I teach when I'm ill because I don't want to lose the teaching time for my guys. Every day I miss is a section or two we have to omit.

Cookies, but probably not chocolate chip because the chocolate will melt. Oatmeal raisin would probably hold up, as would molasses, peanut butter, or M and M. A drop cookie recipe would be pretty quick. You could also try jam streusel bars -- make a streusel, put half of it to cover the bottom of an 8x8, spread it with jam, then put the rest on top and bake it at 350 20-25 minutes.

Sell them. Hard boiled eggs. Lazy deviled eggs (don't pipe the filling in, just dump it in with a spoon) or deconstructed deviled eggs (chop the whites, devil the yolks, mix them together). Frittata (great for slipping veggies in as well). Omelets (again great for slipping veggies in). Crepes. Yorkshire puddings. Shakshouka (more veggies). Enrich most sauces and soups. Pasta carbonara (ok it does have cheese, but it's not the main POINT of the dish). Curried hard-boiled eggs to go with a starch.

Frozen veggies in a bag. If you like steamed, toss them into a steamer. If you like them better with a bit of crisp around the edge, toss them on a baking sheet, add spices of choice and fat of choice to taste, and toss them in the oven until done. I do mine at 400 because I like ultra-crispy and it takes like 10 minutes tops. You can also microwave them in like a pyrex dish. If even that is too much, get the steam-in-bag veggies so you just toss the bag into the microwave. Canned veggies are better than no veggies so if you like canned (I like green beans and carrots and beets and tomatoes and they're shelf-stable), that's another quick and easy way. The nice thing about frozen and canned is that they are already prepped and peeled so you do not have to do any of that work. So it will be <5 minutes of actual work. Vegetable soup using broth of choice or even bouillon cubes is another decent way. It does usually require a bit more prep but you can make one soup and eat it for a few days. After you get your veggies, if they're boring, you can toss a bit of cheese on them, or for me I just tend to stir them in with the protein so they all mix together and absorb flavors. There are many other options as well.

If you have a pressure canner, you could make and can stews/soups which will be shelf-stable and also help empty your fridge. Also, here's a cookbook that I have never tested but looks like what you need. http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/2014/08/12/free-shelf-stable-recipe-book/

Not only that, but if a private school shuts down mid-year, the kids can always be transferred to the public school as currently stands. The PS might end up educating them in trailers or bussing them a while away, but you won't have groups of kids just sitting at home waiting for someone to open a school with room.

If I were anywhere near as much of a jackass to my acquaintances as I am to myself, nobody would ever talk to me.

Yeah, this crap about "guide on the side vs. sage on the stage" where the kids are supposed to discover can work really well if the teacher has a thorough and profound understanding of elementary math, but ... honestly, if I were the principal of a school where the teachers were of this caliber in general, I'd just make them all use Saxon. I'd rather have them taught boring math than no math. At least Saxon kids can usually compute.

In a lot of colleges, the focus has shifted very heavily towards student retention and graduation, frequently at the expense of standards of instruction. There is a huge emphasis on keeping failure rates lower in classes. This is by no means universal, but we regularly get transfers from a couple of our feeder schools who have supposedly taken college algebra and 2-3 semesters of math for elementary school teachers, and yet they cannot add fractions or solve basic word problems. By state law, we are not allowed to refuse to accept these credits. It is extremely frustrating, both for me -- because often they are trying to pick up a math minor since they already earned 12 credits, so they end up in a more advanced class I'm teaching while being bizarrely unprepared, and this causes them to blame me for their lack of preparation (because I'm mean and I make the class too hard) and complain mightily -- and it's also frustrating for our math ed person who teaches the upper-level elementary school teaching class.

I agree with everything you've said. But the issue we're looking at on a country-wide level is that there are not enough people who understand elementary math deeply enough to fill the slots needed for elementary school. Even if we suddenly found a way to recruit lots of qualified people to elementary school teaching, it would take literal years to get enough. So what I'm looking at is a way to try to pull out of this vicious cycle. I think that math specialists would help this. Maybe in 20 years after enough people have grown up being properly taught, we could eliminate the position.

While I agree with you on how things *should* be, we are looking at what *is*. I'd rather have quality instruction than the specific relationship with the teacher, and unfortunately we don't have enough with a truly deep understanding of elementary math.

Here I 100% agree. We have reading specialists. Why NOT math specialists?

Don't tell ME what to do, buddy!

Yeah, unfortunately. Good filling lower-carb snacks would be things like string cheese, boiled eggs, jerky, non-starchy veggies.

You use more fuel, yes. But that fuel doesn't need to come from energy taken in by mouth. It can come from stored fat reserves as well. But it is probably good for him to have healthy snacks available to take with him. For me, at least, having healthy snacks that I was rather "meh" about but didn't hate was good. For example, I wasn't a huge fan of hardboiled eggs but was willing to eat them -- but that was how I told if I was actually hungry or not. If I was willing to eat hardboiled eggs, it was probably hunger. If I wasn't, but I wanted peanuts, well, it probably wasn't physical hunger. Learning how to tell the difference was huge for me.

I don't know. You hear a lot of smack talking about teachers. How many times have you heard "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach"? But another reason it's so soul sucking is because the administration is so convinced of their incompetence that they keep implementing more and more restrictions. In some cases, teachers have been forced to teach literally with an earpiece by which someone can relay immediate feedback, which often involves chiding them for not following the script exactly. There is no room for divergence. They have little to no input on curriculum, pace, or anything else. I could not work under those conditions. I would very seriously rather stack shelves at Walmart.

Larson is a pretty average precalculus text. But there can be differences in the *ways* that schools implement it that can make it easier or harder. If you go through a standard text and only ask the easy problems or assign all the homework with an online access code leaving unlimited attempts and "help me solve this" open, it's not a standard level class. If he's *been* doing the lessons from DO algebra 2 for a bit, I'd go ahead and let him try precalc. They might be right, and if not, you'll have a lot more ammunition to argue with them.

BTW, if you have a springform pan, you can improvise a tube pan (which will easily double as a bundt) by sticking a half-pint jar in the middle.

The course codes actually do serve a purpose (besides laziness). I require course codes because my students do better on my handwritten tests when I do this. I use a mix of online (for simple algebraic questions with simple answers) and handwritten (for graphing and "explain why" problems, as well as problems where I really want to see their work). Online, I allow 3 attempts per problem (numbers are regenerated for each one). The instant feedback means that I'm not getting an assignment where every problem is done wrong. They realize the first one is wrong and go into the book, instead of just contentedly circling their answer and continuing. Ideally, of course, I wouldn't mark homework at all, but assign it for learning only and post answer keys, and the students would read the answer key and figure out what they did wrong and use it to study for the test. But I have to teach the students that are in the class and not the students I wish I had in the class, and if I tried this, the failure rates would be astronomical.

Test prep companies. Sigh.

Testing is another issue. One thing that has ALWAYS bugged me is that we have no measurement for tracking kids year-to-year and making progress. If a kid enters in 5th grade totally illiterate (for whatever reason, immigration, lack of schooling, I don't care) and at the end of the year is at the end of 3rd grade, I think that kid has made FANTASTIC progress and the teacher and school have done an amazing job. But all the damn test says is "not proficient". This affects gifted kids too, who are neglected because the focus is on getting kids to "proficient". If a kid is at 9th grade at the beginning of 5th and still there at the end, I think the teacher and school really haven't done a good job with the kid.

I've put bundt pan cakes in both loaf pans and 9x13 pans. Watch the 9x13 for overbaking, it'll bake faster. Tunnel cakes can be done in loaf pans, just the end piece won't have much of a tunnel. I'd test or have a backup dessert (I use butterscotch brownies for this because they are SO fast) planned in case a catastrophe happens, but the only catastrophe I've ever had happen is burning the cake because I forgot to set the timer short.

Exaaaaactly. Philosophically I'm still quite far libertarian. But watching how laissez-faire policies actually work in action, I can no longer support it for things that I believe are a public good. I think education is one such. I also agree with you about the horrendous pricing in college texts. One of the reasons we went with the company we did for access codes in lower courses is because they're a <$100 payment, one time, access for life.

I actually think it'd be kind of like it is now as far as the families with the money and the know-how -- they would sue to get their kid's voucher increased to an appropriate level (assuming we're talking a voucher system instead of HAHA YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN). The other kids -- even a bargain-basement school is going to be reluctant to take a kid with severe disabilities if they aren't required to take every kid that comes, so I have a feeling they'd be technically "homeschooled" but probably not get a lot.

Commenting on my personal experience: I lack the willpower to refrain from consuming unsuitable quantities of available foods. I used to keep those foods around, and I used to be obese, and I used to be continually disgusted at myself as I reached for another cookie, yet unable to really stop myself. The only way that I've been able to maintain a normal weight range is to keep certain specific foods out of the house. It doesn't help that PCOS/IR made me more susceptible to blood sugar spikes/drops as well. I will say that after I broke the habits, there are many foods I've been able to re-integrate into my kitchen which I had originally banned due to continual overindulgence (cold cereal, bread and jam, peanuts, popcorn, pasta), although I don't see myself ever able to have a cookie jar of cookies or a large bag of potato chips or regular soda around. But maybe. My self-discipline is improving, but I had to first break the habits.