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Farrar

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Everything posted by Farrar

  1. I don't think you can compare someone saying that the president hasn't kept his promises and sprinkling that with the f-bomb as the same as inciting violence. I'm sorry, no. And really, that's just so common on both sides. And, yes, with prominent people. Yes, on both sides. Really, sprinkling discourse with the f-bomb as an amplifier is just linguistically getting more common and acceptable in many quarters so it's not surprising that it's hit political discourse. It's a way to sound like you understand current speech patterns.
  2. But there has been a rise in racially motivated killings coming out of conservative ideologies, like Dylann Roof and the guy in Portland. And the attack at Comet Ping Pong (the Pizzagate place) could also easily be termed politically motivated. In fact, I'm not sure what else you would call it, even though it was deeply misguided (as was this). It's not a contest. ALL of these things are horrible. And I would agree with your earlier post and all of them are rising in part from the vitriol (though also in part from mental illness). However, we can't say it's one sided. There is nasty vitriol on both sides.
  3. So, for kindy/1st grade... depends a little. The Writer's Jungle is the overarching philosophy book. It's the big picture. If you are a big picture thinker, it's very useful to start with this. However, there's very little in there about working with younger kids. The exercises she talks about and the techniques for revision and so forth are mostly about older kids, once they're writing. This is what Julie calls the "Jot It Down" stage. However, if you like to think about the big picture first, then you could start there. Jot It Down is a supplement that's about a project a month. It also summarizes the Brave Writer lifestyle for this stage. I think the project books are the best place to start for nearly all people new to BW. BW also makes two other products for this age. One is the Quiver of Arrows. Your kid isn't ready for it unless they can copy a sentence with some confidence and enjoy listening to a longer read aloud (think Charlotte's Web or Mr. Popper's Penguins). So some first graders are there - others aren't. The other is The Wand. It covers some phonics, some basic writing all through picture books. It has a sort of different feel from the rest of BW, IMO. Some people love it, others not so much. Don't judge it by the sample though, because that's just the first lesson - it absolutely ramps up in difficulty. Finally, there's another option. Julie gives so much away for free. If you follow her blog, watch her videos, listen to her podcasts, follow her on other social media - then she lays all her ideas out over and over in different ways and you can pick up on how to "do" BW from that.
  4. Mostly you walk around, marvel at the beauty, get wet from the spray in various places, marvel at the beauty some more from a boat, and then come back at night to see it lit up so you can marvel at that. I don't want to underestimate it... we're glad we went. On the other hand, I don't think it would have been as fun with a 4 yo and a toddler. We stayed at Great Wolf (it's on the Canadian side) and that was nice. Really, it was a great little trip for us. It's something you should see in your life at least once. Whether or not this is the moment in life that's right for it for you... dunno.
  5. I'd love to make it to about 90, but mostly I'd like to live as long as I'm happy living.
  6. I feel like the young man is a victim. He's a victim who did something really dumb and entitled... but I'm not sure I believe the North Korean government about where he was and what he did. I mean, they're not a trustworthy source. To my mind, just going to North Korea *for fun* was his primary mistake. But then... it's like, you shouldn't walk into a dangerous place and wave about money and not expect to be robbed... but, on the other hand, it's the robbers who are the bad guys.
  7. Is she reading more YA type books or is she still reading middle grades? Some kids that age are on to John Green novels and other modern high school stuff. Others are still reading upper end middle grades books. Since you say she's sensitive, I'll assume mostly middle grades novels? How about... Stargirl Absolutely Normal Chaos A Mango Shaped Space When You Reach Me Close to Famous Flipped The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate One Crazy Summer
  8. Rodman said he has nothing to do with it. I seriously would not call him North Korea's Jimmy Carter. Carter tries to attempt diplomacy on behalf of peace and general Western ideals - with varying results (and, of course, sometimes in controversial ways, but hopefully we can agree he is intelligently well-intended). Rodman is being used by North Korea and can't speak intelligently about any issues around the country except that their ceremonies look cool and their leader seems like a nice guy. He's a tool.
  9. I can't quite imagine exactly how you would use AAS in a group setting. It's so individualized. I even found it a little challenging to have two kids in the same level when I first started it (one kid quickly surpassed the other though and it became easier). I guess you could have each kid have their own set of tiles and board... someone had directions for how to make a carry kit type thing for the tiles. You could do that for each student with a small magnetic whiteboard. I'm just thinking it would be tricky with kids at different points. My experience was the kids progress at really different rates through AAS.
  10. Yes! And not only that, but it's the way kids learn about the world. This article and study only addressed skills. It didn't address content at all. Playing dress up is often about content learning - learning what are the jobs, the roles, the historical figures, etc. and what are the rules of those jobs and time periods and so forth.
  11. There's a summer jobs program here for kids. Pretty much all young people 14 and up can do the program. You make money based on your age (younger kids make less, older kids make more), but you can put it on a resume and get a job reference out of it, obviously. The city partners with private businesses, but the vast majority of jobs are with the city itself and the vast majority of those are with DPR (parks dept). Some of it is "make work." But a lot of it isn't - they hire an army of teens to run the summer pools, clean up the parks and do summer landscaping projects, and be support staff for the rec camps. And even some of the make work is kind of cool. They do mural projects and things like that. I think it's kind of a cool program - it obviously allows today's youth to say a quintessentially DC thing - "Marion Barry got me my first job!" But I'll say... the reason this article cites for kids not having jobs is absolutely true for most families with teens that I know - nearly all of them do some sort of special program or schooling over the summer instead of getting a job. It's college application stuff.
  12. The fact that the study didn't follow the kids past age 5 made me roll my eyes. Oh, kids got a two month gain in literacy test scores at that age? So what? A lot of the other studies I've seen about early academics show that kids quickly lose those gains by the end of elementary school and often end up behind in other ways. Not only was the dressing up comment completely absurd, but the idea that play based learning is hard to pull off was completely unsubstantiated. And so what if it's hard to pull off? We should settle for methods that are easy but inferior? That's been one of the biggest problems in education trends in the last few decades, IMHO - the desire to make everything easy to implement and thus reduced to the most uncreative, simplest methods of instruction. The article says that learning through worksheets isn't what is meant by academic preschool, but with attitudes like that, it's absolutely what it gets reduced to every time. I'm also not much of a Montessori fan overall, but this article clearly misunderstood Montessori on a very basic level. Montessori is not play based. And it has a pretty clear progression of skills - things that are perhaps more fundamental to, you know, life, that aren't measured on literacy tests of five year olds. ETA: I'm not even really against gentle academics in preschool. We played with C-rods, read books aloud, sang the alphabet song, played counting games, etc. most days when my kids were that age. It's really more about the framing. This article framed that as important and other skills, like small and gross motor development, social skills, practical skills like getting dressed, and creative play as unimportant. And when you're talking about 3 and 4 yos, any piece that tries to sell me that knowing your letters is somehow more essential is patently absurd to me.
  13. Yeah, they called it "planned obsolescence." I hear you on the cell phones. Someone above said that they couldn't get non-Brother inks to work in their Brother printer, though we had a Brother laser printer for years (it finally burned out, but it was good for a cheaper model) and never had that issue - but this is a newer thing, using the software updates to try and circumvent the ink refill market. I'm pretty sure the business model is to sell the printers at close to a loss and then make the cash on the inks. I feel like I'm in an elementary school DARE advert where the printer dealer is trying to hook me. First ink's free, lady. Next time though, you gotta pay.
  14. If he's never done Dragonbox Algebra then that might be a good thing to do over the summer. Or Hands on Equations if you want something more schooly and less of a game. Just to get his brain trained for algebra. Just thinking of "fun" things to keep up the math in a light way if that's what you're thinking.
  15. So, this is actually the printer we have (I think it's another in that line). I also really, really like it from a hardware standpoint - it works consistently, it's a good printer that has all the options I like and getting it work on wifi was very easy. But... HP did an update where it invalidated all ink refills of all kinds and all non-name brand ink. And we got hit with it. I downloaded another update that was supposed to fix it, and then a hack. And nothing worked. So I caved and spent a boatload on new name brand inks. They worked. So I went to refill them because supposedly once you had the new ones, it would work again. And they would not work. It was essentially planned uselessness by HP. The machine's software is holding me hostage. Pay us or this perfectly good machine won't work anymore. So... screw that. I'm buying another brand and I won't be going back to HP. And since buying a whole other printer is basically the cost of replacing the ink (in fact, many of the options are significantly cheaper)... I may as well.
  16. A lot of the Epson ones seem to be super cheap. Like $50ish. And Canon has a couple of ones in that range as well... Sigh. I guess one just has to buy. I mean, it's the same cost as replacing the ink, so I guess it's worth a try.
  17. Do pre-algebra next year. It's really just more practice with all of that stuff so no matter what you think, you shouldn't wait on that. My rising 8th graders can be the same way. It never happens (or, almost never) when they're doing a page of practice. It happens all the time when they're trying to hold the formula for something in their head and do the calculations (like with the circle or triangle) or when they're doing multi-step word problems. Sometimes they'll make really big, great conceptual leaps and do the "hard part" of a problem and then stare at what they did and wail, I don't know what to do now! And it turns out they just need to add with fractions or something and it's like it was just one thing too much. Obviously that stuff needs to get ingrained, but I'm of the opinion it can get ingrained in tandem with moving forward conceptually.
  18. Not HP. I really liked our little HP inkjet, but then HP repeatedly ruined it by making it update even when I turned off updates. The updates have meant I've wasted a great deal of money on ink that will never work and buying ink that's isn't refills costs as much as a new printer. Not to mention how environmentally cruddy it is. So... I'm done with them. Never again. So... a color printer that will also do copies and print via wifi and won't fall apart too fast. We don't print a huge volume of pages (and I'm not interested in having a laser printer for that reason) but more often the kids are doing projects and want to print images for something. And then occasionally I print or copy a worksheet or the like.
  19. Maybe Brave Writer's Help for High School for composition? It's written to the student. But if you liked IEW, it might not be exactly your style. Or... you might enjoy having a different take on composition. Mosdos for lit? Or just reading books? We like the Glencoe Lit Guides.
  20. That's a great illustration of why Lexile is nuts. I think the RL levels or the Guided Reading levels work a bit better. But don't take any of them too seriously. Take the recommendations of real people over computers as more important.
  21. The idea of deciding that a 3 yo *will* do algebra in 7th grade or earlier is just really, really putting the cart before the horse.
  22. There aren't that many capitalization questions on the ITBS and the questions are pick the mistake, which I think is harder for kids who haven't done that as their drill. If you see him mostly getting it right in the real world, I wouldn't take it that seriously. We've done the Evan-Moor Daily Paragraph Editing books. They're good. I like them. They don't have explicit teaching to the student - just "reminders" of things to look for in the paragraph sometimes. They definitely cover capitalization of all sorts. My kids both have been struggling with the finer points of capitalization this year. Like, you capitalize that Human Civilizations meets in the afternoons, but not that algebra class meets in the mornings. You capitalize Western thought, and the Old West, but not western North Carolina. You capitalize Japanese food but not southern food. I understand all those rules (inevitably when I post things like this, someone tries to explain it all... I get it, thanks, and they will too eventually). Things like that keep tripping them up and they either end up overcapitalizing everything (like in ds's lab report, where he used timothy hay, that's a name and then it goes with the hay, so he made it Timothy Hay throughout and it had to be fixed) or they forget and underdo it (like when ds wrote "french fries" in lower case over and over).
  23. And now that I have read most of the thread... Personally, I would plan to drive to the city if I was in your situation, Mergath. :( But I'm so stubborn like that. I'm so aware of how people often engage in a sort of strange magical thinking in regards to medical providers. They don't change doctors even when there are red flags about what the outcome is likely to be. It's true even in situations where people have options. They just get stuck on a path and get scared to deviate, and hope that things will work out. I didn't get the birth I wanted, but I'm glad I fought for a birth I could be okay with. It made me crazy how everyone kept lying to us about risk factors. Like, the reason they wanted us to stay for several extra days had to do with the beta strep positive thing - and yet, the risk goes down after a certain time (which we stayed through) and then doesn't go down again for weeks. There was zero medical evidence reason for us to stay longer. Yet, an elderly, "I mean well" physician came in to tell us that if our babies suddenly went into distress, that we'd probably not be able to get treatment (I sat there like, are you seriously threatening my two day olds?), oh, and we were forfeiting our insurance by leaving and would be on the hook for the whole medical bill, and oh, was it personal? Didn't we "like" them enough to want to stay? It drives me crazy because one wants to be able to trust doctors... we need to be able to. But they're not even doing the things that are recommended as best practices and when we see them doing that, they try to say it's in our best interests and how dare we question them. Ugh.
  24. I haven't read the rest of the thread, but I'll share my experience. I had a planned homebirth for my twins. I labored at home for several days, but the midwife eventually felt, in part because of the stalled labor when my water had broken and in part because I was beta strep positive, that I needed to go to the hospital for IV antibiotics and to be induced because baby A was in such a funky position. Refusing intervention was a bit exhausting. If I had not had a doula who was a former corporate lawyer, I don't know if I would have made it through. They basically came in every half hour to beg me to have a C-section and threaten me with dead babies. But we waited it out for the doctor I had chosen as a backup to get back from a trip, induce me proper like, and pull baby A out - who was trying to be born by the neck, that crazy kid. Baby B fell out by the feet (we like to say he was trying to kick his brother out). Anyway, two healthy babies later, we also left against medical advice. They came in and threatened us regarding that as well. Long story short... they cannot force you. Get a good doula with a heart of steel.
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