Yep -- scientist here. I use math as a tool to answer my questions. Glad there are those who love the proofs, my older son included!

I agree. At some point the SAT becomes a test of mental quickness. Scores would be higher if kids were given more time. I think just getting used to the testing format is worth about 80-100 points. For more movement than that you actually need to learn the content.

Oh, I completely agree that the SAT scores are related to wealth. I was just saying that you absolutely CAN change your score. The girl I'm helping (thread on high school board) hired me for 1 hour per week for 36 weeks. The rest of the work is hers. And I might add that this is the FIRST time I have tutored the SAT so it is not like I am some expert on how to game the system. But we have moved her unofficial scores from 950 to 1300 (superscored) in 10 months.

Yup. And my older boy improved his English/Language score from 700 to 780 by taking 8 practice tests over the period of 4 weeks. 80 points when you are already at a high score is impressive movement. So he went from 94th to 99th percentile with about 20 hours of work. Prep matters.

I so hear you! Two years ago when we did the process was about the most stressful of my life. So many nicky picky details to deal with. So many stupid questions to find answers for. So much uncertainty that it would all work out in the end. So Whine away. The CSS profile is HORRIBLE.

Thanks! This is my first go at helping with the SAT, so she and I had to figure it out together. So here is her unofficial starting point and her unofficial best scores (all timed): Total 950 to 1300 superscored (31st to 86th percentile) Math 460 to 620 (29th to 79th percentile) Reading 490 to 680 (36th to 91st percentile) Now, I know she won't get a 1300 tomorrow, and actually if she does we will be challenged for cheating because her first official score was a 1050. But 1300 gives her enough wiggle room for nerves and pressure to still pull off a 1200. Crossing fingers!

yes, it shows a complete lack of understanding of what equals means. It is not so bad with computation, but it becomes very very bad with algebra. The problem is that no transferable skills are taught in primary school. There is no way to connect the mess above to algebraic thinking.

She came today with a 620 in math!!! This from a kid who in February could not have done 2x+5=7.

The thread is definitely more about curriculum, but it also categorizes different writing approaches and does work through a bunch of the books listed here. And it focuses on organizing the big goals and how to accomplish them. ETA: I'm rereading it. Wow what a trip down memory lane. Here are some good non-curriculum posts past the first page page 3 detailed discussion on how I taught my son to write beautiful and purposeful descriptions, with an example page 5 post 20 and 21 (I think, boy I miss post numbers) - discussion of anthologies Page 6 - discussion of teaching reading vs writing papers (multiple posts on page 6 are non-curriculum)

Do that! It definitely does not spark joy. And every time you see it, you will get mad again. Get rid of it.

See my update on the first post! Doing well! Crossing fingers.

I've read it twice. It is about *how* to design writing assignments to encourage thinking and engagement. Definitely not a curriculum. Half of the book is not very useful to a non-professor audience, but the other half more than makes up for this.

I don't know much about how primary school math works here, just the results I see with almost every student who seeks me out. There is just a huge disconnect between primary and secondary math -- even the curriculum documents are written by two different non-connected teacher groups. And intermediate math is basically a joke. Stick the kids on a computer and let them self teach. So I actually don't like teaching algorithmic methods for computation, I much prefer mental math. But this must be connected to some sort of understanding that you are actually doing a multiplication problem even though your mental math calculation is repeated addition or piecemeal multiplication. If not, algebraic skills are completely foreign. How can you possibly understand xy let alone set up an algebraic word problem, when you don't know you are multiplying. So for 8*14, students here would do 8*10=80+5*8=40+80=120-8=112 And they would write it that way too. If you try to clarify what multiplication is, they just don't get it -- they don't think that way. So xy is completely meaningless and they can't use algebraic skills to work real life problems. Most students I have worked with have no idea that if you have 80 pies split between 8 people, that you are dividing the pies among the people. So when you have x pies split between y people, you are sunk. It only gets worse from there.

I find it hard to believe that your dd would ever struggle with the issues most of my students have. She has you!

Please define biblically sound, as there will be a lot of different opinions on that. That said, I would suggest easy college textbooks over any jr high/high school textbooks. My favorites: College Physics by Knight et al Earth Science by Tarbuck et al Chemistry by Chang Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life by Taggart et al.

Not showing your workings is actually not the problem. The problem is when students are not *also* taught how to link word problems to the actual operation being performed (add, subtract, multiply, divide) or taught how to write math in a formal way. Mental maths teaches students how to break numbers up and put them back together in creative ways. This is a great thing. Without good numeracy skills, students simply do things by rote, which is just memory not math skills. However, when mental math is done to the exclusion of writing out math formally, students become *very* confused in algebraic word problems. What happens in primary school programs with a mental math focus is that students see problems as repeated subtraction rather than division, or a series of operations mixed up, or some such confusion in the actual operation. When you ask them to write their workings, I call it "crap out of your head". It is typically completely unclear what they have done, with equal signs misused, unorganized numbers/equations/numberlines, no logical order, and then the correct answer at the end. This does not set students up well for high school math. They fall over completely in algebraic word problems because they cannot recognize the operation required, they have no idea how to do proper workings, and have been trained to work through intuition rather than logical steps. Here in NZ, students struggle through 8th and 9th grade with these issues, and by the end of 9th grade are failing. At this point, they come to me. I teach them to separate out computation (by calculator, algorithm, or mental math) in a box to the side. Then they have to show proper algebraic workings -- working always down. I show them which steps are required, and which are optional. NZ actually marks on "mathematical statements", unorganized crap out of your head will be marked wrong. So it is not mental math per se. It is a program limited to this that leads to a major issue in the transition to high school math.

I would love to hear your thoughts. I think I was the one that steered the thread towards this. I live in 600sq ft, and have only the resources that 'spark joy,' so I have definitely conquered stuff. But that does not mean that the result is a minimalist approach to homeschooling. I have to work to keep focused on my goals and the things that make a difference to my children's education.

Engaging Ideas. Best book on teaching writing that is out there, hands down. Glad to see EKS recommends it too! I have read and evaluated 30+ books/curriculum. Years ago, I wrote a thread up comparing them, and then started grabbing other good lists of resources people posted elsewhere on this board and added them to the thread also. I keep posting it recently, and it makes a big box when I link which makes me feel like I am self-promoting. But if you want me to link to it again, I will. 🙂

Haha. With a waiting list until 2021 I can pick and choose. 🙂 I have also been known to become 'too busy' when a parent tries to micromanage me or doesn't like my policy of paying if your kid comes or not. So you as the parent also have to be nice to me!! As for currency exchange, it is wild here. Since I have lived in NZ (21 years) it has been as low as 0.39 and as high as 0.91. Currently, as it drops, we are paying more and more for MIT. Our bill went up 7K last year due to currency translation. sigh. But as I posted in the tutoring thread, my goal is to make the same salary as a top teacher here with me working only 20 hours a week. I figure since my hours are restricted to after school, people are paying me to be available. So currency exchange masks cost of living here and I make double the hourly wage of a top teacher (and I do charge for noncontact hours). But I do have friends who say I should raise my rates again. 🙂

Ooops. Saw your siggy and assumed he was 6. So what is important to you? So for example, my younger ds now is 16 and wants to solve complex world problems maybe through a place like the World Bank or more local problems by being a mayor. So what is important for his homeschool? What stands out is that he must learn to embrace complexity, he must learn to see different actors' perspectives on issues, and he must learn to see nuance and shades of grey. This means that I must create a structure for his education that requires him to make sense of many many different sources for single large scale problems. That is definitely not simplicity or minimalism from a traditional point of view, but does match your definition of focusing on what is most important. What do we then eliminate? Any single perspective course unless it is a get-er-done class. So what is it that *you* want to have your 1st and 4th grader learn? Do you have clearly stated goals? Seems like you want to align your actions and resources to your goals. This makes sense to me.

Awesome! Well time we moved past the 5 paragraph essay! Have you seen my ds's essay on the accelerated board? Way way beyond the 5-paragraph essay and it was crazy hard for him to write! Purpose and Audience!! Ruth in NZ

When my ds applied to university, I listed "US history in a world context" on his transcript. And in his course descriptions, I described the course from 1840-1970. He got into 3 great schools (CMU, UM, MIT), so it couldn't have mattered that much. Depth vs Breadth. I'm all for Depth.

Oh, someone asked for some NZ content. The best, cohesive, deep-thinking work can be found in the example tasks that NCEA (NZ Certification of Educational Achievement) posts on their website. Internals are large single tasks done during the year and created by schools based on how they taught the set content. Externals are high end exams done on a set day in November that are the same for all kids (check out the 12th grade probability exam and distributions exams -- very impressive!). The links below give multiple examples of each task/assessment that if worked through with care can really increase a student's level. Remember that NZ is not a percent correct system; rather it is a levels of thinking system. So each assessment has 3 levels of work within each task/exam: 1) achieve is regurgitation and understanding of concepts, 2) merit work is relational thinking and applications to real life, and 3) excellence work is abstraction, generalizations, and insight. Work through multiple tasks/exams and you will up your level of thinking. Level 1 (10th grade) Internals (numeracy, measurement, statistics, linear algebra, basic trig, transformation geometry and many others) http://ncea.tki.org.nz/Resources-for-Internally-Assessed-Achievement-Standards/Mathematics-and-statistics/Level-1-Mathematics-and-statistics externals (algebra, graphing, geometry, probability) https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/ncea/assessment/search.do?query=Mathematics&view=exams&level=01 Level 2 (11th grade) internals (advanced graphing, intermediate trig, coordinate geometry, bivariate stats, multivariate stats, questionaires, experimentation, network analysis, and many others) http://ncea.tki.org.nz/Resources-for-Internally-Assessed-Achievement-Standards/Mathematics-and-statistics/Level-2-Mathematics-and-statistics externals (algebra 2, basic calculus, probability) https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/ncea/assessment/search.do?query=Mathematics&view=exams&level=02 Level 3 (12th grade) internals (advanced trig, network analysis, conics, time series analysis, multivariate analysis, bivariate analysis, simultaneous equations, linear programming, and others) http://ncea.tki.org.nz/Resources-for-Internally-Assessed-Achievement-Standards/Mathematics-and-statistics/Level-3-Mathematics-and-statistics externals (differentiation, integration, complex numbers, probability, and distributions) https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/ncea/assessment/search.do?query=Mathematics&view=exams&level=03 --------------- Hope that is helpful! I love comparing the American to NZ system, because I grew up and trained to be a teacher in the American system, but have taught in the NZ system. Fascinating the difference. Ruth in NZ

Precalculus is usually trig, coordinate geometry, and complex numbers if I remember the American system right. Here in NZ, precalculus and calculus are taught simultaneously over 2 years, rather than sequentially.

Aw, thanks! Yes, but just for maths unless I really like your kid and he/she is super motivated. 🙂 And if so, then I have also tutored Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English, Media Studies, Geography, and even Academic PE!!! Haha. I've got a lot of work to keep up with so many subjects and their national exams! I have a couple of families where I'm on their third kid. 🙂