I'm a tutor. That is even lower than a teacher. I learned long ago not to tell anyone I was a tutor, or they would dismiss me out of hand. Instead, I say that I work with at-risk youth (and some of my students have been). Then they will talk to me.

For my older boy, it is his music that people connect to. As a theoretical physicist, nobody and I mean nobody will engage with him about his work. In fact for his entire life, people will be pretty rude and just say I hate math, or I don't want to listen to this, or just glaze their eyes over. He learned early on that people will come up and talk to him about his music, engage with him on a high level conversations about his performance, or music theory, or composition etc. Music is approachable for anyone, theoretical physics not so much. If my ds didn't have his music, he would be way more isolated and have exclusively physics friends which would have changed his personality. Here is the essay he wrote for university entrance that really demonstrates how important the humanities were to his formation as a person: Describe the world you come from; for example, your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations? Throughout my life, math and music have been my constant companions. Math has given me passion and purpose, while music has given me my community. I am lucky to be a part of a family that appreciates mathematics and loves science and technology. However, from the age of twelve, I have outpaced both my parents and my peers in math, requiring me to study independently. My peers came from music. For the past six years, I have been actively involved in a series of chamber music groups and small string orchestras. These ensembles have given me my community -- a collection of quirky, outgoing individuals who aspire to become professional musicians. Through their friendship, I have become more outgoing and less self-conscious. I have learned how to handle disasters on stage: I have forgotten pieces of music played from memory, had to improvise when my trio skipped a section, and had to reassemble twelve pages of sheet music off of the floor. Music has also given me opportunities to practice public speaking, lead a small string orchestra, and mentor younger students. The music community has helped me to develop the people skills critical to all endeavors, and has convinced me that I love working in groups. I love the people and the camaraderie. Music has made me realize that I don’t want to do mathematics in isolation, that I want to be a part of a collaborative project, working together towards a common goal.

FODMAP fixed my IBS in 48 hours. I had diarrhea 10 times a day, and poof it was gone and I was normal. And so I stayed on the FODMAP diet for 6 months and then did the whole slow one-food-at-a-time-return to find out it is wheat. What they should have done, and did not do, was test me for celiacs before putting me on FODMAP. Because now that I don't eat gluten, they won't be able to see the celiacs, but if I am a celiac, I would need to be way way more careful. So yes, do testing before a major diet change that could mask other things that could be going on.

I'm a pockets girl. But when I dress up and carry a purse, the only thing it holds is my dress shoes! 😛

There was the kid that held the world record for the rubik's cube. 4 seconds as I remember. His mom posted the video and it was incredible.

My older boy is still taking lessons at 23 through the university department. He is passionate about his violin and is incredibly accomplished. I could see him teaching music as a side gig one day, and he is definitely planning on being in a city-level orchestra for his whole life once he finishes his schooling. I do think there is more than one way to keep music in your life even if you don't make your main living from it. ETA: he would have double majored in music and physics, and had been accepted into the music department, but his university did not have a performance only degree.

I'm not a big car person, and my dh gets road rage so we sold his car early on in our marriage. So we have always looked for places to live without a car. Typically, you need to live either downtown (in a highrise) or in the early suburbs (1920s) where they have trains into town. Many of the 1920s suburbs are too tightly packed for box stores, so the mom and pop shops still exist and are walkable. I'm not a big bus person, so we have looked for either walkable or near a train line. These are the places dh, ds, or I have lived in the USA without a car: Reno, NV (Near University) Seattle, WA (Pioneers Square, walk to downtown for work) Cleveland, OH, (Cleveland Heights, train to downtown for work) Boston, MA, (Near MIT) Ithaca, NY ('downtown' area) Richmond, VA (in the 'Fan' the 1920 subdivision so close to downtown). Washington DC (near subway line) Newburyport, MA (biked everywhere, worked at the wildlife sanctuary) Here in NZ, we live in the 1920s subdivision of Wellington (walking distance to downtown) We have lived for close to 30 years in places where a car is not needed, and my older boy has chosen not to learn to drive so is committed to living a car free life. lol

Our path shows the flexibility in the system. My older boy was homeschooled in NZ, where to gain college entrance he needed to pass the equivalent of 4 AP exams. No other classes in any grade were counted or considered. Because he was homeschooled and majorly motivated, he did lots of other academic 'stuff' that the NZ system knew nothing about. When he decided quite unexpectedly to apply to American universities, we had 2 choices, to apply with the 4 NZ exams or to create a homeschool transcript. I chose the latter. Basically, I had to create courses out of all of the other academic/for fun work he had done (I had records, but this work was not organised into courses. For example he read 4 hours per night and I knew what he had read). I decided to make 7.5 classes each year to show that he had worked a full academic load (which clearly he had given his test scores like a 1580 on the SAT). But I could have made 6 or I could have made 8. What I came to understand by working with this board is that the goal of a homeschool transcript is to represent your student fairly not accurately, because there is no way to be 'accurate' with something as squishy as learning. Education is in the eyes of the beholder, and taking 'courses' is just one way of organizing/explaining learning. However, 'courses' are the way that admissions people understand education, so all learning must be explained in this way even if it was not done in this way. My point is that it is your choice how to represent your child, and I counted a lot of stuff that was done for fun because this kid loved to learn. Breakdown for my ds's 30 courses: 2 Dual enrollment courses 4 courses through the National NZ system 24 homeschooled 'courses' (6 were using AoPS as a provider, 10 were organised by me, and 8 were created out of his self-learning passions) With this approach (and a LOT of math competitions) my ds got into MIT, U-M, CMU (with top scholarship), and was rejected from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

I had set time requirements for his weaker subjects, and then let his passions run. I did this throughout middle and highschool. At 11, his dad read history to him at night, and during the day I required 1 hour of English with me. The rest of his time was his to do with as he wanted. Typically, he did 2+ hours math, 1 hour physics, and 1 hour violin. He also chose to read for hours and hours every night - classic literature, the economist, national geographic, and scientific american.

My nephew was. So he contacted them. He found out that he was waitlisted because they didn't have some test scores but everything else looked good (they did not tell him this until he called). So he got the test scores sent in, and he was admitted 2 days later. This was for a reach school in engineering (top 3).

I've come to believe that integrated math in 8th, 9th, and 10th grade is a better idea than siloed math by year. (algebra, geometry, and statistics). That way you can do all the easy topics in 8th grade, leave all the hard ones until 10th grade, and have constant repetition so stuff sinks in. It is actually a small percentage of kids that are developmentally ready for a proper course in Algebra 1 in 8th grade. This sets kids up for failure and sets teachers up for covering only the most basic drill and kill content so that most kids can pass with an A (or maybe a B lol). Bad all the way around.

This is what I saw with my nephew that I homeschooled by zoom during covid. He thought he was good at math because he always got top grades. But then we found out that this is only because they were teaching algebra at the most basic level, doing a 2 week unit and taking the test right after it (with no cumulative tests), and all word problems were extra credit. He was NOT at grade level as far as I was concerned. But he thought he was far ahead because he was earning 100% on all tests (but then he would forget everything he had learned). This kid wants to be an engineer, so I was working really hard to convince him that YES you should do word problems even though they are extra credit and you already have 100%. What a disaster.

I remediate this work for Every Single Student except the kid who did Math-U-See epsilon (which is an entire year of fractions). This ALWAYS includes 10th graders where I have to go back to drawing pizzas so we are still working on conceptualization, and typically I have to keep them practicing in 11th and 12th grade in for kids in the calculus stream because it was just never understood or mastered in primary school.

Ah, well, I guess I forget what is in an algebra 2 course, given I work within a different system. lol. Yes, to exponential growth. No to differential equations. I did multivariate time series analysis and lots of nonparametric stats which is based in combinatorics. There is just lots of types of maths. The US has picked one kind to put full focus on which helps some students (economists, scientists, actuaries) and hurt other students (humanities kids, social scientists, artists). I think the key point here for me is not that the algebra 2/precal/calculus stream shouldn't be offered in high school, it just shouldn't be compulsory to get into university, given that university is a gate keeper to higher socio-economic position in life.

My PhD is in mathematical modelling of ecological systems. I did the equivalent of covid modelling for mice. I never used Algebra 2, precal, or calculus in my 4 years of research. Just saying.