Yes, I know. That's one reason why insurance is going up in price. Please note that I'm not saying that getting rid of pre-existing condition exclusion is a bad thing. Every decision has tradeoffs and costs, and nothing is going to be unambiguously either good or bad. I think it's a great benefit to many people. But it was an entirely rational business decision for the insurance companies.

K then! :)

All things shall pass. Balrogs shall not pass. Therefore, balrogs are not things.

Some bacteria go into a bar. The bartender says "Hey, you can't come in here!" The bacteria reply "Oh, it's okay, we're staph."

Yes. That's the whole reason for the pre-existing coverage exclusion or for making people with pre-existing conditions pay more -- they can't afford to have people moseying along on a catastrophic plan, get sick, suddenly buy a better plan and have to start paying out a lot more. If this were implemented, premiums on healthy people would need to go up a lot more to compensate. Insurance (of any kind) is a gamble. You're paying them to assume the risk for you. As such, it will rarely have a positive expected value.

Ask about it here, and search for old threads. Cathy Duffy has a website you can read, btw, where a lot more than the 101 are reviewed. Remember, btw, that the meatiest curriculum around may not be a good fit for you or for your student. What you need is the curriculum where your student learns best, that you can reasonably implement.

Yeah, I think one big difference is that homeschool curricula, pandering to a much more fragmented market, don't feel the need to cover absolutely everything that anyone might possibly want to teach every year. They can afford to say "you know what? Use that other curriculum over there if you want that, we don't cover that this year/this way."

I ended up *being* homeschooled after a string of attempts at school that went from good to okay to bad to terrible. My mother had only heard of it for extremely religious or extremely hippie people, but school just wasn't working.

Lock the doors and hide behind the furniture until they leave. Mostly kidding, but there's no way you should have to try to host and care for a sick kid.

But they don't all, even if you include blocking implantation (which is not the medical definition). I've been looking at this over the last few days, as a matter of fact. I'm going to skip the IUD's because my preliminary research indicates that it actually may block implantation to some extent, and look at Plan B. Plan B is really a high dose of a standard contraceptive pill. When these pills are taken over the course of a month, they thin the endometrial lining a little, but mostly suppressing ovulation. There isn't any evidence that that will block a fertilized egg from implanting, but nevertheless, it's a hypothetical possibility in the month-long course. However, researchers say that that specific possibility doesn't happen with the one-time dose of Plan B. In other words, the *minute* chance you *may* get in the month-long course does not occur -- if anything, plan B is *less* likely than the Pill to block implantation. Several studies have shown that Plan B does not work at all if the woman has already ovulated. Women who came seeking Plan B were given hormone tests to determine whether or not they had ovulated, and then given the drug. Those who had not yet ovulated did not get pregnant, whereas those who *had* ovulated got pregnant at the same rate as you would expect from women who took nothing at all. This is one reason that Plan B is relatively inefficient as an emergency contraceptive, although of course significantly better than nothing at all. This is distinctly opposed to the Copper IUD, where insertion as an emergency contraceptive has something like a 99% rate of preventing pregnancy (for example, in one study in China, of nearly 2000 woman who requested one after unprotected sexual intercourse, there were no pregnancies). Continuing on Plan B, they have also done experiments in a simulated uterine environment using unused fertilized embryos from fertility clinics, in which the presence of the drug had no effect on blocking them from attaching to cell walls. It was on the FDA labels despite lack of evidence, that they blocked implantation. The company has been asking for it to be removed for a long time. Ella seems to work the same way as Plan B, although there are fewer studies on that because it has been licensed far more recently. Another issue people have with Ella is that it is a close chemical cousin of RU-486. Some have said "but if a woman took it in the same dose as RU-486, it could cause an abortion!" Respondents have replied that it is neither licensed nor prescribed in those amounts. Now, I am leaving the area where I have actually researched and moving into speculation. According to my mother, RU-486 and similar drugs were originally popularly referred to as Plan B prior to the licensing. I have no evidence for this, but she swears it is true. These drugs DO cause early abortions. I wonder if this is one reason opposition is so heavy?

It must be a state thing. I had never had it covered in 15 years of being prescribed it.

I wonder whether it applies to students who are in the bottom 25% of their class, or just to students who are in the middle. I'd love to see the data on this -- from both of them.

Absolutely. In all the math classes I have taught (many developmental), I have only once had someone complete every problem on every homework assignment and still not pass. It is very rare (under 5%, but I don't have precise numbers) that someone who completes 90% of the homework and attends 90% of the classes still fails. Most of the students who fail have missed at least 25% of the classes and/or homework. Many start out well (indicating that they CAN succeed), and then life gets in their way, they miss a few weeks, and never catch up.

topology: http://www.amazon.com/Experiments-Topology-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486259331 -- could work for the olders, and the youngers might have fun with the cutting paper even if the mathematical explanation goes over their heads.

Nice article, I'm pondering finding the article they used in the developmental math study and assigning it to my students for reading this fall.

I would not wager anything I would care to part with against that.

Quite honestly I expect to see single-payer come a lot sooner because of this.

Why does a Frenchman only have one egg for breakfast? Because one egg is an oeuf. (enough)

It seems sort of like using the Crusades to state "Christians believe ..."

Right. But if the kid places there intellectually, but is not ready for the copying of problems and/or does not have the stamina necessary, I would use a different curriculum rather than a lower level [of Saxon]. In borderline cases, if I wanted to use Saxon I would type up the problem sets myself so that I could space them out to make them into worksheets. (edited to add "of Saxon" for clarity)

Two scientists walk into a bar. The first one says, "I'll have some H2O." The second one says "I'll have some water too. And why on earth are you calling it H2O? We aren't in the lab, doofus." The first scientist mumbles to herself, annoyed that her assassination attempt failed.

While I agree with your post, my friend is simply tired of having students attempt to claim that he is violating their religious rights by forcing them to answer questions on evolution in order to pass the class.

Heh, a bunch of my students (in the Bible belt) have stated that although their biology textbook taught evolution, the high school teacher refused to teach it.

In addition to Ravin's suggestion, he could also take a summer math class at some point in order to get to calc if that is an option.

f(x) goes into a bar. The bartender says "Sorry, we don't cater for functions."