Frances
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Posts posted by Frances
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On 4/21/2024 at 9:31 AM, Dmmetler said:
One thing to consider-Organic chemistry (and biochemistry beyond the basic level) requires a different skill set than physical or analytical chemistry. While physical and analytical chem is heavily based on math skills and innate mathematical reasoning, and is very algebraic, Organic chemistry is much more visual, and if you're not good at 3D visualization, will be a struggle. For many students, those 3D visualization skills don't develop before college-age (and it's recommended now that Organic chemistry be sequenced LATE in the college program for that reason, because the difference between even age 19-19 and age 20-21 is apparently statistically significant.). If a kid is talented in art and 3D drawing, they'll likely find O-chem to be easy. But if they aren't. it can be a real struggle.
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4 hours ago, pehp said:
Yes-I think that’s it. The lack of efficiency drives me bananas especially when it results in things like getting 4 hours of sleep because he has procrastinated and has to scramble, or missing fun family stuff because he has let his work snowball. The fallout is irritating for his parents, and seems to result in a cycle of fatigue-crankiness-panic-work-fatigue….which I realize describes college for many of us, but still, I don’t like it!
It may be that I need to give him the rope and see what he does with it. He’s certainly old enough. It is hard, particularly when I also see him sullen or super cranky from suffering the bad effects of his poor choices. I almost feel like we are in a push-pull. We never had that in toddlerhood—guess I’m due for it now. But I do want him to get confident that HE can manage himself without me micromanaging. And I know it’s crucial for him to develop his independence from me—& perhaps this is his way?
His EF skills aren’t great (but mine are really, really strong, so could be his are more typical) so I worry about his ability to function well. At the same time, he’s a theatre kid who is never late for rehearsal, never misses his lines, and has huge backstage responsibilities during shows because everyone thinks he’s so reliable. So I try to remind myself that he CAN do well with tasks and responsibilities when he’s motivated to do so. He just doesn’t seem very motivated at home!
I know it’s tough (been there done that with my now adult son), but I think you’ve answered your own question. Letting him suffer the consequences of his poor time management (maybe even getting less than an A in a class) will likely do much more to help him later in college (and preserve your relationship) then trying to micromanage him now, especially given that he seems to have the ability to function very well when he wants to. Honestly, getting less than an A in a class might be just the thing for him to be willing to listen to some of your time management suggestions.
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On 4/10/2024 at 10:34 AM, Malam said:
I don't think a first grader is behind if they used to not know these. What grade level is it at?
Exactly. My son was very advanced verbally, a voracious reader, and subsequently aced every verbal test he ever took, including on the PSAT, SAT, and MCAT. We were definitely not talking about those types of ideas in kindergarten and first grade in any formal way.
At his age, the most important thing is being immersed in a language rich environment. Listening to books that are beyond his reading level and informally chatting about them is much better, in my opinion, then knowing and discussing terms like main idea, supporting facts, etc. I’d be worried that such things would turn him off even more to reading. Given what I’ve seen in most formal reading programs commonly used in public schools, I’m actually surprised any kids emerge with a love of reading.
I’d stay with the grammar he likes, do tons of read-alouds with informal discussion, provide him with lots of great books at his level for reading practice, do short practical writing like letters to relatives, and maybe introduce dictation and/or copy work as a way to discuss very basic grammar and punctuation. Unless you find other structured things he loves like the grammar program you are using, I would stay away from any formal programs at such a young age.
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I have a vet friend who specializes in veterinary dental work. She doesn’t have her own practice, but travels to a few different locations during the week to do specialized dental work. In the past, she also did some contract teaching in her specialty area for the local vet school, as she lives in the same area and is a grad. I think overall she is happy with her choice of career, although she has mentioned more than once that her new grad son with a BS in computer science made more $ his first year out of college than she will ever make. I think her debt load was pretty low due to living and attending vet school locally (she did undergrad and vet school at the same U) and grew up in the area.
I also know a student who will graduate from vet school this year. It’s all she ever wanted to do and she’d been doing a variety of animal related volunteer work since elementary school. I have no idea how she has funded vet school. I know she found the program very challenging the first year, likely compounded by the pandemic.
I think the advice to not borrow more than you will make the first year is solid. Reading the article linked above reminds me of some of the people we knew when my husband went back to professional school. Personally, I think she was crazy to go out of state and borrow more than the cost of tuition, not that just borrowing that alone wouldn’t have been bad enough. We also had a child, but I worked full time (while homeschooling) and my husband worked summers and we borrowed only enough to pay the tuition we couldn’t cover from earnings and savings (I started full time work the year before he went back to school and we saved everything I made). Being married while attending professional school should ideally mean you can borrow less, not more, since you have a partner who can earn $. I certainly wasn’t earning an engineer’s salary, yet we still managed to borrow so little that it was completely paid by his eventual employer’s loan forgiveness program.
In general, I do agree that state funding for state schools is woefully inadequate. But my husband’s professional school tuition was exactly the same as the vet school tuition at his U (tied for highest amounts), despite the vet students’ education probably using 100x the resources. His program used no special facilities at all, just regular classrooms. While the vet school facilities were expansive and had multiple locations both on and off campus. Not to mention that they had significantly more faculty members for a much smaller program.
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6 hours ago, Grace Hopper said:
Colleen was the wife of the (German, I think?) dairy farmer who sold to Horizons. I forgot Julie may have also been married to a dairy farmer.
I do remember Colleen, but don’t recall what happened to her. But I think this is her ex-husband.
https://www.organicvalley.coop/blog/swiss-alps-to-northern-cascades/
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23 minutes ago, Arcadia said:
Something else that make our withholding for Federal dramatically wrong is that the W-4 does not take into account bank interest. We put more money from savings into CDs last year so Federal tax owed is higher than we expected.
You can make estimated payments throughout the year to account for this, since with CDs the interest earned is known.
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On 3/18/2024 at 4:37 AM, cintinative said:
Slightly off topic, but I saw an interesting video a month or so ago about how we (Americans) have all sort of accepted that we have to pay for a software to prepare our taxes. If you are interested: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000009030739/irs-intuit-tax-season.html The original intent, per the video, was for the government to release a free version of something for us to use. Turbo Tax was free for a bit as sort of a measure to fill the gap until the feds got that going, and then it never happened. I don't know, I hadn't really thought of how silly it was that we are all paying to pay our taxes until that. My kids do use the Turbo Tax free edition, but you can accidentally find the wrong turbo tax site pretty easily.
The IRS is testing a free (for everyone, not income dependent) direct file program in 12 states this year and some states, like mine, also have free direct file programs. These are very similar to Turbo Tax or other tax preparation programs, just without the fees. Hopefully next year it will expand to all states. If you don’t need help, the IRS also has free fillable forms, as do many states.
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12 minutes ago, SKL said:
I disagree. I took stats in grad school for my MBA. The only thing that touched on algebra II was standard deviations. While it was a nice flex to understand that in some depth, it was not actually necessary for a reasonable understanding of social study data. (And many of my classmates had never taken algebra or had no memory of it.)
You had MBA classmates who had never taken Algebra!?! I’m sorry, but I find that impossible to believe unless your grad program took all comers and you were basically just purchasing the degree. That they had forgotten most of their Algebra, yes that is believable. But likely the problem solving skills they developed while taking Algebra and other advanced math classes were still with them to some degree.
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11 minutes ago, EKS said:
What's interesting is how far do you back off? I mean, that is really the question.
Calculus shouldn't be a requirement for social workers (which I absolutely agree with, btw). Should precalculus be? Algebra 2? What sort of statistics should they understand? You can teach statistics pretty qualitatively, which I would say is appropriate for the vast majority of social science majors.
I could see math through Algebra II plus Statistics as appropriate minimum college prep high school requirements.
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3 minutes ago, SKL said:
My kids are currently taking stats in high school and will take stats again in college and probably grad school. They do need to have a basic understanding of study results etc. Much more practical than the graduation requirements!
Stats is very different from algebra, trigonometry, and geometry. Yes, I've taken all of them.
Stats extensively uses Algebra. They couldn’t have succeeded in Statistics without it unless it was only a conceptual course.
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3 minutes ago, EKS said:
Not really. You need a basic understanding of algebra and an ability to push buttons on a calculator (or better yet, prepare Excel spreadsheets).
Having taught it for many years, I would disagree. Solid algebra skills, math sense, and good problem solving skills are what lead to success in statistics.
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5 minutes ago, SKL said:
My kid wants to be a social worker. Please explain why she needs to understand integrals.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for calculus to be a requirement for social workers. But I would certainly hope she’s required to take at least one statistics class for her degree, as it would seem quite important in that field. And that means solid algebra skills through Algebra II.
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6 minutes ago, Heartstrings said:
My sociology degree required stats but it wasn’t the same as the stats in the math department. It was a stats for humanity majors.
I would assume it was algebra based statistics you took, not calculus based statistics from the math department. One still needs two years of high school algebra for algebra based statistics. I taught it for several years and students who didn’t have solid algebra skills struggled.
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2 hours ago, SKL said:
I agree that not everyone needs that level of math.
My kids entered high school in 2020. At that time and until this past year, all high schoolers in my state were required to take at least Algebra I & II + geometry (and my kids' Alg II class included some trigonometry). They also advised that in order to be "college ready," they would need an additional year of math on top of these.
Even though my kids are college bound, they will never use Algebra II (or trigonometry) concepts in their college programs. Really, only kids who are planning to go into science-y fields will "need" that. The only other logic I could see in requiring it would be to prove you have the smarts. But why? Why screen out non-mathy kids from non-mathy professions (or make things extra hard for them)? My eldest needed a tutor (in addition to the teacher's after-school help) to avoid failing Algebra II. As it was, she passed it with a D, destroying her otherwise good GPA and affecting her college scholarship. 😕 It's a shame.
You’re absolutely sure neither child will ever need to take a basic college statistics class? An awful lots of majors outside the humanities and arts require it and they would generally need both Algebra I and Algebra II before taking it, although not trigonometry. So I disagree that only kids going into science-y fields need Algebra II. Business and economic majors, psychology and sociology majors, math majors, etc etc would all need Algebra II.
I also disagree that only “mathy” kids can succeed at classes like Algebra II. That’s certainly not the view in most of the rest of the world. Most college bound kids in other countries are successfully mastering much more math than Algebra II.
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I’d leave it up to her. For some kids, practicing is as much or more fun than competing at tournaments. Hopefully she gets to participate in most if not all of the practice stuff.
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On 1/29/2024 at 12:58 PM, SeekingOne said:
Edited to add: I'd actually be interested in any and all resources. She's two and a half and can count to at least 20 accurately, knows all the letters and many sounds, colors, shapes. I think she'll be bored in preschool next year, other than that she's very social. 😉Hopefully her parents will choose a developmentally appropriate play based preschool rather than an academic one. There’s no need for her to be bored if it’s developmentally appropriate and full of books, language, lots of free play, art, music, large and small motor skill activities, outdoor time, etc.
While teaching reading early is fine if she’s developmentally ready and eager (and mom is willing to stop as soon as it’s not fun), the most important thing is to immerse her in a language rich environment, lots of talking with adults, read-alouds (picture books and chapter books), audio books, etc. This will have way more long term benefits than learning to read at a young age. Similarly for math, the most important thing is to help a child develop number sense through daily life, games, books, etc. Personally, I think so many kids struggle with math in school because neither they nor their elementary teachers often have much in the way of number sense. While there are likely some programs out there to help with this, daily life is full of so many opportunities.
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If they are willing, would it work for the grandfather or great grandfather to talk to your husband?
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23 hours ago, DawnM said:
I have over 10 years when I add in a few jobs I had in college, etc.....
The question is, how much will they NOT allow me to have due to taking a state pension. I am not sure if you have looked at those rules.
It’s not due to taking a state pension, it’s due to not paying in to SS for 17 working years, but rather paying into the pension. Does your SS statement show the income for those 17 years or is it excluded?
Before this provision, there were retirees who hadn’t paid into SS for most of their government career but had enough SS credits from often relatively low paying jobs to get both SS and a pension. And since SS pays larger benefits on a % basis to low income workers, it was considered windfall because their SS benefits weren’t calculated based on their true earnings. Thus the need for the windfall adjustments.
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1 hour ago, SKL said:
I really like staying in an apartment or house type place on vacation. Anytime you're traveling with more than 4 people, hotel options are more expensive than an average airb&b, with a lot less comfort and flexibility. I don't want laws that make this option impossible. I don't know how they're taxed, licensed, etc., but whatever laws are created shouldn't be such that the only beneficiaries are the hotel chains.
I don’t think hotel chains are the only beneficiaries when say a jurisdiction doesn’t allow entire homes (or apartments in big cities) to be used for short term rentals. Often neighbors are very relieved to no longer have to deal with parties, loud noise, police calls, excessive trash, etc. Having the owner on the property prevents most of this from happening. Not to mention more houses available for locals to buy or rent long term, the main thrust of this thread.
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2 hours ago, BusyMom5 said:
And to add to the drama that is AirBnB, those types of rentals are very popular with short-term tenants like traveling nurses, doctors, and other professionals who stay in one area for a few months at a time. It does fill a need for professional housing. I have several friends who have one to three Air BnBs. They get a lot of situations like this: elderly mom is sick, daughter and her kids move in for a month to care for her, lots of traveling nurses and doctors, families considering moving to the area so they rent it for one month, families between houses- buying or selling. There have been a lot that rent for a month or more. Is this "short term?" It's not vacationers- we aren't a vacation destination. Most of the time it's people visiting extended family.
We get lots of traveling nurses here and there are plenty of full basement apartments in homes or accessory dwelling where they can rent. Before VRBO and AirBnb even existed, people here rented out these kinds of spaces for traveling workers, legislators during session, visiting family, etc. and continue to do so. Month to month apartment leases are also not uncommon here.
In a very nice upper middle class neighborhood here a landlord didn’t know her month long renters through VRBO were running a drug operation until the police raided the premises and found a huge stash of drugs, money, and guns. No one called to let her know after the raid, not the police nor her property management company. A neighbor of the short term rental who had previously had to deal with problem renters called her. Incidences like this would be far rarer if the owners and renters were on the same property. In the newspaper article about the incident, police interviewed said people using VRBO and AirBnb for this purpose are becoming increasingly common and they always choose entire houses in upscale neighborhoods.
While I infinitely prefer AirBnb type places to hotels when traveling, we now only rent those where the owner resides on the property due to the devastating impact on housing affordability and availability almost everywhere. I’m not talking a room in someone’s home, but a separate apartment type situation either in the basement or elsewhere on the property. I realize even these types of places could provide long term housing if not being used short term, so are not without issues.
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15 minutes ago, Happy2BaMom said:
That's the way AirBnB started, but that isn't really the case anymore. According to AirDNA (a data & analytics company specializing in vacation rental companies; report available through link), only 38% of AirBnB listings are homeowners with a single listing. In some vacation hot spots, corporate ownership can be up to 90% of the listings.
Which is not to take away from the fact that 38% is still 38%, and those individuals should be exempted from any gov't requirements, restrictions, & taxes that should (IMHO) be applied to corporate & multiple-property ownerships.
I wonder what the % is for VRBO which was always intended to be full properties, not spaces in someone’s home or on their property? Personally, I think the dividing line should be between those who live in the house or on the property as their primary residence and rent out parts as as short term rental and those, whether individuals or corporations, who are using a property purely for short term renting. The latter is really no different than a hotel from a business perspective. Legally, I think it’s much easier to treat properties used for different purposes differently as opposed to treating different types of owners differently, but there are probably others here who are more knowledgeable.
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1 hour ago, Melissa in Australia said:
Here retirement, or superannuation is paid by employers. A percentage of weekly income
People paying 50% or so of income on rent aren't living the high life of holidays involving flying, going on cruises or things like that. At least the ones I know personally aren't.
That’s nice that retirement is paid by the employers. Yes, I would think that people who are spending 50% of income on rent don’t have much left after paying for all of the basics, even if retirement is taken care of by the employer.
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8 hours ago, Mrs Tiggywinkle Again said:
30% seems huge to me, like I can’t imagine it. Is that an actual liveable amount or just what the government considers, and is not really accurate for everyday people trying to make ends meet.
I just sat down and figured it out; our mortgage is 8.6% of our grossly monthly income. We put over 30% right now in retirement and other savings, so that does bring down our net, but I can’t imagine paying more in mortgage and still have money leftover for life things.
I don’t think most people paying 30% or more of their income for housing are putting much if anything towards savings or retirement.
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3 hours ago, SKL said:
Regarding air b&b, I would agree with limiting the number of units a person can own before they get taxed like a hotel or however that works. I don't think the government should prevent private individuals from letting other private individuals borrow their homes for a fee. I mean, remember when this sounded like a fabulous idea? Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Where I think things are heading here is distinguishing between owner occupied short term rentals and non-owner occupied ones. If you live in the home and want to rent out a room or basement apartment or backyard apartment or whatever, fine. Obviously it’s better for the housing shortage if you do so to long term renters and not short term ones, but it looks the government here is going to leave these alone.
They are looking much more closely, however, at any homes used only for short term rentals, so basically as a business. Various proposals are being floated from restricting their number and location to taxing them like businesses rather than residences and several things in between.
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Conflict and the resistant teenager
in High School and Self-Education Board
Posted
Your post reminded me that I also did weekly planning meetings with my son. Sometimes we even went to a coffee shop for a hot drink and a treat while planning.