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tearose

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Posts posted by tearose

  1. This is not anywhere near the same level as building a house, but DH added a mudroom onto our house with no construction experience. He learned how to do the electrical, HVAC, insulation, drywall etc. using Youtube and other internet resources. It took him a lot longer than a contractor, but it turned out really well. He did outsource the plumbing, since he didn't feel comfortable doing that, but I think that only cost us a few hundred dollars. As long as you're realistic about it taking ten (or more!) times longer than a professional, I think it can be done. Will you have a place to live while building the house?

  2. DH and I have been planning a library since we moved into our house three years ago--we finished our basement and set aside a big room as a library. Since we moved, all our books have been stacked on the floor (sorted roughly by subject and genre, but still a huge pain to find anything). We looked into getting bookcases custom-built, but the prices were astronomical :eek: . We finally just decided to get Billy bookcases from Ikea--a lot cheaper, and I won't have a heart attack if my kids scratch or ding something. We're filling three walls with bookcases going from floor to ceiling (using two height extenders on each bookcase). We also decided to put glass doors on the bookcases to make the room look a little more formal (and keep the dust off the books). I am SO EXCITED to finally have enough storage for my books (and room to buy more books :) ). I figured that this board is probably the only place where people would share my excitement over this kind of thing!

     

    ETA: in-progress pictures found in posts 30, 48, and 61 :)

  3. I live near a town with Swiss roots, and there is polka music almost every weekend--and the dance really fills up. The older folks are by far the best dancers. A few polka bands we've enjoyed that you can find on Youtube are Steve Meisner, Greg Anderson, and Johnny Koenig (not local but amazing on the accordian).

  4. I used to only sort by color but because it was a pain to get everyone's clothes in the right place come folding time, I now sort darks/lights for the kids and then for me and DH separately (though I sometimes combine the whites load if there isn't much from all of us). Now I take all our clean stuff into our bedroom, and it's quick to put away. And it's also a lot faster to put away the kids' stuff. Before, I'd avoid doing it, and a few loads of clean laundry would pile up before I'd finally make myself put everything away.

  5. I'm sorry. I can see that my terse response has left any number of things unclear! No, I would not propose grabbing journal articles at random!

    And, yes, absolutely, a knowledgeable guide would be essential, but I think that is true of all the material to which I was alluding. However, if I were attempting a course such I described (and that has not been the route we took with any of our kids so far), I would very much expect to get them to the point where they could handle such material. ...and I know my own experience as a high school student and as an undergraduate was greatly enriched by such content. ymmv :)

     

     

    Perhaps we're talking about different publications--I am referring to peer-reviewed journals written by scholars and intended for a scholarly audience. I think that many students who have had an introductory class or two in chemistry (or physics, biology, etc. ) at the college level are not ready for such reading because the research is so specialized. If you are referring to peer-reviewed journals, we'll just have to agree to disagree :)

  6. The college he will apply to, besides the junior college, requires only a 450 in the reading section and the 460 in the math portion. The writing portion isn't mentioned. I just showed him a prompt from teh Dec. 2012 SAT and he said he could answer it, but he doesn't think he could write the essay in the time given. Also, the site says the student is given lined paper and is limited to that. How much lined paper do they receive? I don't think even I could judge the length of an essay I do based on how many lines are given to me. That seems bizarre.

     

    Another question. Do we need to get him a picture ID? He does not have, nor does he want, a drivers license. But I think the DMV will issue a picture ID.

     

    Has he considered taking it untimed or with extended time? Some of the possible accomodations to request are here: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/ssd/accommodations/time

    It is noted with the score if the test was taken with extended time or untimed, I think.

  7. As far as reading current journal articles -- one usually needs a pretty darn good base of information in the field to even begin to understand what is being talked about in most journal articles. Most undergrads aren't ready for it. This is something professors will start to introduce in college, but they usually recognize that the point of reading journal articles as an undergrad is not so much to get information out of the articles, but to get practice in figuring out what is going on.

     

    I'd also add that unless you really know a field well, you would have a hard time knowing which articles were significant for that field. You can't just randomly flip through these journals and expect to find suitable reading material. You'd need to know if there was follow-up research after an article was initially published, how credible other scientists found it, etc. And, as pp have mentioned, these articles are often so specialized that even undergraduates need guidance in learning how to read them.

  8. I recently found out some really bad news about someone I know of through mutual aquaintances. She was found brutally murdered in her apartment. It's horrifying, and I don't have any idea what to say to the people who were close to her. "I'm sorry" doesn't even seem to come close to expressing what I should say.

  9. For me, Latin is an essential language to learn. DH and I feel like we truly understood grammar after taking Latin and both wish we had not waited so long to take Latin (high school for me, college for him). I took Italian later in college and definitely think that Latin made it so much easier (same could be said of French or Spanish).

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