I haven't seen a remodeled Target, but the descriptions here make me wonder if they were trying to compete with Bed, Bath, & Beyond. All those little in-and-out sections, a layout I can never predict, no shortcuts to anything, having barely enough room for one cart in the aisles (there's no way for a *person* to squeeze by a cart, let alone get another cart by - I hate how squished it feels).

That might be a good pattern for this year's origami (ish) photo ornament. I started doing it a few years ago - picking a simple origami pattern and photoshopping a photo collage so that, when printed, I could fold the photo paper into the ornament and have the pictures all end up right where they should on the finished product. It's not easy to find a pattern, because photo paper doesn't work for anything but the simplest origami. I did a six-pointed star the first year (using six different strips of paper), holly leaves the next, and a Christmas tree last year.

Thank you for all your thoughts and encouragement! I know I haven't been posting, but I have been mulling over the thread and trying things out. A week after posting, I went through a lot of the ideas with dd12. I think she finally made sense of "of = multiply". (Working through @LMD's ideas was particularly helpful.) I agree with the people who've said that it's probably something to do with the fraction concept itself. I've been hoping that hitting it in pre-algebra would help - that seeing it more formally done would help us both. That's actually why I did an experiment with AOPS Pre-Algebra - nothing gets into the nitty-gritty whys more. But I had no idea whether it would work for her: on the one hand, she is generally a strong math student who loves a challenge, and the AoPS pre-test doesn't call for anything more than fraction basics, which she had down. But on the other, while she intuits most things to do with math, the few that do trip her up, *really* trip her up. In any case, AoPS was a fail - the detailed proofs weren't making sense to her (found out later that she wasn't able to intuit the jump from elementary math equations to algebra equations, when we did it explicitly in MM - took two days of her working it both ways before she felt solid), she may be all about having an intuitive understanding, but she struggles with explaining it explicitly (and generally doesn't see why she should have to). On the other hand, it was *great* for bringing misunderstandings to light, and pinpointing exactly where the problem lay. (Though we didn't work on fractions, I still got a lot of insight into her thinking processes, and it gave me a lot of insight into what might be going on with fractions.) But it made for long, hard math sessions, when every other day involved being brought to a screeching halt by yet another difficulty being uncovered. AoPS was hitting too many of her weaknesses - they expected students to intuit a lot of things that she just needed to see explicitly. So we did some pre-algebra-y MM, and now have started Dolciani. Originally, Dolciani (which I had on my shelf) looked both boring and intimidating to the both of us, but somehow after AOPS - and me figuring out the basic structure and point of pre-algebra - it looked downright friendly ;). So far she's doing fine with it - pretty straightforward, no difficulties. WRT evals, I do wonder. I've wondered about her for quite a while, but every time I was about to pull the trigger, she'd make a leap. It's easy to miss her inflexibility on stuff, because she's generally quite flexible - far more so than ds7 (who I'm *really* starting to wonder about, as he's just not outgrowing stuff). But on the stuff she's inflexible on, she is *really* inflexible on - more politely than ds7, usually, but just as strongly. But she's generally willing to talk about it, and listen to what I have to say, and I can usually persuade her to give it a trial go. And it doesn't happen on all that many things (as compared to ds7, who is stubborn and inflexible on what feels like all the things, although he *is* improving, be it ever-so-slow). And, before puberty, she didn't throw a fit over it, either (also unlike ds7) - we could discuss it rationally; now she cries a lot, although once I calm her down, she's willing to discuss. I do wonder whether, in our discussions, I'm giving her the words she needs to describe what she's feeling far more than I realize - that it's less a discussion than it is me throwing out words and ideas until something clicks - that I'm doing a lot more of the "putting it into words" work than I realize. Thanks again for all the thought and effort y'all have put into your replies - I really appreciate it! I'm working my way through all the links and resources and approaches.

I only seriously dated dh. We were both in college, so the more common lie would be neglecting to mention a boyfriend/girlfriend back home, although I suppose you could still neglect to mention a spouse back home, too. In any case, he presented himself as single, and I never had any reason to distrust it. I did no research or background check, nor did it occur to me to do so. Even looking back, I think I learned enough about him from meeting family and friends (both on-campus and back home), going to his home church, etc. that it would have had to have been a multi-person conspiracy to keep the existence of another "official" relationship from me. I mean, he still could have cheated on me with another woman, but it would have been seriously unlikely for *me* to have inadvertently been "the other woman". I knew too many people who had known him for years.

I don't particularly have troubles with food, but the idea that it's impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object was really jarring to me. I mean, I'd say that food can nourish the soul as much as the body - and that that is fundamentally a *good* thing. It's a problem when people use food to try to fill a non-food hole in their souls - but imo the problem is trying to use food to solve a non-food problem, not the idea that food satisfies immaterial as well as material needs.

Related to this, I've noticed that for me there's a difference between using my alone time to do things that refresh and recharge me, and using it to escape. When I use my free time to escape from the stress and responsibilities of life, it doesn't equip me to do anything more than to want to keep escaping. The more I escape from life, the more I want to stay in my escapism, and the less I want to re-enter the fray. But when I view my free time as a time of rest, instead of a time of escape, I'm better able to use that time in a way that *enhances* my overall ability to handle life. "Time of rest" isn't quite the right phrase - it's more like a time where I can do certain kinds of good things that are only possible when I have a block of uninterrupted time. Sometimes that involves restful things (naps, pleasure reading, etc.), but sometimes it involves a different sort of effort-ful thing (research reading, writing, exercise, etc.) - so that I'm resting from hs'ing through doing other active things, instead of resting all of me. So my focus is more on "what good things can I do with this time", instead of on "what bad things am I escaping from with this time". I can really feel the difference between using my free time to do good and using it to escape from having to do anything. (Which is really, in effect, the difference between using it to to do good and using it to escape from "having" to do good.) (Which is why I hate the phrase "me time", too. It turns doing good things to/for yourself into an act of selfishness, and so turns selfishness into a virtue. And completely erodes the ability of people to understand the difference between selflessness and self-neglect.)

I'm only midway through with my oldest, but as of yet I have not experienced burn-out. I've been long-term tired, I've struggled with depression, but while those things all made hs'ing *hard* - and sometimes required changes in how I hs'ed - none of it led to burnout. I *have* experienced burnout symptoms with other, lesser, commitments, though. (Thankfully they were all short/medium-term commitments - I was able to power through to the end, and then stop, secure in the knowledge that *I didn't have to do it anymore*.) Which makes for an interesting question - why burn out here and not there? But I've never felt like I've been losing myself. I think that burnout and losing oneself don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. WRT losing oneself, I agree with a lot that pp said: *It helps to have a strong reason *to* hs (as opposed to just strong reasons to *not* use non-hs options), so that hs'ing a good you are pursuing, not something you feel forced into. As well, knowing *why* you hs can help moderate outside pressure - you aren't at the mercy of others' *It helps to have other roles in your life than just hs'er, to pursue good in other areas of responsibility, too. I think that burn-out can come even when you have the above, though. Sometimes hs'ing might require more of us than we have to offer, and sometimes all the other responsibilities of life combined with hs'ing can require more of us than we have to offer. If that state of affairs goes on for too long, if we burn the candle at both ends for too long, then I think burnout is the natural result. Doesn't mean you don't believe in hs'ing, doesn't mean you've subsumed yourself into hs'ing to the exclusion of other spheres of life - just means that everything has been too much for too long. The stuff I got burned out on were things I valued, thought were worth doing - and they were just one thing in my life - but they were just hard, harder than I was prepared to handle. I will say, they were a kind of hard that did spill over into the rest of my life - I felt like I never had a proper break from them. By the time I recovered from one day, it was time to prep for the next - they did dominate my life out of proportion to their place and their importance. I think a lot of the practical things you can do to help keep yourself from getting burned out - like eating well, getting enough sleep, etc. - things that help you stay ready to handle life and help keep life within manageable bounds - might not be as effective if you are losing yourself in hs'ing (or in any one thing). And I do think a strong sense of purpose and a generally balanced place for hs'ing can provide some help in not burning out even when things are hard.

With a 7th, 4th, and 1st grader, I feel like I'm solidly past newbie now, but nowhere near veteran. IDK, what's the next level beyond newbie? Disillusioned, maybe - when the reality of my actual children had well and truly overthrown my lovely hs air castles ;). But I'm past that, too. So what's next? Optimistic realism? Or realistic optimism? Where you've settled into teaching the kids you have, but haven't had any major crises or burnouts past the initial newbie disillusionment.

Also, as an fyi, pen nibs have to be prepped before you use them. They come with oil on them, to keep them from rusting, but you have to remove the oil in order for the ink to feed right. Careful washing with dish soap and water does fine; the calligraphy page I linked above also talks about using a potato.

You want something with a lid, that has a flat, not-prone-to-tipping-over-base, a wide opening, and is 1-2" deep and probably not more than 2-3" wide. A baby food jar would be good, I think. The first container I used was not deep enough (less than 1/2in) - you couldn't get enough of the pen into the ink. The next one I used was 1" tall and 2-3" in diameter. That worked well - you could get the ink deep enough without the container being so wide that it took a ton of ink to get it sufficiently deep. You want a good lid, because you need more ink in the inkwell than you are going to use in one sitting, and you don't want to waste it - imo attempting to somehow get it back into the ink bottle would be a disaster waiting to happen. The only problem with mine was that the lid wasn't liquid-proof (which I did know), so that it wasn't good for travel - if the closed container tipped on its side, it would leak. (And did leak, when we moved - but I'd put it in a plastic baggie because I'd anticipated problems.) I'm glad I could help :).

I put together a dip pen calligraphy set for my dd last Christmas, following the recommendations for calligraphy beginners given by the person who made the learn-to-do-calligraphy instruction guide I got. I got Moon Palace Sumi Ink, the Tachikawa Comic Pen Nib Holder, Model 40 (T-40) (turns out people use dip pens for drawing manga), the Nikko Manga Pen Nib 3pc set, and for paper got 32lb printer paper (it was rec'd as relatively cheap paper that doesn't absorb the ink). You'd also need an inkwell - I improvised one from containers lying around the house. Plus you also need some kind of lint-free rag for cleaning the pen nib, and a cup to hold water for cleaning. It's worked out pretty well - everything worked as advertised. You don't have to do calligraphy with it - you can write regularly, just as you'd write regularly with a fountain pen.

We're on our 4th pass through fractions (SM was our main program, and alongside it we did LoF Fractions, MUS Epsilon, and now we are working through Key to Fractions alongside MM for pre-algebra), and while dd12 can objectively do more on each pass, she still fundamentally feels like she doesn't understand fractions and nothing about that has really changed. She's a very whole-to-parts thinker, and has to understand the concept before she sees any point in learning the procedure. Usually this is not a problem, as most of the time she picks up the concept effortlessly. But there's something fundamental about the fraction concept that she's simply not getting, some misunderstanding that makes all the various fraction operations feel like they are *breaking* the rules she already learnt, instead of extending them. She's offended by the apparent rule-breaking, thinks that fractions are inherently nonsensical - that there's nothing *to* understand, that my persisting in working on fractions is analogous to me trying to make her accept the legitimacy of 2+2=5 (which she vows never to do) - and mostly she just wants me to quit torturing her with the abominations that are fractions. She will grudgingly accept that I actually believe that fractions make sense, that it truly is not my intention to make her accept 2+2=5, but she's pretty sure that I'm factually wrong about it being possible for her to ever understand fractions. With SM, it was me dragging her through the fraction sections, which is why I sought out supplements after the first disastrous foray. With LoF I had her do it independently, which was in retrospect a horrible plan. She did great for the first half, and then fell off the train spectacularly, with much weeping and rending of garments. Next we tried MUS Epsilon. This helped a lot in some ways - I think she finally got an intuitive sense of what's going on in fraction math, and she was able to do the Epsilon exercises with ease - but it didn't help with her fundamental misunderstanding. Now she's working through Key to Fractions. She both hates it and says it is too easy :sigh. According to her, she hates it *because* it is too easy and thus is pointless. Usually that means she finds the concept easy but there's something about the execution that is hard. IDK if it's related to her fundamental misunderstanding - that nothing about this work is helping her connect what she is doing with the fundamental meaning of fractions - or if it's related to something else. She really presents as 2E in a lot of ways, and so much of math (and school in general) has been working on turning her intuitive understanding into logical/sequential oral/written expression. (Also a lot of school has been remediating auditory processing weaknesses and working through a reluctance to physically write.) Anyway, I'm hoping to brainstorm what the fundamental misunderstanding might be, and how to work through it. I suspect it has to do with not understanding fractions as being division problems, but I'm not sure. The one concrete thing I've noticed is that she persistently doesn't understand *why* you can go from "1/4 of 40" to "(1/4) *40". She's improved on every fraction thing that *doesn't* use that premise, but fails on everything that *does* depend on it. I can get it in her head long enough to get through a chapter, and have done so repeatedly, but it doesn't stick - she fundamentally doesn't understand why you can do that, even as she seems to understand every step of the teaching in MUS on the topic and can do all the MUS problems on it. I think she understands full well all the reasons people keep saying you can, but she's missing the fundamental premise that *allows* them to do it, that makes those reasons *true* instead of being a convenient fiction.

The Christian thing is to always do God's good to everyone, whether they deserve to receive good or not. That is not the same thing as always making life *easier* for others, and it's not the same thing as always giving people what they *want*. I think a common assumption is that you do good for others by giving them what they want whenever possible. And so *not* giving people what they want, when doing so is within your power, is inherently selfish. Given this assumption, the only non-selfish reasons to *not* give people what they want is either because you *can't*, or because what they want is *wrong* and so giving it to them would *not* be good. And so the Christian art of saying no becomes determining when "it would be unwise for me to do this" means that, really, we *can't* do it (or means that it's wrong of you to ask me to do it) - and so we can say no with a clear conscience - and when "it would be unwise for me to do this" is just covert "I don't wanna do it" selfishness, and so we are obligated to say yes. For many, attempting to turn "it would be unwise of me" into "I can't" is inherently a covert attempt to put the self first. And so some demonize the whole attempt (you can never, ever put yourself first ever), and others argue that, you know what, sometimes it *is* ok to put yourself first. And then Christian ethics becomes figuring out when it *is* and *isn't* ok to "put yourself first". Only that doesn't really play all that well with Scripture. But always doing what others want regardless of the effect on yourself is madness. The problem, in my opinion, is with that initial assumption, that "doing good for others" means "letting them do what they want (unless it's sinful)" - that the core dilemma is between "doing what I want" and "letting others do what they want". And so, the only alternative to the madness of always subsuming myself in others' wants is to occasionally "put myself first". And so ethics becomes judging when it's ok to put myself first (do what I want), and when I must deny myself (let others do what they want). I think that's a false dichotomy, albeit a common one. And I think it stems from the common-but-unbiblical assumption that the best thing we can do for others is to let them fulfill their dreams, to do what they want. That turns the Christian call to do good for others into helping others fulfill their dreams and wants *instead of* trying to fulfill our own. And it gives no grounds except selfishness or sinfulness to turn down a request. So either you (wrongly) justify selfishness, or you (wrongly) demonize unwise things as actually sinful, or you (wrongly) never turn down a request. I know my parenting really suffered when my main notion of "doing good for my kids" was "letting them do what they wanted". I had no grounds for saying no when what they wanted was both possible and not sinful. I think what we need is to get rid of that assumption that "doing good for people" means "letting them do what they want". (We also need to get rid of the equal-and-opposite assumption that "doing good for people" means "NOT letting them do what they want".) Culturally, there's a strong sense that people determine their own good, that people have to determine for themselves what good they are going to aim at. It goes against the cultural grain to assert that *God* has actually established the good we are supposed to aim at. But I think that regaining that Biblical teaching is vital to escaping from the trap described above. "Always doing good for others" doesn't mean doing *their* good instead of *my* good; rather it means always doing *God's* good. Boundaries can't be about "when it's ok to put myself first" (aka do what is good for me (aka be selfish, do what I want)) *instead of* putting others first. The question can't be "when is it ok to do good for me *instead of* doing good for others"; the question must always be, "given the situation, given my resources and abilities and given the need, *how* can I do good here?" And this good needs to be measured objectively, against God's Law; what I want and what others want is *one* thing - but it's not *the* thing. The various subjective wants are *one* thing to consider in determining which good thing to do, not *the* thing. They *do* matter, but they aren't the *only* things that matter. (I say that to my kids all. the. time. when they tell me they don't want to do something - what we want is *one* thing, not *the* thing. "I don't want to" is *not* the same thing as "I won't do it". We don't have to be trapped by the if-then logic of "if I don't do want to, then I won't do it".) And likewise, we don't have to be trapped by the if-then logic of "if someone wants me to do this, then I have to do it". Instead, we can ask ourselves, what good will be accomplished by my doing this thing? What harm will occur if I don't? Likewise, what *other* good will I *not* be able to do if I do this thing? And what harm will occur if I *do* do this thing? Is the good accomplished by my effort here a good use of my resources? Is it a wise use of my resources? I can't do all the good, everywhere. Given the situation and my resources, is *this* good a wise thing to do? Our choices aren't *whether* to aim at *our* good or to aim at someone else's good; rather, our choices are *how* to best aim at *God's* good. And it's legit to turn down requests - *good* requests - because we are doing other good elsewhere. (We just have to make sure we are indeed pursuing *God's* good and not our own.) It's also legit to turn down requests because we think that doing what the other person *wants* isn't really going to be doing them actual *good*.

I wrote nearly 300 words last night :), albeit on an entirely different story ;). Think I will just go ahead and switch, since that's nearly 10x the number of words I had on the other :lol:. Idk what my goal is, other than to keep plugging away here and there - to keep getting back on the train after I fall off. Eta: Yesterday I also wrote 1500-2000 words in an attempt to explain/understand something (there was a lot of deleting and rewriting - much time and thought was expended), and today I wrote 300-400 words on teaching spelling. Agreeing with a pp, 1000 words is a nice daily amount, but 2000 is kind of tiring and time-consuming-- when I've done several thousand words a day over several days in the past (usually in a multi-day attempt to understand something), it's exhausting and kind of life-consuming. I tend to not feel the drive to write anything for over a week after one of those marathons.

I forgot about this. When I started working on spelling with my oldest, she couldn't perceive the middle of words either aurally or visually - she just had a vague and muddled impression of everything but the first and last syllables (and her spelling showed it - the middle of words were a mostly random bunch of letters that roughly followed the visual outline of the word). She's just all-around weak with auditory processing and sequencing (I did a ton of diy work with her on that, plus went through Rewards), but her visual memory is excellent - she just needed to learn to actually *see* the individual parts of the word. And the SYS marking method is how she learned it. We only did seven or so weeks of SYS, till it clicked, but we used the marking system across the curriculum for over a year. We modified WWE to do studied dictation, with her marking the passage to study it. Between that and learning to blend sounds together, she had a huge jump in her spelling - went from misspelling everything beyond CVC words to garden-variety bad spelling - and I think it was enough for her to start picking up spelling from her reading.

I'm doing Spelling through Morphographs with my struggling speller, and it is spelling that gets done here. It does take teacher involvement, but it's completely scripted, so it's open-and-go, no prep. There's about 15-30 min of teacher-led instruction, and then 5-15min of independent work. Overall it takes about 30-40min. It's done a lot to improve her spelling. (She was reading over my shoulder and told me that it's now not challenging (which is a bad thing in her book), but that it has helped her ability to spell.) My oldest is not a linear learner - she tends to struggle, struggle, struggle, and then *bam*, makes a big leap. StM was never really *hard* for her, but she made a leap about a quarter of the way through, and another around halfway through. (We are about 60% through right now.) It's improved my ability to spell orally, as well (a weak point for both of us). Also, importantly, I feel like it's taught *me* how to teach spelling. (I really like working through scripted programs that, in effect, teach me how to teach a subject as I'm teaching it.) There's a placement test - iirc, the pre-test requires the ability to spell CCVCC words and to spell common consonant digraphs (sh, th, ch). IOW, StM expects that incoming students can reliably spell one syllable words by sound - that they can break one-syllable words into sounds and spell those sounds with the most common phonogram. (It took a decent bit of work with my struggling spellers to get them to that point.) For a while, I made dd break all the new base words and morphographs into sounds before giving her the spelling when I introduced them, as a means of reinforcing and practicing the ability to spell by sound (dd's weak point), although I haven't done that since her latest leap. Honestly, recently I've been increasing the difficulty for her - by her request - by adding more morphographs onto the words, because since her latest leap she's been getting annoyed at how "easy" the words they gave were. She doesn't quite understand how thrilling it is to here that spelling is "too easy" after all the years of hard work and bad spelling. (Although she's not as solid as she may think she is - she still misspells 2-3 words in a page of writing - but those tend to be letter reversals, and she will catch them when re-reading.) Another thing I'm doing with her is Touch Type Read Spell for typing, as it follows an OG progression and helps reinforce reading and spelling. She says, "Now *that* is hard." The first module involved a lot of tears, but something clicked in the second module, and now she is aiming to get straight 100s.

I am amazed and inspired at how well so many of y'all are doing, though :).

I think aiming for something resembling consistency is going to be my goal. I sat down to write Thurs evening and ended up several separate and contradictory one sentence summaries, each one increasingly further from the idea I started with. I'm not sure whether those 50-odd words ought to count or not. A big difficulty of mine is that I find it much easier to write *about* my story than to actually *write* the dang thing. I find non-fiction to come much more naturally to me than fiction (which is kind of odd since I read much more fiction than non-fiction). The story-writing mode is not nearly as natural to me as analysis mode. I regularly drop 500-1,000 word posts (this little throw-away post is over 250), and I've written thousands and thousands of words in my private journal trying to understand and apply intriguing ideas I picked up in my research reading. I do discovery writing wrt trying to figure out a new idea all. the. time., easily spilling a few thousand words in a sitting. Yet I persist in wanting to write fiction. I just need to learn story-writing mode. And I do have several scenes already in my head - I mean, I can see them play out - *have* played them out in my imagination multiple times. Just need to get. them. on. paper. Which I suppose is what I'm trying to do through doing NaNoWriMo - if I can just get the scenes I already have in my head written out, I'll count this a rousing success.

Well, I just went and wrote my first word - actually my first sentence (so *six* whole words). Which is actually my 2nd highest NaNoWriMo word count to date ;). Several years, I've been part of the 58% who don't even write one word. So that's one hurdle overcome :).

The whole situation really burns me. It's not fair to high school graduates who successfully did everything they were told to do, and yet are still left unprepared for college. And it's not fair to those who are prepared for (increasingly expensive) college to have their classes spend substantial time teaching what ought to have been mastered in high school. And it's not fair that jobs that don't require college skills nevertheless require college as an easy means to guarantee the high school skills the job does require. Especially because of how dang expensive college is. But I have no idea what *individual* people and businesses and professors can do to effectively push back against this systemic problem, when the system as a whole isn't going to make the drastic changes necessary. Colleges aren't going to refuse to admit unqualified high school graduates en masse, or flunk them out en masse in freshman weed-out classes (which, as I understand it, is what used to happen in easy-admit schools). A large number of businesses aren't going to take chances on hiring high school graduates with a high likelihood of being unprepared for jobs requiring high school skills if they can find enough people with college credits to hire instead. And high schools aren't going to refuse to graduate everyone who is unprepared and admit they are incapable of preparing a large number of their students. So what can individuals do to resist the counterproductive-to-true-learning pressures inherent in the system? *Are* there things good teachers can do to genuinely educate willing but underprepared students without dumbing down the standards for success? Or is the system just too broken to do good by your students and do good by your educational standards?

Reading this thread has made me happy that moving from a non-compliant state to a compliant one made getting a REAL ID automatic and (thankfully) painless. (It was so straightforward, especially compared to the stories here, that I thought that surely our new state must not be compliant yet. But I looked it up, and upon finding out it was, I double- and tripled-checked that my new id is indeed REAL ID compliant. It seems to be - has the spiffy gold star and everything.) In our old state, I kept worrying that the extensions would run out and we'd be stuck needing a passport just to fly domestically. Or, assuming they finally managed to achieve compliance (they are at least trying now), we'd have had to make a special trip to get them, etc., etc. Really glad I magically ended up with a REAL ID because of the move.

I didn't *want* to be a boy, but during puberty I was often terrified I somehow *was* one. IDK, I wasn't really a tomboy, but I wasn't very girly in the usual ways, and I didn't think I looked very pretty. One day after having looked in a mirror at the store with a hat on, and thinking I looked like a boy (and feeling crushed about it), I went home and checked to be sure I hadn't somehow grown a penis or something. I mean, I felt completely ridiculous about it - I was 13 or so - but somehow the prospect that I wasn't really a girl but was somehow a boy in disguise or something just felt so strong and overpowering in that moment. I honestly didn't truly *feel* female until after having kids; marriage, while providing what I thought ought to be strong proof that I was truly a woman (one that I certainly used as rational reassurance), didn't actually overcome the visceral fear. It took pregnancy and labor to do it.

To me the question at hand is: is there something about being able to successfully demonstrate your knowledge in an oral examination, say, that is both a) important AND b) not possible to demonstrate by other means? What is lacked by not demonstrating one's knowledge via a given method, and why does that lack matter? What makes it a hard that *matters*, as opposed to needlessly hard? (You see these sorts of questions come up in questions of rigor. Not all hard requirements are equal. It's hard to do 50 worksheets a night, every night, for homework, and certainly not everyone can do it, but mostly people here think that's a hard that doesn't matter wrt developing the skills that matter. It's also hard to do Latin to a high level, or to learn to write good, logical essays, and likewise not everyone can do it - but that kind of hard is thought to matter, to be worth it. So you don't lack much if you discard hard things that don't cultivate results that matter, but you do lack much if you discard hard things that do cultivate results that matter.) So to me a key question is: which hard things about a given college course *matter*, and why and how do they contribute to mastery; and which ones are needlessly hard, are just hard for the sake of hard, and so can be changed to increase access without decreasing mastery? It's easy to judge the hard things *I* can do as necessary, and the hard things *I* can't do as unnecessary ;), but I think it's important to go beyond that, to really delve the role of the various pieces, to think through what they accomplish, do they actually do what we thought they did, and whether they are worth the difficulty and the exclusion of those who can do everything but those things.

As a practical matter, I suppose I'd document, document, document. Give a pre-test, so I had documentation of who had the necessary pre-req knowledge. Keep track of absences and missed assignments. Keep track of who sought outside help. As much as possible, front-load assignments and such so that I'd maximized my ability to drop students in line with university policy who aren't likely to do the work. Maybe give second chances to struggling students who are faithfully attending and turning in work and otherwise using all available avenues. On entirely different lines, I had a professor who allowed our score on the comprehensive final to be our score for the class if it was better than the average of all our scores (aka your class score could be higher than your final, but never lower) - it allowed for students to catch up and have their final grade reflect their final knowledge. I don't know how many students took advantage of that, but I did. I skated along the (low) average most of the class, but then got myself together, worked through the whole book, and aced the final. As a philosophical matter, I'm finding the debate fascinating over whether using "easier on the student" methods to boost mastery of the same (hopefully challenging) content is "lowering standards" (a bad thing) or "increasing access to mastery" (a good thing) or doing both. I suppose it depends on how much college learning is about mastering high-level content and how much it's about mastering (or exhibiting) high-level learning skills. And how much the content and the learning skills are intertwined. I think it's clarifying the issues in my personal concerns about how much my "the teacher is the bridge between the student and the subject" approach might accidentally lead to stunted growth (aka become the sort of spoon-feeding of the content that undermines the developing of the intertwined skills). In general, I think I'm in favor of teachers deliberately working to *facilitate* the needed skills mastery in their students just as much as to facilitate the needed content mastery. So modifications that function to "teach a student to fish" wrt needed learning skills (instead of leaving them to sink or swim wrt skill mastery) would be increasing access in a good way; but modifications that function as *giving* the students a "skills fish" each class, and thus not requiring them to develop those skills on their own, would be lowering standards in a bad way. Of course, there's a whole 'nother practical issue at play: when a large number of your students really *ought* to have mastered certain needed skills by the time they got to you, but they haven't, and so as a practical matter, you have to deal with it. My dh is facing this in his confirmation classes. His confirmads just don't have the writing skills or the thinking skills or the learning skills they ought to have. He has to either explicitly teach them the lacking skills (and thus take up valuable class time) or drop the things requiring those skills (and thus have a lower level of learning) or keep expecting them to be able to do things they *should* be able to do but that he knows full well they can't do (and have a lot of frustrated and failing kids who aren't learning anything). Honestly, in his case, I've been strongly encouraging option 1: to explicitly teach them the lacking skills. That seems to be the path that leads to maximum learning. I know the situations are different: junior highers versus college students. As well, confirmation is for all kids, while college is optional. So, philosophically, dh has to deal with the kids he has, because "flunking" a bunch of them is just not an option - not just for pragmatic reasons (parental outcry), but also for the sake of the kids - it's better to modify confirmation to fit the kids than it is to declare a bunch of kids as "not confirmation material". (But at the same time as he is working to teach the needed skills as well as the need content, he does require active participation on the part of the kids. If they are failing despite sincere effort, he needs to figure out what needs to change so that their effort yields good results. But if they aren't trying, they aren't getting confirmed - they will have to repeat a year.) But college - especially community college - is becoming more and more a "for everyone" thing. I sympathize with all the arguments that say it *shouldn't* be that way, but what do you do as an individual when the system *is* that way anyway? Maybe it's for some to uphold the old standards, come hell or high water, so that we as a society don't forget what is possible. And it's for others to do their level best to help their students get higher up Mount Parnassus - to genuinely increase their students' knowledge, whatever the starting point, and to get them as close as possible to where they need to be. IDK, I'm sympathetic with arguments that the latter approach is what is appropriate for elementary and secondary education, but post-secondary education simply requires students to be at a certain starting point, and that's that. But so much of community college is about offering a second chance at secondary education - is it fair to hold them to tertiary educational standards? But another big part of community college is offering the early stages of tertiary education, and if tertiary education requires a certain level of skills as well as content, then it does. But when so many students have the content (sort of) but not the skills, is it so awful to just go ahead and teach the needed skills instead of turning them away? Where else would they improve their lacking learning skills, if not at community college? (But as a person who hopes my kids could utilize community colleges for the early parts of college ed, I certainly don't want to dilute the quality and rep of college-level courses at community colleges.)

Oh, good catch! My dd actually did the exact same thing today, and flipped out when I pointed it out to her. She's pre-algebra, not geometry, but she just didn't understand how to write the work, although she already had the correct answer before we ever started figuring out how to show it. I really think lewelma is on to something, that kids who jump straight to the answer and have a hard time showing or explaining it are using thought processes that aren't explainable in the usual linear, step-by-step method. When I was teaching dd to write equations for word problems, she'd already have the answer, and then backfill the intermediate work. She'd often make mistakes in those intermediate steps in the beginning, because she didn't understand what they were or why they mattered - correct or incorrect, they had nothing to do with how she actually solved the problem. It took a lot of work for me to connect her intuitive understanding of the problem to the linear steps. We did a lot of manipulative work, where she did the next step with the manipulatives and I wrote it down, because she could see with her eyes that the manipulative step was true, and she could see that the equation I wrote accurately reflected that step, and it helped give meaning to the otherwise meaningless steps.