I'll have to ask the clerk about this when the ticket is posted in 7-10 days. I'd like to have my day in court to complain about the badly set up construction zone, but probably I'll have cooled my jets by October and will rather save myself $100. My BIL already fixed the bit of trim that was dangling, although he'll need to glue it in place to make sure it doesn't come loose again. I'll just live with the scratch because my car is officially in beater territory with 160,000 miles on it.

I was in a fender bender in a construction zone at GW's day program today. I want to fight it because I believe that I did not fail to yield given the traffic and visibility conditions. If the other driver hadn't been driving too fast through an obviously hazardous area, they could have braked in time. (This part is JAWM.) GW and I are fine as are all the people in the other car. My car has a scratch and some detached trim, the other car has 2 scratches. I'm not even shaken up which I'm surprised at. I did my best to navigate a hazardous area and I don't feel guilty or upset about the accident. (I'm surprised about that, I'm usually so given to self doubt but not in this case.) So I googled a bit. The ticket would cost me $300 and 3 points on my license. I called the first lawyer to pop up on google and they quoted me $125 to represent me and fight it. I think I have a good chance of winning given the construction disaster around GW's school. I could try to go it alone, but it's probably worth $125 to do the best job possible presenting my case. Have you ever hired a lawyer for traffic court and what was your experience like? I'd especially appreciate input from Harris County or just Texas in general.

I just need to rant about how much I hate Astroboy's math homework. It is the most annoying thing imaginable. He has to mark up every word problem using CUBES: circle the numbers, underline the question, box the math words, evaluate the problem (that means figure out how to solve it, insert eyeroll) and then solve it and check your answer. It takes twice as much time to mark up the problem as it takes to solve it. Way to suck every bit of joy out of math! The only saving grace is that it only takes Astroboy about 30 minutes to do the whole week's packet. If this is the only math a kid sees at home, they are really going to be hurting when they hit algebra. The difference with Singapore Primary Math is striking.

I'm using Climbing to Good English with my 9yo nephew. It's very independent and includes writing practice along with detailed grammar instruction. Take a look at a sample and see if it would work for you.

What do his high-achieving classmates' schedules look like? If they're similar, he doesn't really have a choice if he's shooting for highly selective schools. If he does have some wiggle room and finds it's too much: -deep six the Micro self-study first, it's not on his record and he can just do the CLEP the summer after high school if he wants to place out and he's attending a school that will accept it (or can get it transcripted at a community college and then transfer that credit) -if it's still too much, I'd ditch the philosophy class. He can read on his own over the summer. -if it's still too much, I'd drop the AP Stat class. This class will only work for the first semester of business statistics or for a social science statistics class. It won't exempt you from Engineering Statistics, so depending on his prospective major this class won't yield usable credit. Good luck! High school is such a rat race if your student is shooting for lottery schools.

It was my nephew's first day of public school today. He's in third grade (again, his birthday is late spring and the school took one look at it and strongly suggested enrolling him in third grade). On the plus side, he'll be able to get used to speaking English all day every day with no back up except a pocket Spanish-English dictionary. On the down side, he's doing Singapore 4A and finishing up a third grade public school reading program with me so he might eventually be bored. Afterschooling went smoothly. We can do 20 minutes of math, 20 minutes of Climbing to Good English and 20 minutes of buddy reading or writing without him getting too squirrelly and then he picks a leveled reader from the immense stash I bought on ebay to read on his own. They come with comprehension questions on the back that we can use for writing practice. Easy peasy! I am so glad I remembered Climbing to Good English. It's really hard to find ESL materials to use at home with advanced elementary age learners. I need help with phrasal verbs, irregular past tenses, weird idioms, hard to pronounce flat English vowels. I don't need "Let's learn the colors in English". CtGE is the closest I've come and today's lesson went very well. He formed sentences from word banks that included things like "known for" and using like to compare. He wrote 3 sentences about mules eating the top off a convertible. Just the thing to get a 9 yo's writing juices flowing. One day down, 179 to go! Whoo hoo!

I've gone through cycles over the last two years with my dd. When she gets to a new location, she tends to call a lot and have some new life skills questions. Then she settles in and the calls space out to every few days. When she's at sea, I'll get a couple of emails a week. Some are just proof of life, some are long disquisitions on what path she should take in life, it depends on her mood and what's going on. I go with the flow. She still needs someone safe to vent to, someone to ask how to clean the fridge, someone to bounce ideas off of and I'm glad I'm her go-to person. But she's learned a lot in the past two years and handles a lot of stuff on her own now that I didn't think she'd be able to do. (I didn't tell her that, I just anticipated panicked phone calls that didn't come. I'll take the win.) It's a gradual process of them growing up and becoming more competent and us learning to let go and not worry. It's a lot better than a once a week long distance phone call for both of us.

@Gil you need to take down that article, it violates copyright and could cause issues for this site.

I think this quote from the article sums it up best, using my non-fiction text analysis skills that were not explicitly taught in the 70s: But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

When dd's ship pulls in to foreign ports, they require junior enlisted to have liberty buddies. You're not allowed to go out into town alone. That seems like a decent idea for university first years when they go out at night. It's especially important if they're drinking. Dd's ship is in the yards in SF Bay and so she's spent a lot of time on the ferry and the BART exploring. At first, she didn't feel comfortable going out alone and always buddied up to go into the city. Now, that she's been there for a while, she feels more comfortable navigating alone. If your kid likes to run, I'd definitely get pepper spray. Dd has had pepper spray since she was 16 and jogging on the greenbelt near our house. It's not so much for human attackers as it is for loose, aggressive dogs and, in a pinch, coyotes or wild boar (those shouldn't be out during the day and if they are they're absolutely dangerous.) If your kid isn't a runner, have them carry their keys between their fingers and mentally go through the exercise of using it on an attacker's eyes. This was what they told us at my urban college orientation in 1986 and it's served me well there and in other dangerous places. I've had to have the school/mass shooter discussion with new arrivals. There was a mass shooting in a mall in Texas about a month after my BIL, SIL and nephew arrived and I explained run/hide/fight. Make sure they know to always note the exits and think through an escape plan. I also warned them that some people think it's cool to open carry. It was an unpleasant conversation.

Trinqueta is finishing up her application to the University of Florida's online CS program. The essay is written, reviewed by me and a couple of shipmates and posted. The rest of the application is filled out. She's ordered her SAT scores (and paid the surcharge for "archived scores"-what a scam) and transcripts from MPOA and the CC. She forgot about the summer class she took at the University of Dallas, so that's one more transcript to order, but on the bright side, it looks like that Latin class will fulfill her foreign language requirement and she won't have to take the Spanish CLEP. It should be complete well before the Aug. 28 deadline for January admits. Phew! It's all on her except for me reading and commenting on her essay which was very cut and dried: Why do you want to study online at UF? That's easier and harder on the parent. You can nudge, but you aren't there to constantly remind them to keep going. The next step for T is to fill out the FAFSA. Then she has a couple of CLEP and DSSTs to take to check off degree requirements that don't line up with her TX AA requirements. FL requires 2 biology classes, doesn't count her 2 semesters of English Lit Survey or her Film Appreciation class as meeting the Humanities requirement (???!!!???) and requires technical writing for the CS major. The tests will check most of this stuff off. She'll need slightly less than 60 credits to finish her BS.

The United States of America. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 paid $20,000 to each surviving Japanese-American internee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Liberties_Act_of_1988 I'm glad we made good on that debt, but we have other outstanding debts that need to be addressed. It's not just slavery, the Tulsa Race Massacre, segregation, etc. It's all the programs that were specifically designed to NOT benefit Black veterans, potential home owners, Social Security recipients, etc. This directly impacts people today and it's not fair. The same goes for the financial claims of Native Americans. They deserve compensation for all the treaties we failed to keep. Since those were made with entities that still exist, we should honor them.

I took Arabic at university with absolutely no background. There was a fluent Hebrew speaker and a Malaysian student who had studied a bit of Arabic in high school, but other than that, the rest of us had no experience at all. We all survived and learned a lot. It was my last year at university and before the internet so I promptly forgot most of it, but I'd still do it again. If your ds has taken classes on the Middle East and has a strong interest, it's well worth pursuing. It stretches your brain in a way that just rehashing the Spanish or French that you took in high school doesn't. Nowadays, your ds should probably get a head start with Duolingo and Youtube videos. That will give him a feel for his ability to learn Arabic and make the first couple of weeks of learning to read and write a new alphabet easier.

I was reading What is the Declaration of Independence with my nephew today to explain the 4th of July. It's a surprisingly good account of the events leading up to the revolution starting with the French and Indian War. You could easily piece together an engaging year of history using the Who Was/What Was? series. These are easy enough that they won't feel like a chore for a fourth grader who is not an accelerated reader and there's lots of variety so you can focus on people or events they'll find particularly interesting. For example, we read Who Was Jackie Robinson? because dn is a baseball fanatic and that led nicely into a discussion of the Civil Rights movement. If I'd started with Who Was Rosa Parks? he'd probably not have been as interested. We buddy read the books, I do one page, he does one and it takes us three or four days to get through them reading for half an hour a day. You could easily do one of these one week and then do a project or read a fiction book that takes place at the same time on alternating weeks.

Thanks @daijobu and @TheAttachedMama for your thoughts. I'm homeschooling and soon to be afterschooling my 9yo nephew and we've been using Primary Standards 3 this past 3 months. We went through it quickly because he had already done most of third grade math but I wanted to make sure he was solid and had covered all the American curriculum. I've been contemplating Beast Academy for afterschooling but I've been hesitant. I'd prefer a complete open and go program that will cover all the math that his ESL class may or may not cover to keep him on track. Thanks for validating my preference!!!

This strikes me as a recipe for disaster. He'll accuse you of lying, whether or not it's true. If one of your kids refuses to go, you'll be the snitch reporting them to their father. I don't think this is a problem you can fix.

Who is going to do the notifying? Parishes don't take attendance at mass. They usually define "in good standing" as meeting a threshold of financial contributions or asking for a waiver for financial hardship. Most people use automatic payments now, almost nobody is tossing in a preprinted envelop with your name on it. Are you going to have to send him a time-stamped geolocated photo every time you go to Mass?

Has anyone else had "in the bathroom with the chandelier, obviously" pop into your head when you read this title? Some things can just not be unseen and they're like visual earworms that infect everything else.

I would have used Matilde for another girl and Tobias for another boy. I love the names Imogen and Xiomara but I wouldn't have used either because they would be a nightmare to pronounce in either English or Spanish. If I ever get a fur baby, I will absolutely use them, even if it's a boy.

If he gets an ASD dx from Early Intervention, he'll be eligible for the public school's Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities. They will have a a special education teacher and aides and offer OT and SLT on site and usually integrated into the classroom. PPCD is probably the best therapy available unless you live near an independent program that specializes in ASD and accepts your insurance.

ELL nephew and I have really clicked with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Journeys ELA curriculum. It's everything homeschoolers usually hate about public school reading instruction: short stories, worksheets and somewhat random spelling and grammar instruction. But, it's worked really well as a base for working on his English issues in an open and go format because I didn't have a lot of time to plan. I can eliminate stuff that will be too challenging without him even noticing (he's a perfectionist and would be offended if he knew I dump stuff I think will be too frustrating.) The fill-in-the-blank worksheets are great tools for expanding his vocabulary bit by bit since they tend to spiral words with the reading. All in all, it's surprisingly useful as a base for 3rd grade ELA.

I recommend making flashcards for practicing math facts. You'll need addition, subtraction, multiplication and division for all the facts. It's easier to make your own because the commercial ones often aren't complete, especially for subtraction through 18 (they often stop at 10) and division. I'd also do "Make a Hundred" cards. These are numbers 1-50 on one side and the number that will make 100 on the back: so 1-99, 35-65, 78-22, etc. Once you've drilled enough to make them fluent with their math facts, you can assess what gaps they need to fill. Having their facts down will make learning any new skills much less painful and they'll catch up quicker. For reading, I'd get a phonics based reading program and go through that with the 9yo before you do anything else. Something like Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons or The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading will help you fill in any phonics gaps and get them decoding confidently. I've just been through a similar process getting my English Language Learner nephew up to speed. The math flash cards worked like a charm and we're about 3/4 of the way through Singapore PM 3. He was a good decoder because Spanish is completely phonetic, but we used flash cards for the unfamiliar English sounds (short vowels, r-controlled vowels, sh vs. ch, th). We play "What the heck is the gringa saying?" and "Talk like a gringo!" regularly and it's noticeably improved his pronunciation and spelling of English words. This might also help with decoding. I made cards with words that start with B and end with D and have as many vowel sounds as I could think of: bad, bed, bid, bod, bud, bade, bead, bide, bode, booed, bard, beard, bird, bored. I say the word and dn has to hand me the correct card. I wouldn't worry about doing a formal science or history program until their skills are solid. You can just pick books on a particular topic they find interesting and maybe add in a few art, cooking, experiments or field trips to round out their learning and make things fun.

Is there a placement test to gauge his readiness?

No. I definitely prefer young adults to little kids. I'm homeschooling my 9yo nephew to get him up to speed with English before he enrolls in school in August. While 3rd grade has fun elements, I much prefer the deeper discussions of teens. I really like seeing the fruits of all the labor I put into raising my kids.

My dd graduated from Memoria Press Online Academy in 2021. We both thought her classes were well run and she got a good high school education that still allowed time for her to dual enroll in our local CC and finish her AA concurrently. However, I have heard that the new headmaster is not as organized as the previous one and that the quality of MPOA classes has declined. There's also an entrance exam that may be a factor in whether or not the program is suitable for your student. You also need to carefully consider the teacher's background and the assigned texts. We eliminated a couple of options because we didn't agree with the political slant that the course would take. OTOH, dd had some truly excellent teachers (Mr. Maycock, really good high school math teachers who were moonlighting, a PhD candidate who was a former Army Captain, and a priest) that you wouldn't get at a regular high school. Before doing the high school diploma program with MPOA, dd took several classes at WTMA and they were excellent, especially the AOPS based math classes. We went with MPOA because of their complete diploma program and the fact that they had experience with a B&M school (Highlands), their specific course offerings (Henle Latin, the logic/rhetoric sequence and separate lit and comp classes) and a previous good experience in an online class. It sounds like WTMA might be more like a unified school rather than an assortment of individual classes now. That wasn't the case 6 years ago. That probably would have swung dd's decision their way.