There's books, right?

You know what professors hate? Students sniveling about grade and grade-grubbing. You know what they really hate? The high achievers who get the best grade in the class and still complain about the grading. You know what professors like? Engaged students who really want to learn the material they have to teach. Professors have a lot of "soft power", beyond just giving out grades. Staying on a good relationship with professors can be key to being recommended for internships, jobs, and graduate schools. I would recommend that your student go to office hours regularly, to help the professor remember who he is, and to only bring up this test in the context of wanting to understand why he missed the questions he did miss. And maybe, to bring up in passing something joking and kidding like "I didn't think the first test was too hard, I found it interesting and challenging -- I hope you don't make the others ones too easy just because of the complainers :-) ".

Oh, I totally agree, and I bet that a B.S (or BA) in Math is much tougher than the Masters in Math Ed, and that's where my beef is. I bet SIL would have been a better teacher with a bona-fide Math degree rather than the Math Ed. program.

Isn't this just degree inflation? If a bachelor's degree in math + a teaching certificate had the correct amount of rigor, it would be more than sufficient to teach middle school math. Why is there even such a thing as a master's degree in math education? College is the new high school and graduate work is the new college.

This is mainly about personal preference, but around here the silicone caps are the most popular. A lot of the problems with pulling of hair can be fixed by taking them off underwater and putting them on when the hair is wet.

Maybe this isn't popular, but I think that any of these different methods can succeed or fail, and a lot of that depends on the individual children being taught (or untaught...) , and the strengths and needs of the students should help to determine which philosophy to use.

There's lots of options, but one out-of-the box idea: would he consider ancient greek? It's got some of the grammatical features of Latin, and is a good complement, and would look outstanding on a college application (IMHO).

I think there is a market for these, but it isn't going to be booming. You can find these kinds of things on abebooks and other used book store aggregators for not very much money. Perhaps there might be a bit more value in bundling a bunch of them together and offering the bundle for sale.

Latin 3 gets a bit harder to teach without experience. In the first two years, there's lots of memorization, which is straightforward to teach. Years 3 and 4 should be more about translation of classical literature, which can be a big shock to those not used to the "random" word order, and trying to figure out why some word is dative. Or maybe ablative, or ... One approach is to focus on a "reader", of which there are many. In the legamus series of readers, I might skip Virgil until later, and start with one of the easier authors, either Ovid or Caesar, maybe Cicero. If I were you, I'd also consider the newly released Latin for the New Millennium 3 textbook. This is essentially five or six readers all combined into one big textbook, and there is lots of online help with forums and websites for teachers, and you need not have studied books 1 and 2 to use #3.

If they want to protest something, the letter from the school had the sentence in it, "I do believe the read is worth the while". Ugh. or this "I only have a classroom set; therefore the books are to stay with me and we will read in class" Spending class time to read a book seems like such a waste.

I love it! How about Mater invicta --Mother unconquered (at least not yet...)

When are you going (roughly)? Recommendations for, say, now, might be much different than, say, June. :laugh:

There was a fantastic article in the nytimes a while back that I just can't find now. It was about a boy diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, which I know is controversial now, and I'm not going to try to diagnose your ds online. He was incredibly socially awkward, but the best thing his mom did for him was sign him up for theater classes and productions. He could easily memorize the lines, and it "taught" him how to interact with other people, and as he grew up, he was able to use what he learned from the characters he portrayed in his real life interactions with people. It literally gave him a stage to work on many of his issues. I don't think that just being on his own with a bunch of peers will necessarily cause him to work out his issues, nor will being put in random extracurricular activities. But, with a focused effort, great progress can be made. Maybe your ds is a bit young, but something to think about in the future.

If you don't know the difference between an adjective and an adverb, it will be difficult to correctly know the difference between "good" and "well".

But the real AP exam is still pretty tough, right? So this must be one of those "AP" classes where the students bomb the AP exam, or worse, don't even bother to take it.

I know several girls who have had concussions from playing soccer, but none from heading the ball, all have been from running into another player and hitting their head against another player's head or elbow or something. One had pretty long-term brain damage, and couldn't walk without help for months.

Has she read "The sixty-eight rooms?" It's a mystery set in the Thorne rooms.

Thank you so much for this. Keep in mind that I don't want to seem to mock or belittle people of faith, but I just don't understand these prayer requests, especially for strangers. Can someone please explain this to me, so that I can understand? The belief is that there is an omnipotent God, who could with no effort, say, heal an innocent child dying of cancer. The omnipotent God knows the child is dying, and chooses not to help her, but could have his mind changed if enough mortals pray for it to happen, as if he were running a cosmic polling service? I just don't get it. Now, I can understand the famous CS Lewis quote about prayer not to change God, but to change oneself. But that's just personal and doesn't require any public requests.

I would certainly allow it. London is an easy city to get around it, and a good first choice for foreign travel, as there are few language problems. I highly recommend sending them with the "London Mapguide", which you can get from amazon -- it is a map of the city, but in a small booklet format which fits in a purse, you don't need to fold it up like a traditional map, and it is printed at a scale that is useful for walking around.

David Macauley's Roman City video is age appropriate, contains a lot of great material, and I think you can view the whole thing on youtube.

Completely off topic, but I recently heard a radio program that quoted statistics on how amazingly ineffective CPR is. Something like 5% of all victims of heart attacks who get CPR outside of a hospital survive one month. Ah, here we are: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2013/jan/15/bitter-end/ 90% of doctors surveyed said that they would NOT want to have CPR performed on them if they were in cardiac arrest.

One of my goals is to always have my kids in a position where they can positively surprise me with what kind of work they are capable of doing, but without overwhelming them or giving them work they can't handle. Just like the trivium encourages us to revisit the same subjects in different years, perhaps your kids will also read Aristotle in college. That doesn't mean that should only read him there. Just like we get great value out of seeing Shakespeare plays in the grammar, logic and rhetoric years, and still too learn more in college, reading Aristotle is college is greatly enhanced by having read him earlier.

You can't go wrong with Edith Hamilton and her books "The Roman Way" and "The Greek Way".

I've never been, but I think a trip to the Jimmy Carter presidential library would be a great WTM trip -- I'd love to be able to take mine to each of the presidential libraries in the country.

I think that being close friends with the family might make things worse, if you disagreed about curriculum or a grade or discipline or ...