lewelma
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Posts posted by lewelma
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10 hours ago, Heartstrings said:
Yes! So much this. People don’t understand, or at least don’t like, that supply and demand apply to labor as well.
I could say a lot more but I don’t want to derail the whole thread. I honestly don’t think the average person in this country understands the basics of supply and demand or the free market, at least not based on the comments I hear on a regular basis.
Supply and demand don't work for Teachers for 2 reasons. 1) In the public system, it is a monopsony - only one buyer in a location - so salaries do not increase when there is a scarcity of applicants. Supply and demand rules break down when there is a monopoly or monopsony. 2) State regulation requires attendance by law and regulates things like student/teacher ratios. These regulations/laws constrain the free market so it cannot seek an optimum product for a price people will pay.
This said from a person who is anti free-market, but does understand it. 🙂
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7 hours ago, PeterPan said:
We've had people say this on the boards before. Nuts, my dd said it about somethings (spiritual, not academic). It's like they get more wiring but the connections weren't made between that thing and the info, so they need the connections AGAIN. It's why we do things over and over in teaching, not just once. Or they just hit their omniscient age and are sure we never knew that or told them that.
I want to say it was Nan in Mass who said something so simple and yet so helpful. Kids do a LOT of growing from the age of 12 to 18, in fact they pick up speed and learn faster and faster each year. So she told me: don't despair when your 12 yo can't do xyz, because in the next 5 years you will see enormous growth.
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
And I'm with you that the BRAINSTORMING is where it happens.
There are so many paths for neurodivergent kids. And it takes a lot of trial and error to find what works. In the end, my ds just couldn't make *written* language happen by *talking* into a phone. For him, oral language uses a different part of the brain than written language. So we did the hard yards to get him to 1) spell and 2) structure sentences. (Composition was always going to happen whether he used speech-to-text or typing.) We did 2 things:
1) 30 minutes per day of typing dictation to remediate spelling and grammar
2) 2 hours per day of side-by-side brainstorming, outlining, paragraph structuring, essay structuring etc.
We did the above for 6 years 40 weeks per year 7th to 12th grade. What is interesting is that the mechanics of writing took less time to master than the composition.
For those that are struggling with their neurodivergent learner, my point is that different kids need different things, and don't be afraid to just try different ideas until 1 sticks, or all of your ideas converge into some synergistic whole that sticks (which is what I think happened with ds).
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
He's almost 15 now and his signature still takes him several minutes to write despite a full year of work, sigh.
The only thing that my ds physically writes is his signature. He even got a bubble filling in helper for his chemistry exam last year because it used scantron, and he can't fill in bubbles. One of the biggest things you helped me with when he was 12 (7 years ago!), was that it was time to abandon my efforts to get him to physically write. I had struggled to just give up on it -- I was still in the mindset that we could make it happen if we just put in the time, and you pushed me to just stop focusing on what was not very important and not very possible and incredibly stressful for my ds.
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
But I'd be pretty stoked if he could get his thoughts out on a subject using dictation.
I still remember at the age of 17, we were talking AGAIN about topic sentences, and he turns to me and says "why did you never tell me this before?" 😳 Um, I talked to him about it every single day for 5 years! Maybe 10. That is when I came to understand his mind was simply not ready to hear what I had to say until he was 17. Fascinating really.
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I also want to take this moment to thank PeterPan for all her help 7 years ago when I was trying to figure out how to help my little boy with dysgraphia. I had so many questions, and she calmly and slowly answered each and every one, and helped me brainstorm options for this boy who could not at the age of 12: physically write because he couldn't remember what the letters look like, spell any word at all without sounding it out incredibly slowly, have any sense of where a period went or any understanding at all of how language is structured, remember what a introductory sentence was let alone organise his thoughts in any way. Thank you so much, PeterPan, for your time and patience. DS is now a writer. This piece of his came out two days ago:
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2 hours ago, Corraleno said:
Yeah, it wasn't the suggestion of a spellchecker that pissed me off as much as the line about how "these kids never learn how to spell anyway,"
Ah spellcheckers. My younger boy could not spell 50 out of the top 100 words at the age of 12. So many people told me that he could just use a spell checker, no problems. But, hello, how is he going to get a spell checker to come up with the word helicopter, if he can only get HEC down?!?!? Spell checkers only help if you are close.
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1 minute ago, Not_a_Number said:
Yeah. I’d agree with that!!
Your post flattened it too much, I think, though. Like, to deal with anxiety, you wouldn’t necessarily change the CONTENT, just the approach. Same for other challenges.
Agreed that my post was flat. You know me, I could write a book. lol. However, I'm not sure I completely agree. When I have students with anxiety, the first step is to reduce expectations across the board. Make things easier for a time because in my experience success breeds success. So have them succeed, then slowly ever so slowly build up the level of work. And while you are doing that, you are dealing with the underlying cause of the anxiety. For me, tutoring is about 40% content and 60% emotional work. So in the OP's situation, I would consider the work too hard for her child's current state of mind. I fundamentally believe that if a child can, they will. So the flip of that, is that if they won't that means they can't, and it is my job to figure out why.
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32 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:
That can really break down with anxiety issues, though. That's what I've seen the most of in my family -- not that the content is too hard, but that the content makes them anxious and then they can't tackle it.
My philosophy is broad. Anxiety means that they can't. To me, when I say that someone *can* do something, it means that they have the intellectual capability, the emotional stability, and the desire to do the work. If any one aspect is missing, than they can't do it, not that they won't, but that they can't. And the only way to make the desired outcome happen is to figure out which issue is the problem and work to resolve it. To say that a kid can, because they intellectually can, chops the whole person into pieces and isolates critical characteristics from each other even when the person experiences the problem as a whole.
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I am of the belief that if they can, they will. I would suggest that the content is too difficult or in some way inappropriate.
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We are at the end of Winter here, and we didn't have a big spike (graph for NZ based on wastewater). Why is the USA having more cases?
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I charge by the term and have a set package.
20 hours direct tutor time (2 times per week for a 10 week term)
3 hours non-contact time for communication, planning, printing, etc
If a student is sick, I will tutor by phone. If they are very sick, then we will reschedule.
I will do make-ups for non-sickness if given 3 days notice. (I limit it to 2 times per term unless there is a good reason)
All make-ups need to be made during the term (except if it was in the last week of term)
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When the doc said after my 2nd something like, "you can have 1 more if you want, but if you do we will need to corset you while you are pregnant and then use surgical mesh to rebuild your abdomen. This could lead to lifelong back trouble." I turned to my dh, and said well, that doesn't sound so good. And we were done at 2.
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6 hours ago, Ottakee said:
I would suggest taking some Advil or something before the appointment. My insertion wasn’t as bad as the biopsy I had but it was a bit uncomfortable. I have never given birth though so that might be different for you.
I was given a cervical softener and valium.
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I'm about to get my 4th mirena. I'm 53. (my family goes very late into menopause). My period was heavy enough that the mirena lightened it by a lot but did not make it stop like it does for some people. No trouble at all from the Mirena - no weight gain, no mood swings, all good.
I cannot take BC because I can't handle the systemic hormone. But the hormone in the Mirena is much much less and really just hits your uterus, so I can handle it.
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I don't know the legal requirements of Minnesota, but if you post what you have found, I'm sure someone could interpret it.
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Top priority is your kid's education and relationships. The moms are supporting you and your role of homeschool parent. All educational decisions are yours.
I think you could simply have a private meeting and explain. 1) be positive. I love what you are teaching my son. He is gaining so much from your viewpoint and approach. 2) He has a lot of other passions that I want to support, so your class is supplementary to the educational work we do at home. 3) because of that, he and I will pick out the assignments that will help him and pass on the rest. 4) I really value your feedback, so will be using all your grades to help him to learn. 5) I know how much work you are putting in, so just let me know how I can support you and your efforts.
If you take the above approach, you don't have to discuss the ND. But if you think that it would help make your case, then get permission of your child, and add that to the discussion as to why you need to pick some assignments and pass on some (#3).
These are homeschool parents. I would assume that they don't believe in lock-step education or their kids would be in school. So I think that they will understand if you are super appreciative and positive.
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Why can you not adapt the assignments? Why does he have to do busy work?
As a homeschooler, you the mom decide the grades. So you could tell your son, that the grade given at the co-op will count for 25% of his overall grade and the rest will come from his own passions that you can link in any way you want to the topic under study. I would absolutely take control of your child's education. Yes, he needs the friendships so needs to be in the co-op, but No you don't have to have his academics revolve around it.
Just my 2 cents worth given that I have a child with a learning disability.
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1 hour ago, SHP said:
Students involved in performing arts really struggled.
My ds is definitely the exception. When MIT closed down, he was in the orchestra as a class that was fulfilling his arts requirement. Being a tech school, they switched the class to the physics of wave form of the music when they tried to do the mixing of all the different instruments played across the world. There were so many problems because of all the different types of environments, recording equipment, time delays, etc. It became a different class, but still an excellent class nonetheless.
In addition, because the concertmaster and associate concertmaster dropped out, ds became the concertmaster for the MIT Symphony orchestra for the rest of the term, which was a real feather in his cap.
So just one small positive, in the otherwise miserable experience of university and covid for our kids.
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We are in NZ, so covid was delayed here (Elimination strategy was successful for 2020 and 2021). My younger ds started university in February of 2022 (southern hemisphere calendar). 90% of the country was vaccinated when they finally released the Aucklanders 3 days before all the universities started up for the February Term. No one here was wearing masks because there had been no covid.
In the first week 1 of school starting, 18 out of 20 people on my ds's hall got covid on the same day. 90% of his dorm got it that week. The cafeteria closed down because there were no student workers and the chef got it. They had to outsource to a restaurant all the food for 2 weeks that was delivered to each kid's door because they were in isolation. His RA on his hall got it the worst, and all the RA's for the entire dorm got it that first week. All classes went virtual for 2 months. All clubs closed down.
I'm sure masks would have slowed the spread, but with omicron in a dorm situation, basically everyone is going to get it. But having *everyone* sick at once was a big problem.
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On 8/23/2023 at 2:28 AM, EKS said:
I have never found a writing program that I thought was any good. I'd argue that real writing instruction is what happens when you interact with your student about their writing. A writing program does not interact with the student. Even students in classrooms rarely get the input they need to learn to write properly. Teachers try to simulate this by giving a bit of feedback on student papers, but this sort of sporadic feedback won't really move a student's writing (particularly a struggling student) forward either. The best writing instruction is extremely specific--it targets a particular student's particular work in real time.
I completely agree. For years, I kept looking for THE program that would help my child. I wrote a massive summary of all the curriculum that I read one summer (link below). And in the end what happened is that *I* learned to be a writing teacher -- one that could identify my ds's problems, prioritize what to work on, give effective individualized instruction, and guide the process. I did not actually end up using any of the curriculum that I read (and owned lol). Rather, I came to understand in the following years that I needed to read read read lots of different things to really understand what it was to be a good writing teacher, not a facilitator of a program, but an actual teacher of the unique child sitting on the sofa next to me with all their idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses. I completely agree with EKS that interaction the key.
I also highly recommend Engaging ideas. I've read that book multiple times throughout my 8 years of teaching high school. It is excellent and really impacted my approach and how I created writing prompts that were engaging and fun and drove my younger boy's love of learning and love of writing. He was a writer for the Sustainability Trust this past summer. It is hard to believe that my dysgraphia boy came to love writing, and I believe that this passion and excellence was developed because of the personalised program that I created by using this book. Here is the first piece he wrote this summer https://sustaintrust.org.nz/blog/urban-heat-islands
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57 minutes ago, bookbard said:
How are your parents going? That sounds just awful - I assume you're in a different country from them?
Paxlovid to the rescue. Dad is doing great -- he quit throwing up at about 10pm last night, and the strep throat is not quite a sore with the antibiotics. Mom has an iron constitution so she has had snivels for 2 days and now is on the mend. So all is well. Thanks for asking. And yes, it is very hard to be an 22 hour flight away.
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My parents finally got covid, and my dad is crazy sick. ☹️ Unfortunately, my mom has Alzheimers and my dad is the primary caregiver and they live independently with no external help. They are 84 and 81. My sisters and I are running around trying to figure out what to do because my dad at first refused to see a doctor. When he finally did they found his O2 at 91%, that he had strep, and that he was taking paxlovid with some other meds that were a bad combination (He had them prophylactively prescribed him him a year ago, so had them in his house). I have been trying to call him all day, and my sister got a hold of him only to find out he was throwing up which is why he was not picking up the phone. Not a good day.
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23 minutes ago, EKS said:
I realize that whatever is going on in these places is some sort of hybrid between school and daycare, but if I were to tutor another person's child the way I homeschooled my own children (and in my current state of having 20 years of teaching experience combined with a considerable amount of relevant education--bachelor's degree in biochemistry, almost another bachelor's degree in math, master's degree in gifted education, and another master's degree from an interdisciplinary humanities program), I would charge $50,000 per year minimum--and likely far more. No, I'm not kidding.
I take on the responsibility for tutoring a kid for one subject and I charge $7500 per year. And that is where they also have a school and a curriculum set out. So $50k per year for full homeschool responsibility is definitely a minimum.
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Article in NYT re: Americans losing faith in value of college degree
in The Chat Board
Posted · Edited by lewelma
Agreeing to all those subtleties to Monopsony power - it is a much bigger issue here in NZ where we have only one buyer for the entire country for all public schools. However, as to my second point, regulation does constrain the market. We do not see schools with 100 students to 1 teacher like they had in Britian in the 1800s. They would be way cheaper. And by forcing people to send their kids to school by law, you cannot opt out of purchasing the education product. This does impact market forces.