AngieW in Texas
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Posts posted by AngieW in Texas
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I never needed anything like that kind of detail. None of the colleges my kids applied to were even interested in course descriptions or booklists.
I just provided a transcript with letter grades on it and I did not mess with plus or minus either.
I never had a single college request more information.
One of the universities that my youngest applied to had not had a hsed student from outside of NY before. In NY, the state "certifies" that your hs meets all the requirements and we don't have anything like that here in Texas. I did have to meet with the admissions department because they kept asking for things that don't exist in Texas, like letters from the ISD or the state certifying board or overseeing hs organization. They ultimately decided that what I did for the schools my kids applied to in Texas would work. I just submitted a transcript with the course names and grades and then had it notarized.
They didn't ask for anything about HOW the grades were determined or what methods we used for evaluation or anything else. I actually think that providing far more information than they have actually asked for sets up a bad precedent because then they will come to expect it from everybody. That will be the new normal.
Public and private schools just send a transcript with no further information. I can see having course descriptions ready in case they ask for it and I would provide that if asked. Public and private schools do have course descriptions that you can look up on the internet, so that isn't asking for any more information than everybody else has available. I just wouldn't provide it until asked for it because they don't just include it with their applications. The university has to either go seek it out for themselves or ask the school to provide the information.
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I've never used their distance learning, but I did like their high school social studies programs and their biology program. I also used their English program one year, but I don't remember which year it was.
I liked that everything was completely laid out and scheduled for me. My dd actually enjoyed the history textbooks.
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I wasn't at all sure what "oldschooling" meant when I read the original post. From all the responses, I guess that it means using older materials.
No, Saxon is not necessarily the math that you should go with. Just because something has been around for a while, doesn't mean that it's the best program available for your kid.
Every kid is different and your kid's needs and abilities are going to change over time.
I would absolutely not buy far in advance.
For social studies, you can use whatever you like. You don't really need to have specific expertise to be able to teach that well. At the high school level, you mostly just send them off to read and then have discussions for history.
For science and math, you are going to need to either buy a program that teaches you how to teach it or a program that teaches directly to the student or outsource if you are not strong in math and science yourself. I am a math and science teacher (certified in both). I taught high school math and science classes for hsers while my kids were hsing and I've been teaching math and science in the ps for the past two years.
For English, you may feel confident in your ability to teach this, but I did not. I used programs that held my hand for 9th and 10th grade and then had my kids take the rest of their English at the community college.
In my area, dual credit at the community college is awesome. Students can take up to 12 classes at no charge other than buying the books they need. And these classes counted for both high school and college credit. My 20yo was able to graduate college in just three years because she went away to university with 35 credit hours already completed. And because of her 4.0 at the cc and her high SAT scores, she was able to get a full tuition scholarship at university, so the entire cost for her BS degree was just $30,000 (dorm, meal plan, books, everything) and she only took more than 15 credit hours one semester.
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I gained 10 pounds my first year teaching and then another 10 pounds my second year teaching. Now I'm trying to lose those twenty pounds. I've managed to get 5 pounds off so far using Lose It, but I have to really watch to keep my calories down and my exercise up. My metabolism is slow.
It's a little frustrating that my dh who eats a total garbage diet (typically goes through at least two 12-packs of Coke, 1 6-pack of gatorade, and often a 6-pack of Monster EVERY WEEK) including a ton of candy, has actually lost 8 pounds in the past month. He isn't even trying. And he has less to lose than I do. He does nothing but sit and eat candy and drink soft drinks. I'm on my feet all the time. I walk 1-3 miles every day. I swim laps for 45 minutes twice per week. I am recording everything I eat to keep my calories under 1450 + exercise calories.
It's very frustrating. Yes, I am much healthier than he is, but I actually work at it and he doesn't.
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We've been told that the science department is supposed to get a class set of laptops or notebooks or tablets (don't know which) for all of us to share, but there are 15 science teachers, so if they split them up between us, we'd have just 2 each. If they keep them on a cart that we check out, then we wouldn't be able to use them every day.
Funds just aren't there.
And the class set that we are supposed to get was supposed to happen last year and the year before and the year before that, so I really don't see it happening.
What I'd love is to have 6 tablets for my classroom so that each lab group could have one (4-5 students per group), but that isn't going to happen. Then anybody in a lab group who didn't have a cell phone could either do the warmup/exit ticket on paper or do it on the tablet.
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I started teaching at the ps two years ago when my youngest was in 11th grade (went through alternative teacher certification while she was in 10th).
None of the schools I have taught in have had much technology available. In fact, one of them was very anti-technology.
I am looking at using Google Classroom for next year, but my students would have to access it through their phones and I always have a few students in each class who don't have phones or have had them taken away. I want to set up just my warmups and exit tickets through google forms and flubaroo so I can have automatic grading and see the results instantly.
How would I work this for the few students who don't have phones?
Do I just have them do it on paper?
Do I get a cheap tablet (like maybe a Kindle Fire) and put it on lockdown and let them use that to do the warmup/exit ticket? And then it would need to be shared between 2-3 kids each class.
I don't have the possibility of getting a class set of ipads or anything like that. We just don't have much.
Just trying to get scientific calculators for all of my students has been a struggle. They had to share the few we had. Picture 25 kids sharing 6 calculators during a test. We had plenty of 4-function calculators, but why even bother with those at the high school level. For my classes they need to be able to enter scientific notation, raise to different powers, take roots, use log and e^x and sin/cos/tan.They don't need graphing calculators, but scientific calculators are essential.
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I had a lumpectomy three years ago.
I was surprised at how easy the recovery was. I didn't need any prescription pain meds. I took tylenol for the first two days because I felt like I ought to in case pain started, but it never did except for a few times when I overdid things a little. I do have a high pain tolerance, but that really surprised me.
I did have to be careful with how much I did. I didn't carry anything with my right arm for several weeks, but I still used it to write.
Six weeks out, I was perfectly fine.
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We switched over to Ting on June 7th. Our bill with Sprint was $302/month for 5 iphones. Our bill with Ting for the same 5 smartphones was just $89.
We saved over $200 our first month and that was with two of the three billing categories bumping up to the next higher level in the last three days of the month.
Since this was our first month, I checked our current usage about 1x/week to see how much we were using. But I had already looked through our usage on Sprint and with every billing category on Ting set to the highest level we had used in the past year, our bill with them was only going to be about $120.
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I switched the whole family over to Ting in June. I should have done it long before now. We went from $302/month for 5 smartphones with Sprint to just $89 for the same 5 smartphones with Ting.
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My 18yo is very excited about the possibility because she knows she will probably not be able to drive anymore due to vision issues some time in the next 20 years. The others in her support group who had the same level of symptoms that she has at her age all had to stop driving between 30 and 40 years old due to vision issues.
My 20yo is very excited about it because of her anxiety. She can drive and is actually a pretty good driver as long as she is driving a known route, but her anxiety skyrockets if the weather is very bad or if she has to drive somewhere that she is not very familiar with.
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Happened to me in my 1964 Ford Fairlane when I was a freshman in college. I was coming off of the freeway and tried to slow down on the exit ramp and nothing happened. I pushed the brake all the way down and it didn't do a thing. There were cars in front of me stopped at the light, but nobody was in the U-turn, so I took that (thought I was going to flip over) and then pulled into a parking lot and ran over every speed bump until it slowed enough that I could pull the emergency brake. I didn't know anything about downshifting and my car was an automatic. When they fixed it, they said that it looked like a rock had hit the brake line and then it all drained out.
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I just finished my second year of full-time work and it has been a big adjustment. I'm a teacher, so once the school year starts, I am busy pretty much all the time. I leave at 7:30am and get back home about 5:30pm and then generally have at least 2 hours of work to do in the evening plus about 10 hours of work to do over the weekend. But I do get my summers mostly off.
I am spending a lot of time this summer prepping for next year so my school year won't be as frantic.
I gained 10 pounds my first year of teaching and then I gained another 10 pounds my second year of teaching. I couldn't afford to gain any. I'm working on a diet and exercise plan this summer to hopefully at least get back down to where I started last school year. If I can lose 10 pounds this summer and then maintain that weight and then lose 10 pounds again next summer and maintain that weight, I will be very happy.
I have a very hard time doing any cooking during the schoolyear. That was a big part of my weight gain. I also tended to start eating when I got home and keep eating until I went to bed.
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My 18yo is in constant pain and will be for the rest of her life. It is the hallmark characteristic of her condition.
She has a professional massage every two weeks with a therapist who uses trigger point therapy. This particular therapist was recommended to her by her physical therapist. We tried spacing out the appointments, but she was in too much pain that way. Every two weeks is the sweet spot to keep her body functional.
She also exercises on a regular basis. She has to be careful because she has a limited amount of time each day that she stand or walk. The more she is vertical, the more pain she is in. During the school year, she goes to the gym 2-3x/week. She spends a lot of time on the bike, some time on the row machine, and then does some arm work. Mostly she sticks with things that she can do sitting down because of the pain that increases whenever she is standing. For the summer, she is going to the pool and swimming laps 2x/week and also going to the gym 1-2x/week.
I am still hoping for more pain relief for her. The constant pain started two years ago. The massage and the exercise are enough to keep her mostly functional and that's about it.
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My 18yo has to be very careful to drink water all day long. She has low blood pressure and POTS and gets dehydrated easily.
She uses Plant Nanny. She has a Tervis Tumbler with a lid that she uses to drink from all day and as soon as she finishes one cup, she puts it into Plant Nanny.
She's been using the Plant Nanny app for about two years now and it has really helped.
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State Farm was horrific here. The agent I had was awful. I finally ended up going way over her head and having the regional manager working as my agent and I told him I would stay with State Farm only until the end of the 6 months and then I was switching. They were a nightmare to deal with.
We switched to Farmers and have been with them for a very long time now.
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I bought the cd back in September and it was about $35. It had all the print materials for chemistry and physics.
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I put my sponge in the dishwasher every time I run a load. Occasionally I microwave it also.
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If the family member with dog allergies lives in your home, then please be sure to test the dog out with that family member before bringing him home.
Frequent baths (no more than 1x/week and don't use soap or shampoo) will help to keep the air clear for any visitors with dog allergies.
We have two large dogs (each is about 70 pounds) and do not pick up the poo in the backyard. They both have one particular area of the backyard they go to for leaving their piles. We have a very large backyard, so it hasn't been a problem.
For a small dog like you have, I would do a morning walk and an evening walk if you can. If the dog will play fetch, you can a lot of exercise in with throwing a ball to replace one or both walks, but walking is really great for dogs.
I crate my dogs, but they are only crated at night. When we need to leave the dogs at home alone, we will put them in the backyard if the weather is nice or leave them in the house if it is not. I would not leave a miniature poodle unattended in a backyard because they are small enough to be taken by a large bird of prey. A crate is an awfully small area to be locked up in for an extended time period, so I would recommend getting a playpen-like enclosure to put up around the crate to keep the small dog from roaming the entire house. For my dogs, I close the gate at the top of the steps (it's there just for the dogs) and make sure the doors downstairs are all closed. This gives the dogs access to just the living room and the kitchen.
There are services that will come and scoop your dog poop 1x/week. I have seen them advertised, but don't remember how much they are.
A little dog won't cost all that much in dog food. I have two 70 pound dogs. A 35 pound bag of dog food lasts them about 3 weeks (according to my bank records I am buying 2 bags about every 6 weeks). But I have two large dogs. I don't know if this would be proportional or not, but my dogs will each go through a bag of food that weighs half as much as they do in about 6 weeks.
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I would also recommend seeing a geneticist. It took 5 years for my daughter to get her diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (which I asked her rheumatologist about 4 years ago due to a poster on this board). The geneticist already had a packet set up for us when we walked in the door because my dd's medical history made it clear that she had EDS, although she did do a physical exam that clinched the diagnosis.
Getting a referral to see the geneticist may be an issue, but hopefully your doctor will be willing. I think my dd's doctor would have been willing if we had asked a year or two earlier, but I don't know that she would have ever suggested it on her own. And without the referral, we would still be sitting here with no diagnosis. At least now we know what to plan for.
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We actually pay for all of the gas, but we have kids dropping each other off and sometimes dropping me off and picking me up. Because there are three of them sharing one car, the ride-sharing can get kind of tricky. Sometimes that one car won't do it because of the way their schedules overlap and one of them has to drop me off and pick me up to have a second car available.
I send the kids out on errands for me all the time.
Instead of having the kids split the gas bill, maybe have some other system for splitting costs, like a flat fee that they pay monthly as a car-use fee.
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Covering one eye to look at anything is a red flag. Optometrists and opthalmologists don't generally deal with this. You need a developmental optometrist.
That was the symptom that finally got an optometrist to take me seriously and refer us to a developmental vision specialist.
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She has a couple of issues that happen on bad eye days.
1. Usually her eyes feel really dry on bad eye days. She knows that sometimes her eyes come open while she is sleeping and when that happens, her eyes are super dry in the morning. She used to wear sleeping masks at night, but stopped because her skin kept breaking out and then just stayed continually inflamed.
2. On a bad eye day, she has to have super high contrast to read anything and she has difficulty controlling her focus. She can't get print to stay in focus long enough to read through very much. On a medium day, she may have to stop after each paragraph to rest her eyes. On a really bad day, she is down to one sentence at a time, if she can even do that much.
3. She now has an Iphone 6s and the larger screen size has been very helpful. She also has a laptop with a larger screen than her previous one. She can't really go any bigger though because it's at the limit of what she can carry.
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Only one of my kids did an AP test and that was only because the other student who was studying physics with her wanted to take the AP test. They went in together for solidarity. She had no interest in taking the AP for herself.
Your dd will have plenty of dual credit and the colleges I talked with viewed that as much better than AP.
My kids all did dual credit and have the possibility of graduating early because of it. My 20yo actually graduated a full year early due to dual credit.
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I teach at a public high school and they do semester averaging. If the fall and spring semesters average to at least a 70, then the student gets credit for the entire year. In Texas, passing is 70 and above so grades are A, B, C, F.
You should also know that at many schools, teachers are not allowed to have a final semester or year-long average of 69. If either of those would be 69, the teacher is required to bump it up to 70.
In the three school districts I have taught in so far, they have all used semester averaging to get a final grade for the year.
dual credit
in High School and Self-Education Board
Posted
I am in Texas also. I counted all science and math classes at the cc as one full high school credit for each semester. The content covered in each semester was equivalent to what is covered in a full year of high school (which I definitely know as a public school high school math and science teacher).
I didn't have any problems with the way I credited courses with any of the schools my kids applied to in-state or out-of-state.
English 1301 and 1302 - 1/2 credit each semester (my ISD requires a semester of literature also to count for a full credit, but I think that's ridiculous, so I counted parts 1 and 2 together as a full credit)
US Govt 2305 and Texas Govt 2306 - 1/2 credit each semester
Intro to Psychology - 1/2 credit
Drawing I and II - 1/2 credit each (my ISD actually gave a full credit for each of these, but I didn't think the workload justified that much credit)
every semester of foreign language - 1 full credit (my ISD does this also)
all math courses - 1 full credit for each semester (the ISD where I live only gives 1/2 credit for each semester, but the ISD where I teach gives a full credit for each semester)
all science courses - 1 full credit for each semester