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Candid

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Posts posted by Candid

  1. I agree with others that there is plenty out there that isn't modern and dark.

     

    Really if you would mostly read works from before the 19th Century you'd mostly be okay. The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Song of Roland, maybe skip Dante, but Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's sonnets and commedies, even his histories, Paradise Lost, so forth.

     

    Once you get to novels, you'll need to me a bit sharper, but Austen can be but a beginning.

     

    And let me suggest that you not avoid dark altogether. One of the darkest novels out there, Crime and Punishment, is also one of the most uplifting. 

  2. I like the color coded list.  But I think Crichton is modern.  And I assumed that Stephenson was Neal, not Robert Louis; so also modern.

     

    Crichton got caught up in a group high light. Presuming Jurassic Park, I changed him to red, never shelved with science fiction which is what I meant to do the first time. 

     

    Stephenson I thought old but could be new. 

  3. I thought they did have full solution manuals for NEM?  I'd have to look, but I thought we had them.  Though I suppose not a lot is still available.

     

    I forgot to mention that!

     

    Presuming they are still available they did exist for NEM 1 and 2 but not for 3 and 4. We rarely used them, but for struggling they can help. 

  4. I have two takes.

     

    One on the size of the average debt: My opinion is that this is irrelevant in terms of personal decision making. Much smarter to not get too caught up in this. Your debt is what your debt is. My nephew is going to U Chicago this fall. They gave him about half of his full load, but that still means $30,000 to $35,000 per year. I don't think he is expecting to get any work study job. Nor do I expect my brother and his wife will kick in more than $10,000 per year and maybe as little as $0. Which means for him to graduate undergrad he will have a load of at least $100,000. I doubt he has any awareness of how that will hit him.

     

    On the overall problem: the thing to do to fix the whole college loan/ college cost problem is to remove the inability of students to have bankruptcy remove the student loan debt. This would put onus on loan givers to begin to vet programs in terms of ability to repay loans. For instance, we might find that some for profit programs will continue to get loans while some Ivy League programs will see their loans dry up because of student inability to repay. Student loans aren't special. The risk of a college loan needs to be evenly applied to everyone involved not just the student taking out the loan as it is with all other loans.  

  5. I think it really depends on the student and the circumstances.

     

    If you need to read something fast Lear is the pick but if you have more time the Odyssey and Lear both have points to both recommend them.

     

    Lear in my opinion is the most disturbing of Shakespeare's tragedies. Last year when my co-op had to take weeks off and the moms taught some Shakespeare, I rearranged the schedule so I would handle Lear for this reason. So with a younger student I might do the Odyssey now and come back to Shakespeare.

     

    On the other hand if the student will never read either in their four years of high school, pick Lear. You can safely read a synopsis of the Odyssey but a taste of Shakespeare is more required in my book. I am firmly convinced you can't understand Penelope until you have reached her age so waiting to read it as an adult is okay. 

  6. I am in the midst of using the NEM series with my second student. He did NEM 1 last year. 

     

    First you got some good pointers: the Singapore math forums will generally get you an answer to a question within a day or two. One tip: if possible type out the problem on the forum don't just put the book and page and problem, sign up so you see all the forums and put your question in the proper forum. 

     

    Next, I found the NEM series easier and more suited to my brain than the primary series. I do not consider my self a math person, but I was good at math. However, I do usually point new people to the DM series which includes more teacher help. 

     

    I have also found the NEM series to be pretty close to self teaching in our house. With my oldest I didn't make this transition until NEM 3 when an outside project that year overwhelmed me. But younger did much of NEM 1 on his own. The classroom exercises function much as proofs do for the students, so they should prove a concept to themselves before NEM introduces it as a rule.

     

    However, I will also say that NEM 1 starts you out at about 200 MPH for the six or so chapters. It does slow down by the middle of the book and the sections where they apply the the algebra the student has learned to geometry were my favorites. A student using this series will never be able to ask when in their life they might use this math, they'll see its real world applications clearly. 

  7. Online classes:

    Physics with Derek Owens

    High School Composition with Laurel Tree

    Latin II with Lukeion

     

    Calculus using Art of Problem Solving text but not the online class

     

    The following falls under Tapestry of Grace which we do on our own. We do everything they have, all of it, wide open.

    Full credits are:

    19th Century History

    19th Century Literature

    Partial Credits (at the end of four years he'll get a full credit for these):

    Church History

    Art History

    Music History

    Government History and Development

    Philosophy

     

     

  8. I actually took a college level course in science fiction. The one thing I don't see on your list is any short stories. The golden age of science fiction was all short stories. 

     

    I also see books that aren't ever categorized as science fiction even though they seem to be in the genre. I see a hodge podge of other works. 

     

    To help you sort through books I've color coded them. The red ones are never shelved with science fiction, I'd remove them for a pure science fiction course. The green ones are the old classics that were written before the genre existed. Purple are from writers of that golden age. Most of the novel length books in this category began as short stories. Honestly, you might be better off returning to the short stories. The rest are a mixed bag of books that I either am not familiar with or are from later periods of science fiction. One thing that you might consider is you need a few more fill in from these later authors. Plus do you want to play around with fantasy at all? The proto fantasy works by folks like Andre Norton the CJ Cherryth might be of interest, but Norton had a long writing time so you might want to make sure you get an early work (the first Witch World for instance). 

     

    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

    Frankenstein

    Portrait of Dorian Gray

    The Invisible Man

    Farenheit 451 (?)

    Hitchhiker’s Guide

    Ender’s Game

    1984 (?)

    Canticle for Leibowitz

    Anathem (Stephenson)

    I, Robot

    2001, A Space Odyssey

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

    Slaughterhouse Five/Cat’s Cradle

    Tripod series

    Alas Babylon

    Childhood’s End

    Starship Troopers

    Dune

    Flowers for Algernon

    Foundation trilogy by Asimov

    Martian Chronicles by Bradbury

    The Island of Dr. Moreau

    House of Stairs

    On the Beach

    A Wrinkle in Time

    Flatland

    Enchantress from the Stars

    LeGuin titles - Eye of Heron and Lathe of Heaven

    Jules Verne

    HG Wells

    Crichton

    Stephenson

    Heinlein - Citizens of the Galaxy; Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

  9. I just wanted to add that everyone can and should approach this differently.  I think it was Candid (?) who did yr 1 TOG R lit pretty much as written including Words of Delight with a group of 9th graders and according to her posts they had a fabulous year.  (If it wasn't you, Candid, I apologize.)

     

    I did and they did. It wasn't perfect. They mostly didn't like Words of Delight but they loved almost everything else. And yes this year we burned through one Shakespeare play a week and as I've posted elsewhere did discussions that equaled what I did in survey courses in college. 

     

    I will say that your attitude to this will set the tone. I set a positive, I love lit (and history, too!) tone with the students. I had one student whose mom always whined about the load, fortunately her dd took her tone from me and was one of my best students. 

  10. I'd keep some things more for him than the university. I doubt that any of that would ever come back. But final papers, exams, copies of transcripts or grade reports from outside sources. At some point he might be happy to have those.

     

    I remember one grandmother who gave her children's papers and art work to their children on the grandchild's same age birthday. 

  11. No, I just teach and do not have my own research program, so I do not have students working on my research with me.

     

    "Independent study" would not be fitting at all, because that suggests that the student simply studies what other people have written about the topic. At the university, we use the term when a student works through the textbook himself instead of attending class and then simply takes an exam; the student has not created any new knowledge, but just filled his brain with things previously known to humankind.

     

    In physics, the term research means working on something that has not been done before:  investigating a system that has not been studied in this way, measured under those conditions, modeled with this method, described by this technique.  Reading about things somebody else has done is simply considered literature study; research is when you do something original.

     

    DD's project will involve a numerical model for a physical system, running computer simulations and analyzing data for various parameter ranges.  I am looking for a term that conveys this distinction to people who tend to think of research as reading and compiling things other people have found out. DD will be "finding out" stuff.

     

    :D

     

    I have nothing else to add other than I would consider having another faculty member supervise this project if possible. If you have been having her take courses at your school, could you do the course under those conditions?

     

    I suspect that because this is her last semester of her senior year, it won't really affect her admission one way or the other, but it could get her more independent research wherever she ends up and having somebody who can write a recommendation about this in appropriate scientific terms to another professor would go far. 

  12. Hmm...the problem with counting private lessons for credit is that most colleges consider this an extracurricular. Part of counting for credit, is the academic perspective. A band or choir student is typically with his or her instructor in class instruction five days per week for an hour and still needs to go home and practice. A private student is rarely with the teacher for more than one hour per week, and the requirements are vague. A student may or may not cover enough academic material to warrant credit or not. Some teachers, myself included, are pretty rigorous in terms of teaching music theory and history in addition to instructing on the instrument, others not so much. I've known people who took piano lessons for six or seven years who could not explain the circle of 5ths, the difference between a perfect and augmented fourth, could articulate any of the differences between the Baroque and Classic period, or understood anything that would be covered in a high school course. I still even get slightly queasy with amount of credit that some schools (my local district being one) award for these classes because the school puts sooooooooooooooooo much emphasis on performance, that sometimes the kids get out of four years of high school and can BARELY explain the difference between a major and minor key signature. It's kind of scary actually. But, I also understand that it's variable by school district and if a student hailed from say Clarkston, or Frankenmuth districts here in Michigan, their knowledge of theory and history would be extensive in addition to having received excellent group and private instruction on their instrument. So, like all academic subjcts, the quality is very relative...something I HATE about the American education system! But, I digress! :D

     

    If I were inclined to put extracurriculars on a transcript for credit, I can honestly say worship team would not even be in the running. The reality is that music ministry directors, both paid and volunteer, rarely do any instruction whatsoever. It's an hour each week of practicing up what are nothing more than VERY harmonically and rhythmically simple songs - compared to the kinds of works attempted by even a decent community classical band - for accompanying the congregation. In most worship teams, it's not even crucial to read notes particularly well if one can play by ear, and in terms of note reading, hymns and praise choruses are not that difficult in the grand scheme of things. Generally, there if very little technical instruction on the instrument either, and vocalists only rarely receive true vocal instruction. The reality is that worship team participation is just not worthy of credit. It's a volunteer position that should be put in the extracurricular section of the application...church choir also falling under this heading in nearly all circumstances. It's a good extra curricular because colleges like to see volunteerism.

     

    Some days I'd be inclined to agree with you. Today, for whatever reason, I'm not. 

     

    I guess some of it is that it is a fine art credit. Playing music is fine art and requires quite a bit of study and work. Even without knowing the various technical aspects 

     

    And while local high schools might not give credit for such craftsmanship, I think colleges do.

     

    In my area UNCG's music program is considered strong and awards BFAs. 

     

    Here's what their music major guide book says:

     

     

    Private lessons are a component of all Undergraduate curricula. You are expected to practice 1

    hour per day for each credit hour of performance studies which you are registered.

     

    The guide is found here: http://performingarts.uncg.edu/_files/resources/undergraduate/music/ug-student-information-manual-2013-2014.pdf

     

    It appears that they are graded in part on a performance recital at the end of each semester. So improving skill is a valid assessment. 

     

    Sure a music major would need both music theory and music history but for one measly high school credit, playing or singing counts in my book. 

  13. One thought on Norton (assuming you mean Norton Anthologies). There is no reason to think you have to read every story, poem , and excerpt in an anthology. Not even College classes do that.

    Think of a big anthology as a spice rack. You can use it to make chili or curry or apple pie or meatloaf or mulled wine. Some spices would get used in several dishes. Some would be too much if used together.

    So there is nothing wrong with a 9th grader using Norton so long as the individual works picked suit the reader's abilities and your purpose.

     

    This is so true, TOG doesn't try to read everything and college classes I had didn't either. It's a way of get a big assortment of works and especially filling in with some works that wouldn't be affordable as stand alones. 

  14. Ummm, TOG does NOT use any Norton Anthologies in the 19th century and if you go the DE route and stay up to date, they are removing the Nortons for all their year plans (which I think a shame because what you really get in a good, big anthology is the minor works that you might not cover at all, the big works come in as individual volumes but the little poets, disappear). 

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