I agree with what 8fill said. I'd furthermore add that you might consider "He's still in high school, in an advanced course of study" and, should he still desire to do so, graduating him from high school and university at the same time.

I dunno, .99 cents is awfully cheap ... :D (gentle ribbing tone intended)

Check the syllabus next time :P (not meant to be snarky, but a serious warning. We don't cover all of any text at my university simply because some topics are more important than others and the student population couldn't keep up if we did.)

Lack of drill; lack of standard algorithms; over-reliance on calculators. That said, what I've seen of it looks like it'd work fine when combined with a solid arithmetic program and/or a teacher who really understands the WHYs and also has a goal of fluency for the kids. I'd prefer, though, one program that did both.

SO is the guy who's going to be my dh as of this summer. :P

I believe the term 'surd' is less commonly used here; at any rate, I had never seen it used, and certainly not in any modern textbook. However, I know my mother had. Not 100% sure. Here's some interesting commentary on it (scroll down): http://jeff560.tripod.com/s.html

What Regentrude said. Talk to the professors. They're far better able to give advice about her specific situation than people on an internet board.

Surds are what SO, who was educated in the UK during the '80s, calls them. But it should've been taught in Algebra 1. Maybe the odd word threw him off?

Honestly I couldn't memorize the facts at that age. If you asked me 6x8 I'd do 6x2 to get 12 and then do 12x4 = 40+8 = 48. Even in pre-algebra I was still (except more rapidly) using similar strategies because I didn't have them memorized. Finally did get most of them through lots of practice using them but if I'd had to stop and memorize them before moving forward I don't think I'd have ever started moving again. I did quite well in the rest of math BTW :P Can she *use* similar strategies to figure them out without actively having them memorized? If so, I really wouldn't worry about it at her age, but just keep computing by hand until she's computed it so many times that she remembers it. It seems that what she's doing is developing the habit of guessing nearby and hoping she's correct, which you REALLY don't want to do -- a slightly slower response time with some computation is better than a guess which may or may not be correct. First facts, then speed with facts. Same way with music -- if you're learning a tricky fingering, you don't rush through it and hope that your teacher doesn't notice your mistakes -- you do it slowly and correctly and then pick up the speed. You might also try timez attack ...

For a response to her specific question: If the geometric applications don't tickle her 'a-ha' buttons, an arithmetic answer could be: With integers, we can view multiplication as repeated addition. If she is (for example) trying to do 4(2+3), we could do (2+3) + (2+3) + (2+3) + (2+3), which is just 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 when you remove the parentheses. Using the commutative and associative properties of addition, we can rewrite this as 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3. But what's 2 + 2 + 2 + 2? Why, it's 4x2! And similarly, 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 is 4x3. So it's 4x2 + 4x3, which is what the distributive law says it should be. Others already recommended AOPS, which is all I can think of for her level :P

I like your school :D

Right. I think it could work well if you've got enough kids to have a group for the ones who are working across boundaries (e.g. let's take all the k-3s who are working at 4-6 level together), but if you have an 8yo who's 'maxed out' and nothing more to do and you STILL can't move up, you've just postponed the problem.

I agree 100% with you here.

Maybe she spends enough time using her brain that it's nice to pop some candy in sometimes? I know I've read books of that ilk in between writing my dissertation simply because of my brain constantly being fried.

I would hypothesize that it's unfair that a teacher who actively wants to teach a variety of learners would always get the lowest level. And yes, while it IS their job to teach kids it gets frustrating to always have the kids who are far behind, and to never have a few who are capable of actually getting it after instruction. I would also add, though, that imo if any class is overpopulated it should be the one at the highest level.

Yeah, I agree here. Another example could be that you would roll a three AND a four on one roll of a six-sided die.

Why on earth does she need to do first AND third grade math? Are they suggesting afterschool self-paced tutoring and classtime being used specifically for homework from the tutoring? Because I think that's one of the better solutions -- but I really wouldn't like the idea of having to do 'baby math' (which is how I would have seen it when I was that age) in school and then doing more at home.

Yeah. Have they been taught to 0 time out when the first payment is made? Unless this has been specifically taught I would find marking 31 wrong as unacceptably vague.

There is no way for the answer to be 30, unless the problem specifically said to estimate. Perhaps the teacher was careless? I have seen math errors on marked work before. a) Since it deals with price, even if the price of the bike were 360.01 he would STILL not have enough money after 30 weeks. b) Even if applied, rounding procedures should round it to 31, although normal rounding procedures do not make sense here -- it must be rounded up. The example of children in cars is a good one as well.

Tuition is 3650/semester so 7300/yr (roughly), including all fees, a meal plan and dorms it's about 13k/yr for in-state. I was only looking at the tuition/though.

My undergrad in rural Wisconsin was 5k/yr when I was there. I checked the other day and it's 7.5k now.

Yeah, I didn't even get that far, but Bill Gates said something about achieving population reduction with a combination of better vaccines, better health care and family planning. Of course, what GATES meant is that if people in developing countries don't need to have ten children in order to make sure one of them grows up and can care for them when they're old because that's the only form of retirement planning they have, they will probably not choose to have ten children. Some still will. Most won't. But somehow that gets twisted into "Bill Gates admits vaccines are a way of population reduction! The nefarious schemes are publicly admitted!"

I like this. :D

Please note, before reading, that I'm not claiming that everyone should vaccinate. What I AM saying is that this article is not a good source of information. Go to the source. Evaluate your risk for flu, based on exposure and other criteria. Evaluate your chances of being seriously ill if you DO get it. (For example, my SO is severely immunocompromised and I work at a university with many sniffling students. Therefore, I do get the shot, because flu could easily result in hospitalization for him. I never did before.) Review of article begins here: That article has so many problems with misuse of statistics I don't even know where to start. For example, he's claiming that since most adults don't get the flu in the FIRST place, that it's 1.5% effective. In other words, he's making up his own definition of effectiveness. What the 60% means is that in an unvaccinated population, you'd expect 2.7% to get the flu, whereas in the vaccinated population 1.2% got the flu. This means that there was a 60% reduction among people who WERE going to get flu. For most people, does it make a difference? Probably not. For people who are constantly exposed to all sorts of germs (such as public school teachers, daycare workers, nursing home workers), who are far more likely to be exposed and thus far more likely to catch the disease, it may be worth it. Secondly, he's switching back and forth between which statistic he uses depending on what he wants to prove. For example, he links to his article about Vitamin D usage. In this, he claims: Note that this test was solely run on children, while when he claims "8 times more effective", the test was run on children and adults. In order to make the claim, you'd need to test Vitamin D on children AND adults. In that case, it would be *impossible* for it to be 8 times as effective using his numbers, as the highest number of cases it could prevent is 2.7. The absolute reduction in flu for children getting flu shots is (according to his article since I don't have access to the real numbers) 12%, whereas Vit D gave an absolute reduction of 8%. He ignores this and says, essentially, "But this is a vaccine industry study so it's biased so we don't need to count that." Furthermore, including theories such as : further weakens an already misleading argument.

Whatever you use, I'd definitely test through in a diagnostic-prescriptive manner (you give the chapter tests, you see 'hmm, he really didn't understand topic A and he was shaky on topic B but he got the rest,' so assign work on those only.