For the sake of conversation, assume there is no extended family. Would they take the child? What if the parents were LDS? Or Muslim? Or atheists? I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that a non-profit corporation could become the guardian of a child.

What I'm scratching my head over is how this process happens (sorry if this is really a S/O). I don't know anything about how orphanages or the foster system works, but it seems bizarre to me that private organizations can become guardians of children. If, God forbid, a Catholic family died in a car crash, leaving a young child behind with no other family, might that child end up in this orphanage?

Must the orphans be Protestant as well? How are they placed?

Am I the only one creeped out by the video? A device that's always on, and always connected to Amazon, with a super-sensitive microphone -- sure, I'll put one of those in my bedroom.

I associate the term "close reading" with college-level lit crit, especially with poetry: parsing every word, checking the OED for alternative definitions, thinking about author's word choices, style and syntax, etc. I'm not sure there's much place for it in primary education.

When I was in college, back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, my greatest resource wasn't the professors or advisors or deans or administrators (except for department secretaries, they really know everything). My greatest resources were my peers in my major, especially those ahead of me. I don't mean to pick on the OP, but I see this often in these college threads, where it seems like no college student ever talks to their peers about this kind of thing. Now, I wouldn't 100% rely on the opinion of any one student, but if you talk to many students, especially graduating seniors, you can get an immense amount of useful, practical information, about which professors to take classes from, what classes to take, ideas for minors, degree requirements, job prospects, internship or research opportunities, etc. So, I would push this question back on the OP's dd: how many years are her peers taking to graduate? Are they not getting grandfathered into changing requirements? How many of them are double majoring?

5 and half years doesn't sound unusual for a double major, especially if you are counting the one year of CC, where not everything may transfer, or even if all classes transfer, they may not satisfy specific degree requirements. However, usually, when you declare your major, the major requirements are fixed then. Any changes to requirements should only impact students who have not yet declared. And she should certainly get the major requirements in writing, and check off those that she's completed, and bring this list in to her regularly scheduled meetings with her adviser.

I would really like to be able to memorize poetry and have my kids memorize poetry. So, I was a bit disappointed in the book because none of the methods seemed relevant to this task.

And I'd agree with everything you've said, but I don't get the big focus here on "distractors". Several posters above have complained about difficulty taking "multiple choice tests with distractors", as if multiple choice tests without them were just fine. I guess their points would have been clearer if they had just said "multiple choice tests". And in general, I think it would be clearer if instead of saying "my dd doesn't test well", they said: "dd does better on open-ended tests vs. multiple choice tests" or "dd does better on tests with fewer time constraints" or "dd does better on essay questions than MC"

I still don't understand. Consider the question: 1/2 + 1/3. One set of possible answers, with "distractors" is (Kiana's example): 5/6, 2/5, 1/6, and 3/2 another set of possible answers is 5/6, 0, 100, pi I would say that the first one (with "distractors") is just a better test. The second one, perhaps a student with better test taking skills could get the right answer without even doing the problem. Are you saying that you daughter would do substantially better on the second test because of anxiety? I would say the first test is more content driven and the second test can be gamed more easily.

I'm worried that computerized exams bring with them a whole new set of problems. Even doing khan academy online quizes, I've had to teach: type your answer in. STOP. read it back to yourself, so that you make sure that have correctly typed in what you want, and there's no double keystrokes or missing ones. Computerized grading of essays seems horrible to me. Adaptive online tests, where you can't skim the whole test, then go back and do the easy ones, requires new testing strategies.

So, what's a distractor, and why is it bad to have them? If you have to have multiple choice tests, seems like Kiana's list of frequent wrong answer is exactly the thing you want on the test to make sure the student can get the right answer.

But please turn off your cell phones.

And what would happen if the DE teacher gave the university bio test to his students? No doubt they would all do poorly, but they probably wouldn't do equally poorly, so you could still grade it on a curve, and hand out some A's, B's, C's and D's. Does this mean the students who received A's understood the material at the appropriate level? No, but that's what can happen with curved grading.

I guess I don't know exactly what you mean by a "difficult" test. Too often, using a curve to grade is a crutch by a lazy exam writer. If the purpose of a test is to validate that students have learned what was taught, and a "difficult" test has questions that no one in the class can get right, what does that show? If the exam is curved (and why a bell curve, at that?), it effectively throws out those questions, but students may have wasted time trying to get those right, and the instructor may have wasted an opportunity to measure whether some other aspect of the syllabus was learned.

I think there's a bigger question here concerning what grades mean, and the role of assessment in education. For me, ideally, there should be some objective measure of what a student should know after taken some class. To often, it seems that grading on a curve is the result of a poor match between the difficulty of the exam and what the students have learned. We're all heard horror stories about exams that have absurdly low mean scores. Grading on a curve doesn't fix the underlying problem, if most of the students didn't learn the material on most of the test: either the test was poorly written, or the students didn't learn what they were supposed to.

Hang on a second here. Many (most?) English usage experts now tell us that it is fine to split an infinitive in English. Latin's grammar rule are somewhat different than those for English. It is just silly to say that we shouldn't split infinitives in English, just because it is structurally impossible in Latin. Indeed, the periphrastic verbals in Latin are frequently split, even in the formal Latin of poetry. This "split infinitive" example is a place where we can't directly apply Latin grammar to English.

I'm not sure that study of Latin (or any foreign language) eliminates the need for English grammar study, though it certainly helps. However, Greek, and especially Attic Greek, is so much harder than Latin, that fewer people study it, and get to the same level of competency that they would in Latin. And the alphabet is the least of the difficulties -- there's Greek's love of participles, the middle voice and much more complex vocabulary to deal with.

I think that Hunter has really touched the heart of the matter when she says the first thing you need to decide are your goals for classical language learning. If your goal is to read the classics in the original language, that's going to take a lot of focused work, but getting a tiny head start by starting early (say, before age 13) isn't really going to help much. I believe that those years are better spent on other activities, such as learning how to pronounce spoken foreign languages, or playing in ditches, etc. However, if your goal isn't reading, but rather learning a bit about how grammar works with inflected languages, learning some vocabulary, then the elementary years are fine for that.

I have to completely disagree with the above. Are you saying that there is no fitness benefit to jogging or running, unless you are going at an all-out-sprint? For most people, swimming at even a slow speed raises your heart rate above walking and into the jogging range.

One of our local USA swim clubs (and a competitive one, at that), offers a "swim clinic" option, where the kids swim twice a week, given sets and supervised by a coach, but they aren't expected (allowed?) to go to swim meets. You could ask around and see if you've got a local club that offers something like this. If she's interested, another option might be to investigate synchro. It isn't lap swimming, but synchronized swimmers work hard in the water. There are competitions, but they can be more team oriented.

The different games are mostly just different maps. Some have a few extra wrinkles, like tunnels and central train stations. I think the biggest differences is that some of the maps are smaller than the US one, and perhaps play better with fewer people.

Color me skeptical, but I bet there's a whole bunch of coaches, and even alumni, who would be happy to break these kinds of rules, as long as the only penalty is writing a letter of apology.

I'm as revolted as anyone, but I'm curious what kind of punishment would be appropriate. Seems like the people most responsible have all retired, and they will face minimum punishment. Vacating a 10 year old championship seems toothless. UNC threw the poor whistle blower under the bus, seems like they owe her huge compensation. Assuming the cheating is all in the past, banning the football or basketball teams from playing for a season seems to punish the innocent. If athletes and non athletes were systematically getting credits and degrees for work they did not do, seem like UNC needs to have their accreditation organization re-audit the university. I think the University should be ordered to offer every single one of the athletes who was encouraged to take the fake classes a real, four-year scholarship, with no athletic strings attached.

A much more insidious problem that few are talking about is the hours fast food or other service industry workers can get, and how steady they may be. Frequently, people who really want to work 40 hours a week are only scheduled for half that, or less, and the schedules are only posted a few days in advance. Trying to schedule a second part time job, or school, or child care, or doctor appointments, etc. around a work schedule that varies from week to week can be a nightmare.