Hey @Dmmetler - how did it work out? I'm especially curious because my dd16 has started as our church accompanist a month ago, and it's a lot more work and time commitment than I realized. I just spent several hours making up a practice chart through Christmas, because with all the extra services and the new service setting to learn (itself the equivalent of about 10 hymns), we've got to plan ahead (there are 14 unique hymns between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, for example, and that's with dh deliberately repeating several - most years he tries *not* to repeat, and there are over 20 unique hymns between the two services). She's currently spending 30-60min a day, 6 days a week, working two weeks ahead, for three hymns a week plus one liturgical setting, with no preludes/postludes or other special music yet. She'd rather practice hymns than do school <sigh>, but I'd rather she didn't eat up school time with it. I can't figure out how much is just the brutal learning curve when she has no hymn repertoire at all, how much is that we need to work smarter, or how much is that it's just plain hard work <shrug>. In any case, I can't fathom how your student was able to fill in at short notice - how was she managing?

The podcast is specifically talking about three cueing - the theory that good readers don't process the individual sound/letter correspondences but instead use various cues to make predictions about the text, namely context/meaning cues (does it fit with the meaning of the sentence/story/picture), grammar cues (what part of speech are you expecting to go here), and visual cues (does it fit with the letters). Per the podcast, three-cueing came about in the 50s and 60s; prior to that the main options were phonics and the look-say method of whole word teaching (Dick and Jane, for example). The podcast descibes the difference between three-cueing readers and look-say readers (namely, three-cueing uses much longer and phonetically complicated words much earlier, because they are conceptually easy - "elephant", eg.) WRT relevant research disproving the three-cueing theory about how good readers read, the timeframe was 70s and 80s, but even into the 90s it wasn't well-known in elementary education, even though it was well established in cognitive science. WRT people who have difficulties reading supporting whole word teaching, my mom's not in education or anything, but her personal experience was that phonics makes no sense to her (she can't use phonetic pronunciations in dictionaries) and that if she'd been taught phonics instead of whole word (of the look-say variety), she'd never have learned to read. She actually reads and spells very well, but there's several words that she never connected the spoken word with the written word for decades (such as awed - she read it as a-wed). But I have the same auditory processing issues she does (I learned whole word very young, and used my reading ability to work backwards with phonics activities in school), as do my kids; the kids all flunked the Barton pre-screening, indicating that they didn't have the auditory processing skill necessary to learn to read from phonics teaching. I had to work really hard to remediate them and build up those skills (remediated myself in the process). AKA my mom might not have been wrong in her self-analysis - regular phonics teaching very well might have been a disaster for her. My mom remembers being taught, via whole word in school. I do not remember, probably because my mom taught me very young (using the Teach Your Baby to Read flashcard method), probably 15-24mo. Per family stories, I was reading words I hadn't been taught before I turned three. I remember reading chapter books when I was five, but as far as I'm concerned, I've always known how to read. I'm not 100% certain what all was done in school. In 2nd grade we definitely did all these phonics sheets, and I remember not understanding how you could do them if you couldn't read already (in retrospect, because my auditory processing was so bad - I just thought I "wasn't an auditory learner"). But in 1st we had reading groups, and I was in the group that already knew how to read, so we just read through readers together - Frog and Toad, and such. I don't know what was done in other reading groups. Interestingly, though my oldest was 6 when we started reading lessons, and they were extremely hard work for the both of us, she doesn't particularly remember learning how to read. Even more interestingly, despite the fact she was *horrible* at spelling throughout elementary, and we worked so very hard at remediating auditory processing as part of learning to spell - years of hard work - she's practically forgotten all that, too. She's actually good at spelling now, and all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into getting there, well, it hasn't stuck in her brain at all - she's forgotten all the emotions that went with and most of the details. And my middle cried in 2nd grade over worrying about reading in front of her Sunday School class, and she doesn't remember any of that, either - having successfully learned to read in the end, and not really experienced any trauma other than hard work in the process, it's like it never happened <shrug>.

I was able to find links to the transcripts here: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

It was the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene recently (07/22), and I learned this year that her traditional title has been "Apostle to the Apostles" - your post reminded me of that :).

Lifelong LCMS Lutheran. My childhood church was kind of evangelical-adjacent, but I became interested in theology in college and more serious about Lutheran distinctives. Was influenced by Radical Lutherans in my 20s (kind of postmodern Lutherans, serious about Lutheranism but not too concerned about continuity with tradition), went through a crisis of everything-but-faith in my mid-30s when I realized I was 95% secularized without meaning to be and didn't understand hardly anything about the faith or how to live life, delved into more historical sources for theology and overall tried to understand and grasp a more pre-modern sacramental Christian approach to the faith. Succeeded enough to build enough of a foundation to not feel like I was flailing in the void, and that I could actually explain most of the fundamentals to myself and others, and even know how to apply some of it to living life.

We do require church attendance, but not as an official "rule" so much as it is just what we do. (Also we do have a solid reason for *why* it's "what we do" - to receive God's gift of salvation through Word and Sacrament.) And so far it's not been a problem - our teens are on board with going to church. My parents and dh's parents did the same, likewise with no pushback from us, and all of us kids have stayed in church throughout college and adulthood. I pray that our kids continue to believe and attend church (that God keeps us all in the faith is my most common prayer). I don't know what I'd do about serious pushback, other than trying hard to address reasons and solve everything that can be solved without leaving church and the faith, but our kids refusing to go would grieve me tremendously.

I don't agree with your assumption, although I would agree that it's a common *non-religious* framing of the issue, to see religion as just a separable add-on to regular life ("regular life" being inherently secular for all). For (at least some) religious, religious truths are truths about the regular, real world we all live in - and thus underlie every aspect of regular life. It's a whole way of explaining life, the universe, and everything. It leads to wanting different things, and wanting the same things in different ways and for different reasons. And, vitally, it involves ordering life around the central problem of existence and how it can be solved or escaped. These things *matter*. You wouldn't want your child to fall down a conspiracy hole and use falsehoods to explain the world - where it's not just "seeing and doing things differently", but seeing and doing things that are in fact false and do in fact cause harm. And however you chose to deal with it, you probably would be actively involved in trying to guide them - because how your child decides in this *matters*. And whatever problems your child was having that led them to that path, you would want to help solve them *without* them rejecting truth or embracing falsehoods. That's what religion is - a (meant-to-be) true way to explain and respond to the world, with stakes that *matter*.

Vote for #1 - the quotation marks just read like scare quotes to me, and I don't know of any formal reason to have them here. I vote "yes, they belong" to all three. In the first sentence, you are joining two clauses with a conjunction, which requires a comma. In the second sentence, you have an introductory dependent clause, so you'd use a comma. In the third sentence, I think the comma is optional, depending on the meaning/emphasis you are going for - with the comma, the "along with" phrase is more set off, given more emphasis, than without the comma. The first comma is optional (short introductory adverb phrase can either have or not have a comma; a longer one should always have a comma). The second comma comes between the main clause and a dependent clause, so it is needed.

The problem as I see it is that when he squared both sides, he did it wrong - it should have been [-sqrt(z-1)]^2, not -[sqrt(z-1)]^2 - the parentheses should have enclosed the negative, not excluded it. So he should have ended up with z-1 = 9, not -(z-1) = 9. Does that make sense?

It makes sense to me. My dd had a mental health crisis earlier this year, but people outside the immediate family wouldn't have noticed, because she was at her best outside the house, with plenty of people around and things to do. They didn't see her at home, where she refused to be alone, and couldnt sleep except in our room (and often not even then). It was being alone, with nothing to distract her, that she couldnt handle - but that's not visible from the outside.

The Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians series, written by Brandon Sanderson and narrated by Ramon de Ocampo, is very entertaining - I genuinely prefer the audiobooks to the print books, the narration is so good.

I used dictation day by day with my middle. We'd done a level of spelling you see beforehand, and used the sys marking system with it - idk if they are intrinsically very similar, but they do combine well (love the sys marking system - used it with every LA thing we did in upper elementary). I just printed it out, sized to fit the page - it made the print a lot bigger, which was good for my dd. Idk if it was a huge help, but my dd liked it and it easy to do and I do think we saw some modest benefits. I have no idea the actual instructions, but we did it like we did the prepared dictation sections of WWE (with added sys markings) - dd would mark the passage and copy the passage in the morning, then write it from dictation in the afternoon.

Not natural, but my parents have success with putting a bunch of roach traps (the black enclosed ones) under the furniture in every room. Whenever they start seeing them again, they replace the traps. (I think they replace every 6-12mo.) Tip: Date the traps, so that if you are lazy and just shove more under without digging out the old ones, you can tell which are the good ones whenever you get around to it. We just spray, inside and out, twice a year, once in late spring and once in late summer. We do it because of the venomous insects (I wouldn't pay to spray just for roaches), but it keeps the roaches down, too. If I see one around, I throw a new roach trap or two under the furniture, but mostly I don't see them.

We have this. Looking through it, a lot more of our hymns are in this than I thought, plus several unfamiliar titles have turned out to have familiar tunes.

Also, the Guitar Supplement for Christian Worship isn't too pricey; it doesn't have all the hymns, but it has a lead sheet for 67 of them - that could be helpful.

Here's a link to the accompaniment version of the WELS hymnal that came out in 1993, Christian Worship: https://online.nph.net/christian-worship-accompaniment-for-hymns.html Her church likely has one floating around already, if she can find it - just have to share it with the other volunteer. Here's the link to TLH on CPH's website: https://www.cph.org/c-2813-the-lutheran-hymnal.aspx - they even sell the organist edition, too. It's also listed on the WELS publisher, Northwestern Publishing House, too, albeit out of stock. I hadn't realized WELS used it, too.

Our previous pianist said she'd pick out a strong singer in the congregation and use him/her as a guide to speed, pacing, etc. She also offered to bring in a second keyboard and let dd play alongside her, to help her learn and get comfortable - I wonder if the other volunteer would be willing to do something like that. I really want to know which three weeks he meant. In our (LCMS) hymnal, Love Divine is in the Sanctification section, which isn't really tightly tied to particular Sundays the way some other sections are (Holy Week, Holy Trinity, etc.) I'm curious if the WELS hymnal is different (I think dh has one at church - will have to look), or if they had a Sanctification focus for particular weeks in the Season of Pentecost, or what.

Not Catholic, but sacramental realist (Lutheran) - fwiw, Lutherans (and I believe Catholics are the same) don't consider Jesus' baptism to be where Christ established the Sacrament of Baptism, but rather Christ's words in the Great Commission: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." So it's not about how John baptized Jesus, but what Jesus commanded His disciples to do. I was discussing this with my dh (a Lutheran pastor) this morning (it was old news for him - apparently his circles discussed it last year), and he said that he thought it was bad wording which ought to be stopped, but that he didn't think it was enough to make the baptism invalid. Generally our focus has been on it being a Trinitarian baptism - "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" (not Jesus only, or "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier", etc.) - and the necessity of both water and Christ's words, to be valid.

My dh is an LCMS pastor (and my oldest dd has an open invite to become the church pianist, if she ever gets up the courage). For our services, we have the liturgical music (mostly the same week to week, although we rotate between three different settings every few months, which each have different music), four hymns (opening hymn, hymn of the day, distribution hymn, and closing hymn), and preservice/postservice/offering/extra-communion-music. The hymns and the liturgical setting are picked by people not-the-musician, and the musician's expected to use the hymnal settings (or simplified versions of the hymnal settings), and they are the most important ones, too. (Which is to say I think your focus on learning to sightread from the hymnal's a great idea.) The pre/post/offering/communion music are kinda extra - it would work fine to just play one of the week's hymns before the service (often hymn of the day), one of the week's hymns after the service (closing hymn again is fine), and another during the offering (hymn of the day again would be fine); extra communion music could be one of the service hymns (probably the distribution hymn played quietly again) or she could learn a communion-themed piece and play it each week. If she had extra time, or as she built up her hymn repertoire, she could learn a couple of "fancier" versions of hymns that match the liturgical season (Lent, Easter, etc), and use them for those sections - I bet her church has lots of preludes and postludes she could look through, see if any are at her level. (The norm of most LCMS churches I've been to is match preludes/postludes to the liturgical season, and often the postlude is a version of the closing hymn, while the prelude is often a version of the hymn of the day. And for a novice church musician, I think using the regular hymnal version as a prelude/postlude is just fine.) Which is to say, when planning with my dd, we've been putting our focus on getting solid on the liturgical music and on sight-reading hymns, and she can just use easy hymns for the "quiet background music" parts. There's no need to get fancy or get extra music unless she really wants to (esp because, at our church, the only use for non-hymnal music is for the background music). Also, if it's not ridiculous timewise, it might be worthwhile for her to spend an hour or so each week going over and familiarizing herself with the upcoming hymns, even if she's not scheduled to play, so she's ready and also building up her hymn repertoire. Our hymn schedule is usually set at least a month in advance, and as the pastor's daughter, it ought to be easy to get the info.

We diagram Latin - I've found it to be useful. It's a good way to work with the grammar without going straight to translating. We change up the main line order a bit to follow the usual Latin S-O-V order, and we use an asterisk to indicate where a word is implied, such as when the subject is implied by the verb. E.g. Nautam sum. * | nautam | sum But otherwise we basically follow English diagramming rules - whatever the word is doing in the sentence, English or Latin, it's diagrammed in the same way. The only times we've had problems is when we weren't sure what a given form *was* doing in the sentence <shifty>, which is a bigger problem than just not knowing how to diagram it. It's why I like diagramming - you can't fool yourself into thinking you understand it while you are actually iffy on parts, because the parts of the sentence you can't put on the diagram are generally the parts you are iffy on, and the diagramming brings it to light. ETA: Resource-wise, The New First Steps in Latin has an appendix on diagramming.

Interestingly, I read recently that a very common traditional interpretation for both Christians and Jews was that the restored children were in fact the children who had died - that God had resurrected them, thus making it a true restoration.

Basically, the reciprocal of (2+4/5) is 1/(2+4/5), which, as your student discovered, *isn't* the same as 1/2 + 1/(4/5) - your student forgot the distributive law, there. In the process of working through the complex fraction 1/(2+4/5), step one is turning (2+4/5) into an improper fraction anyway.

Oldest dd flunked the Barton pre-screening test (which is screening for whether you have sufficient phonemic awareness to learn to read from phonics teaching) as a fluent reader. I had taught her with straight phonics, and after a lot of struggle, something had clicked and she took off reading. At the time I'd thought phonics had finally clicked for her, but turned out it what clicked was the ability to learn from phonics teaching without having the necessary skills to learn phonics <sigh>. She'd always been a poster child for whole language - expert at using picture cues, context cues, grammar cues to supplement/supplant her weak phonics skills - and when she first started reading fluently, she was reading almost completely visually despite exclusive phonics teaching. It showed when she tried to pronounce words not in her oral vocabulary - she'd be inevitably wrong, often so wrong I couldn't even figure out what word she was trying to say without looking at it. But she had a good oral vocabulary for her age and a good memory - once she heard and grasped the oral pronunciation once, it was there for good. So it only showed up on "hard" words - words you'd not expect a 7yo to read well anyway. But unlike her reading, her spelling was atrocious. She couldn't spell anything past CVC words (not even simple blends). She couldn't hear the insides of words and she also didn't visually perceive the insides of words. So she'd get the first and last syllable right and guess at the letters at the middle, matching the general outline of the word with no regard for phonetics whatsoever - it was a pretty good illustration of how she perceived words while she read. So I used Spelling You See's color-coded marking system to help teach her to perceive the individual phonograms of a word. And I used a lot of things to build up her phonemic awareness: had her do lots of O/G-style reading and spelling with the sound pictures from Dekodiphukan (was a nice bridge between her visual strengths and her auditory weaknesses - LiPS likewise uses visual markers to help kids learn to hear and manipulate sounds they otherwise can't perceive), did a learn-to-read-by-spelling approach to learning cursive (which stealthily remediated phonics), did Rewards Reading (a morphographic approach to multisyllabic words, reading emphasis), did Spelling Through Morphographs (a morphographic approach to multisyllabic words, spelling emphasis), and did Touch, Type, Read and Spell (O/G approach to typing - yet another pass through phonics). We started working on it in 3rd, and finished typing in 8th, and she went from atrocious spelling in 3rd to garden-variety bad spelling in 5th to pretty decent spelling in 9th. She can write by hand and not have to be embarrassed at the results, and she can type effectively. She also had a lot of trouble with both handwriting and oral composition in mid-elementary. When oldest was 7yo and middle was 5yo, I did handwriting with them both for a year. At the end, middle had improved while oldest hadn't (middle now had better handwriting than oldest). As well, she couldn't copy things down from a board - very slow, and left out several letters. Learning cursive helped a lot with handwriting (as well as helping a lot with reading and spelling) - learning it was very hard, and we took a very slow and steady approach, ending up doing something like a Cursive First SWR approach (something meant to teach reading and spelling as well as handwriting) to learn cursive. But it paid big dividends (and she needed the phonics/spelling work, too). WWE helped a lot with both spelling and composition. She loved it because it was literature-based and she loved to read, and it was very gentle (we started with WWE2 two years "behind"). She writes stories in her spare time, now. As well, she had trouble with showing her work in math - she could see the answer but not explain how she found it. Anything that involved explaining things step-by-step was very hard for her. A *lot* of school for her has been me helping her learn how to connect her holistic intuitions to external step-by-step explanations, across subjects. But math is where we hit it first. In music (she takes piano lessons and is fairly serious about it), she's had a problem with rhythm, specifically with connecting the explicitly worked-out count to how she *feels* the piece as she's playing. When she started, she was completely blind to the metronome - had no meaning to her, she'd play with no consideration whatsoever to the metronome's beat, like it wasn't even there. When she had to do metronome work, I'd learn to sing the piece to the metronome and she'd match my singing. (Having to hold the beat against her *really* improved my rhythm, lol, as well as gave me insight in how to get the rhythm into your bones.) Now she's gotten better - she can play below-level stuff to the metronome and hear whether she's on or not. And when I work with her on at-level stuff, I don't have to work as hard to drag her onto the beat anymore. And her teacher did something with her recently that might have helped things click, metronome-wise.

When you say "completely absent phonemic awareness", what all can't she do? I'm assuming she can't identify rhyme, can't reliably tell if sounds are the same or different, can't clap syllables, can't blend oral syllables or phonemes into a word, can't break an oral word into syllables or phonemes, can't add or delete sounds or syllables from oral words. (Also, I'm assuming she's reading mostly by sight - with next to no phonemic awareness/processing, phonetic reading's just about impossible, no matter how much phonics instruction she's had.) Back when I was looking into all this, LiPS (Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program) was the gold standard program for building up the missing connections. Very good program, but a steep learning curve (here's the notes I wrote up when I was working to wrap my head around it). Also pretty pricey, although I was able to buy used and make most of my own manipulatives and come in around $130. Since then there's a still pricey but more user-friendly alternative, Foundations in Sound, that covers the beginning sections of LiPS, designed to give kids what they needed to start Barton. WRT "surface stuff" vs "underlying problem", my experience was that it's wasn't so much a *mistake* to do surface stuff (by which I mean pre-school phonemic awareness activities), as it was that my kids simply couldn't *do* the surface stuff at all. Really, it wasn't so much "surface stuff" as it was "stuff that assumed less of a problem/more developmental skills in place" than my kids had. If they could have done it, it probably would have been helpful, but they just couldn't do it. I have the second book you linked, but I never really used it, idk why - it looks good, though more of a first-level intervention, as opposed to LiPS's super hardcore intervention. Since you have it, you might as well try it, see if your dd can do any of it. If she can, you might as well move through it unless and until she hits a wall. I will say, one thing about already-reading kids with phonemic processing deficits - they are usually really good at using non-phonemic clues to subvert the purpose of phonemic awareness activities, lol. Something to watch out for.

I'm assuming that they are just giving you known-to-be-valid syllogisms to start with for practice - that in real life, using it "in the wild", you'd be using it to prove the validity of unknown syllogisms. (It's like learning math - usually they just ask you to prove that such-n-such is true, instead of determine *whether* such-n-such is true. That way, you can be sure any difficulties in your proof come from your imperfect understanding and not because the thing isn't actually true in the first place.) Also, there's a difference between an asserted-to-be-valid syllogism and a *proven*-to-be-valid syllogism; just because someone tells you it's valid doesn't *prove* it's valid - if you accept its validity on assertion, it's based on your trust in the person doing the asserting, not based on the syllogism having been proven true. Just in general, indirect methods of proof are usually used when more direct methods are either impossible or would be very difficult.