Alyssa, If you're actively looking for supplements, I would recommend Beast Academy as well. I also think that Hands on Equations was wonderful and really fed my later understanding of algebra. It is designed for grades 3-8 but the beginning part would be entirely suitable for a mathematically inclined 2nd grader as well.

I think the take away is there are psychos wherever you are. I saw this floating around facebook and was ... gobsmacked.

Yeah, ok, I like the idea of MUS but not at THAT price. MM blue has topically oriented workbooks that you can buy in ebook form and print out yourself. Here's a link to the suggested order of study: http://www.mathmammoth.com/study_order.php You can get all of grades 1-3 for $45 to see if you like it. Even if you don't like it, it will not be an expensive mistake and the worksheets may be helpful as supplements to another curriculum.

I'd look into any college arithmetic or pre-algebra textbook -- the topics will be organized by chapter so he can take the chapter test as a diagnostic and you can focus only on what he misses, and they will be super cheap if you go with old editions.

I think you were the person I was thinking of but couldn't remember! :)

re: bolstering confidence -- you might seriously consider using something mastery-oriented and without grade levels, like MUS, where it's easy to skip through lessons if she already knows them -- but start in alpha anyway, just move through as she starts to remember what's what. I'd expect her to learn quite a bit faster than a first grader, and so it might bolster her confidence a lot to be moving through levels rapidly. There's someone here (I forgot who) who mentioned starting in alpha with a late elementary child and going through several levels in just a couple of years.

This is the sort of thing that can quite often lead to a successful grade appeal.

Haha, that's what I came in to post. That poor hairdresser.

I think that a kid who's good at adding left-to-right can learn the standard algorithm very quickly once s/he gets to numbers that are big enough to require it.

I agree 100%. This is one of the huge problems with CC imo. I'd much rather have seen it phased in one year at a time.

I'd seriously question whether the 'tailored to local business' is factual. I'm aware of a few cases where that's true -- where there's something like a laser company down the road so the high school runs a lasers program -- but as long as it's voluntary I think that's an awesome idea.

There have been some pretty awful examples -- such as "if math were a color, what would it be?" given as assignments. Most of those extraordinarily silly ones were pulled in later editions of the curricula.

Yep. This is a huge bonus to this type of addition. It is also very useful for estimation. If I have 3 things to buy and they cost 21.99, 23.49, and 27.19, I can immediately say it's going to be more than 60 bucks from looking at the leading digits, and before I get to the decimal places I can already say 'a little over 70 dollars'.

Aligned with CC is not something you need to worry about either avoiding or seeking out. Foerster is still being printed and there are other current solid options. Foerster will cover everything but Geometry. Pretty much any standard college developmental textbook series (Martin-Gay, Lial, Larson) will also cover everything but Geometry. Some of these developmental series also cover geometry but some do not. I would recommend geometry for a STEM-minded student.

Having a passport from there? Sure. But just passed through? It's pretty easy to miss a stamp or for someone to avoid getting stamped. I would certainly agree with taking names and addresses and requiring checkups (at no charge) at the local hospital for the first couple of weeks.

What, exactly, is inaccurate? Any flights out are not coming through us, but are being staged through other countries. In order for a travel ban to be effective, we'd need all the countries to agree.

Schools being rewarded for having a small gap between the highest achieving students and the lowest achieving students.

We don't have any direct flights iirc -- they're all passing through other countries. If we imposed a ban, we'd have to do so unilaterally, as these other countries haven't stopped flights. If there were an international agreement, it might be possible. Unilaterally, it might stop some people -- it might indeed! But other people who have passports from elsewhere but have been in infected countries may very well conceal their status and slip in anyway. In that case, they'd be very reluctant to go to the hospital and more likely to stay home until deathly ill, infecting their family and neighbors. It may very well cause much MORE Ebola in the US to stop 9/10 potentially infected people but drive the 10th into hiding -- especially since frequently immigrants live in crowded apartments with multiple family members and many crowded apartments nearby.

I agree with Kathy and will also add: The calculus scope and sequence should be sufficiently similar to AOPS that it would be easy for a student to supplement more challenging problems and explanations with AOPS if he so chose.

Well, I have a PhD in mathematics and teach it at a university, so I think I did ok :)

I do addition this way. Mathematically there's no reason you can't. I'd save the "you need to do it this way" for stuff that's genuinely mathematically wrong, rather than stuff that's just a different approach.

Even when I was in college, many of my fellow students struggled to do things like dividing by 10 without a calculator. The rest of your post -- yeah, I agree. If I were an elementary school principal with a bunch of teachers who didn't understand math very well, I don't think I'd choose a conceptual curriculum.

I didn't notice whether we did or not. I did notice it was POURING and thundering like mad. This morning all the lawns are washed out and there are trees down all over the place, and power lines in some places too.

I totally agree with pretty much everything that you've said. I see nothing wrong with having students draw out a picture for 1-2 problems, especially when a new method is used. Forcing them to draw pictures for 10+ problems? Ugh, what torture. Ditto writing explanations.

Ditto! :D