Here are some from prealgebra/algebra 1 that *I* think are important to have committed to memory. factoring - difference of squares, perfect squares, difference/sum of cubes lines - y = mx + b, y - y1 = m(x - x1), m = (y2-y1)/(x2-x1) = rise/run, parallel lines have the same slope, perpendicular lines have negative reciprocal distance formula - d = sqrt ((y2-y1)^2 + (x2 - x1)^2) pythagorean theorem -- a^2 + b^2 = c^2, where c is the hypotenuse of a right triangle areas and perimeters of triangles, circles, rectangles

This is something where there are legitimate arguments both ways. If you have a very bright young student who's carrying 12 credits at the CC and also doing 4 courses at home, I'd give them 1/2 credit per semester simply because having 10+ credits/year + any summer classes or extracurriculars would raise eyebrows. For them I'd look at it more like an honors course, where I would expect an extra workload but still one credit. On the other hand, if you have an average young student who's carrying 12 credits at the CC but doing nothing more at home, I'd have no compunction awarding 1 credit per semester and simply consider it more as an average high school class.

Yes. We were doing exponential growth recently and I gave them a bank account. I told them that after 10 years it had $1000 and after 20 years $1400, and asked them to figure out how much was in it after 25 years. Student 1 did some calculations with the correct formula and told me $25. Student 2 wrote "I have no idea how to do this problem but the answer is bigger than $1400". Frankly I like student 2's answer better. At least this student knows what they don't know, AND knows that student 1's answer is wrong.

She doesn't have to stay on it forever, but getting the bleeding reduced would really help with getting the anemia under control. Maybe once she gets her anemia under control she could go off it again.

I strongly agree with wapiti.

Can you enrich before school instead?

and then we get them at university and they bitch at us because they don't feel they should be in remedial math. well, you shouldn't. except your school lied to you and told you that you were learning math. Congratulations, you placed out of calculator manipulation 101.

Just saw this floating around facebook and thought some might find it useful. http://researchbasics.jstor.org/

Yes, it's the last class before calculus.

Nope, even as a mathematician, you're right. Algebra and precalculus and calculus affect science.

I don't think a change at the end of elementary school is "curriculum hopping" Doing something like Singapore 1, Saxon 2, TT 3, CLE 4 would be curriculum hopping and not a good idea. Elementary school scope and sequence varies but they all end up in pretty much the same place, so right before pre-algebra is a great time to change.

What are you trying to take the square root of? Is it irrational? I would absolutely use a calculator at the final step for approximating irrational square roots. A student should understand, for example, that the square root of 27.4 is "five and a bit", but there is no need to get more precise than that by hand. However, if there are factors that can be extracted from the square root (for example, sqrt 12 = 2 sqrt 3) I would do that first.

Make a group called 'jerks' and put anyone who comments in a jerk-like fashion about it in there. Then set your homeschool posts to 'everyone but jerks'. Problem solved. One post per person and they're gone. :) ETA: This presupposes, of course, that they aren't willing to listen and just want to bash.

True, but most *will* grandfather -- but not if the reason is that the advisor suffered from elbow-and-backside syndrome, i.e. not knowing one from the other.

If he understands it and just can't remember all the steps I would do the following: 1) Move on 2) Have him work a long division problem with your help every day. But just one.

Every now and then you get a bum deal and it stinks. I would review this college after your DD graduates and make sure that anyone else who has kids who need accommodations know of what she went through.

Yes. I do not discount that there are universities which do not do this, but none I have ever been at has done so.

Get stuff in writing from the advisor. Doing 5.5 years for a double major + minor doesn't seem that unreasonable, but getting told different things at different times is unreasonable.

Very hard job and usually doesn't require that degree. I'd second the consideration to get a minor, extra courses, or a second major with more practical application. A LOT of people who have boarding stables have a second job to pay the bills. If she gets something flexible it could be very useful. Edited: Think outside the box for that second job. Anything which can be done as work-from-home would be great. Anything related to animals would also be great. Examples: Farrier (this would save money on her own horses and also allow her to meet other horse people) Vet Tech (ditto) Accounting (lots of courses but often can be flexible as long as you're prepared to put in extra hours around tax time. This could be especially interesting if she couples her equine interests and experience to market herself to equine businesses as a tax assistant). Spanish (a lot of agriculture jobs employ spanish-speaking employees -- if she ends up working on someone else's farm the ability to speak spanish is a plus)

Yeah, that really does stink. But isn't that something where you ought to be able to get a disability accommodation, either for extra time or to circle the answers instead of bubbling them on the scantron? I would suspect that a disability office might easily go for the second, and honestly, hand-grading one or two MC exams is not that big a deal. It's hand-grading 500 of them that's a PITA.

Consider Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, Nebel.

I've never heard of oblique used to refer to a single line but upon googling it seems that it is used that way. Using the terminology in your program, I would think of a single line being oblique as 'oblique with respect to a horizontal line'.

Imo, Lial's will prepare them better for college algebra than MUS will.

I guess my point is that if the MC answers aren't distractors, at least to some degree, it is a very bad MC test. As jdahlquist says, it is vanishingly rare that a student does well on open-ended questions and poorly on MC. I do not discount the possibility, but it is extremely rare. In graduate school, I taught the same class both with and without MC tests. In both cases, the quizzes (which were hand-graded and never MC) were highly predictive of test scores -- the correlation score was virtually identical. The test means and grade distributions were also virtually identical. The sort of student who second guesses because of the presence of distractors also, unfortunately, tends to second-guess in the absence of distractors, erasing correct answers and writing incorrect ones.

I think starting with college algebra would be a superior choice -- college algebra + precalc covers what's in a PS precalc course. If you DID want to go straight into precalc, I'd find out which precalc book they use and what chapters they cover, and do the chapters prior to that in the book, am I making sense? For example, my precalc course uses lial's, but we start in chapter 5 after one day of review of important topics from earlier chapters. Someone who'd self-studied Lial chapters 1-4 would be fine.