And there is definitely one thing that bothers me. Someone who has dropped a class in obesity (from class 3 to class 2, or whatever) but is still obese, and maintained that loss, has still improved their odds of not getting a bunch of obesity-related diseases, as well as taken a lot of mass off their joints. Yet we don't recognize that victory. We only say 'yes, but you are obese'. It bothers me greatly that we do this.

Starting BMI: 33 Current BMI: 21.5 Most of the time I had never tried to lose weight, blaming it on genetics. I had lost a bit once and then gained it back right away. I was triggered by a pretty ugly breakup of an engagement. At first I just focused on counting calories. After that I started counting macros, then on nutrition. But the first 30 lbs were lost while eating less of a junk-food diet. The biggest thing that I needed to do was to eliminate the junk-food binging, so I started buying much smaller packages and banned a few specific ones from the house completely. Since then I've also greatly cut down on available prepared food, so that when a hard day comes I'm not faced with cooking a healthy dinner vs. opening a package of saltines, but rather cooking a healthy dinner vs. cooking an unhealthy dinner. One thing that helped, I think, is that I planned to hit a benchmark and then maintain, and I stayed there for a while before I started losing again. The biggest thing that helps me stay motivated to maintain is health and not being in pain. I used to hurt my back a couple of times a year and be in horrible pain for a while, and since I dropped out of obese range it hasn't happened once. The biggest strategy I use is that I weigh daily. Sometimes I track calories and sometimes I don't. If I hit goal weight +5 I started tracking again. But when I'm getting close I consciously cut back just a little bit, so I don't have to track very often. If I hit goal weight -5 I also start tracking again. I've been out of obese range for 4 years now though I've only been maintaining current BMI for less than a year. I dropped from obese to overweight, stayed there for 2 years, dropped from overweight to high normal, stayed there for 1.5 years, then dropped to the middle of normal. My b/p has only dropped a little bit but I was highly active before my weight loss. I don't know about cholesterol because I never tested that, but it is fine now (171, hdl 66, iirc). I became active in my 20s and before that I know my glucose was badly controlled and my PCOS/IR were raging, but after I became physically active they went into remission even before I lost the weight (regular cycles, no dark skin, able to go periods of time without eating if necessary). I was not on any medication for those other than oral contraceptives. The biggest health improvement has been the reduction in joint and back pain.

I score INTX on every test. But as someone else stated above I really don't agree with introvert/extrovert. I'm a shy extrovert.

If they are not-mathy kids, AOPS would probably not be the best fit. I don't really know what else you would do to make it an honors class, though -- because of the incremental instruction of Saxon, it is difficult to supplement.

I use the online homework for lower-division math classes for two big reason. One, because the students get immediate feedback on whether they got it right or not. Unfortunately in these classes, students tend to submit homework, receive it back with a poor grade, look only at the number on the front for what they got, and then toss it in their bag and ignore it rather than re-working incorrectly done problems. Two, because they tend to copy homework, and online homework randomizes the numbers. So they do have to buy the code, which is expensive. If there were a cheaper version that was adequate for my purposes, I would use it. I do tell them that the ebook is bundled with the code and that they only have to buy the print book if they want to, and put the print book in the bookstore as 'optional resource'. I really don't like the 'custom edition' and the publisher representatives keep trying to get me to make one up. They love it because it cuts into the used book sales and also the pirating. For the upper-division classes, editions tend to change much less frequently as there is a lot less market for these (changing a calculus edition will generate a lot more new sales than changing a combinatorics edition) and pirating homework is a lot less of a problem as well. So if there is a more recent edition, it is likely that there is an actual substantive update.

Honestly I think this is one of the ideal ways to enrich almost any basal curriculum. I would totally call that an honors class.

Thin it out into a sauce and serve it over rice. Make sandwiches and freeze them for stressful days. Top baked potatoes.

Ooh, I might actually be in the area. Well, not really, but close enough.

Vitamix is fine in and of itself, but what you don't want to use it for is to add more fruit into your diet and not change anything else, or worse yet, decrease the health of the rest of your diet because you are feeling good about being healthy from your smoothie. I see too many people where they decide they're going to get healthy, and so they start drinking a smoothie every morning with loads of fruit, and then reward themselves for being healthy with a doughnut or similar, and then their weight continues climbing and their sugars don't get under better control, and they get understandably frustrated because they're *trying* to be healthy. As long as you can avoid pitfalls like that, it's a perfectly reasonable way to add more vegetables and fruit into your diet, especially if you don't like to eat them.

This is not all in one district, but spread across multiple, so a slightly larger pool to draw from. It is improving in some areas (one of my students was very happy to tell me that her sister was learning now what she was learning in my remedial class, because the district had just hired a qualified new teacher) but still has a long way to go.

I actually do not think we are far apart geographically so this does not surprise me in the least.

If you start calculus and need to slow down for him to make optimal understanding, you can always complete it over two years -- this is commonly done in PS as well and will raise no eyebrows. If he has only one year left, you can complete differentiation and a chapter of integration and easily justify calling it Calculus I on a transcript.

The situation is a lot more complex and nuanced than "those kids just don't want to work". When students tell me about how their high school math education consisted of the teacher passing out worksheets and then having the students self-correct while the teacher played on the phone, and how the new teacher they got while this student was a senior was aghast at how little they had learned in 3 years of high school math, that does not tell me that the student and parents were not willing to make the effort. When students tell me about how they saw a fraction for the first time in high school and were very confused, because through their entire elementary career their teacher had never had them work with fractions, telling them everyone did everything on the calculator these days, that also does not tell me that the student and parents were not willing to make the effort. (In this case, you're kind of correct that the teacher was sort of forced to pass them on -- to teach them pre-algebra and algebra 1 while transcripting higher-level classes -- but the alternative to that would be to fail almost all the students for having the misfortune to go to really incredibly crappy elementary schools, since our high schools are no longer able to offer remedial classes.) I could go on with more and more examples, but I've already irritated myself enough for a Sunday morning typing these out. There is a tremendous amount of subtle racism and paternalism in this area which results in the heavily-poor-and-minority public schools ending up with "well they can't really handle anything more, bless their hearts" while their parents are being sent home report cards that indicate that they are progressing just fine. Are some of these kids wasting time and hoping to get by? Sure. But there are also a lot who show up to every single class having done every single homework problem to the very best of their ability (which in some cases is not so high, due to lacking a decent education), show up to tutoring, and still struggle in the remedial classes because it is a hell of a thing to try and remediate years of substandard education in a single semester. And those are the ones I care about. The ones who want to be good students, but don't know how. The ones who thought they were good students until college, because they did every bloody thing the teacher told them to do, and got good grades. The ones whose parents thought they were good students, because they were bringing home acceptable report cards and were never in trouble.

We are more selective than a CC, and yet there are plenty of people who are admitted based on good high school grades and place far lower than their grades would indicate. We're talking act-m scores under 16 here, not 'they almost made it'. When I work with them one-on-one, they cannot solve equations of the form 0.5x = 6 (at the beginning of the course). Trust me, if we thought that they had a chance >50% to succeed in college math with some support, we would put them there. But it is not really their fault that the board of education where they lived allowed them to be denied any semblance of a math education, while systematically lying to them about how they were doing. Why would a student who was getting Bs and Cs in classes that they were told were high school math classes suspect that they were unprepared for university?

What he said, especially if you already know Foerster worked the first time.

http://www.food.com/recipe/ginger-crinkles-243951 I double the spices.

I really wouldn't try to slow her down. If she's bright enough to move far ahead, she's still going to be bright enough to learn everything that they teach in school far faster than everyone else and be bored anyway. So what you'd really be doing is making her bored now on the off chance that you can make her just a little less bored in future. I wouldn't specifically try to move her ahead, either (I'd focus heavily on enrichment topics that are not well done in PS, using books such as the zaccaro books for math, teaching non-western civilizations and ancient history for social studies, etc.) but I think there's a difference between trying to slow a child down and deliberately trying to push them ahead. I also think that, quite honestly, at that age you could do all the formal learning she needs in less than an hour and simply have your husband read to her and play with her, so I don't think you necessarily have to put her in PS next year even if he doesn't get a job.

Random thoughts. If he really likes the JA series, I wouldn't worry about it not being thorough at his age. Instead, I'd let him continue through a series he is clearly enjoying and learning from, and then fill in any gaps left with a different series later. One nice thing about getting AOPS is that if it's NOT a good fit yet, you can put it back on the shelf and wait. He'd probably get a fair amount out of LOF Statistics but there might be things in it that are a bit more algebraic than he's had. You can always skim those (again, at his age he doesn't need to get the full amount out of every book out there -- he's not trying to take AP stats) and mark them for a re-run later. Has he tried any of the Zaccaro books? He might like doing Real World Algebra with the JA books.

There's software for the proctor to have many camviews up at once. We do this. We really don't care at all about your house although if you had someone running through with a bloody axe we might get concerned. However, if you're concerned I'd move the computer to a private place for testing, or turn it to face a wall, or something. Temporarily moving it to a private place might be a good idea for helping him do well on the test as well.

I really wouldn't put a bright 8th grader into intermediate algebra at a CC. He will be in a class designed to teach the minimum math necessary to proceed to college algebra to students who loathe math, and he will be surrounded by students who fear and despise math. Furthermore, the pace is very rapid, and if he earns a C, he's technically completed the course but isn't prepared to do anything other than go on and get a C/D in college algebra. Basically, you really don't want to take a nice, bright 8th grader and turn him into a mediocre college student.

I've only skimmed, so forgive me if it's already been mentioned. Another option would be to take college algebra and then stats at the CC. She may be more on board with this if you discuss how it will transfer to college -- usually this combination will fulfill college general education requirements, and then she will not have to take math at college. The biggest argument for taking math senior year is that students who take a year off math tend to place lower (beginning/intermediate algebra) and struggle more in their required math classes at college. This is compounded by the fact that students who take a year off math tend to dislike it and so put off math until their jr/sr year of college, by which time they really have forgotten everything.

There are some things that I've been surprised to learn calculators will do because I'm still used to my TI-81.

I wouldn't be surprised if your weight loss had something to do with it. You're getting a much higher dose in mg/kg than you used to. I don't know why it would come on suddenly, though.

For me at least, realizing that I did things that I hated not because I was a fundamentally flawed human being, but because I looked at things differently than other people due to childhood experiences, was both tremendously freeing and really helped me find ways around them. YMMV.

Food. I'm always afraid I'm going to run out of food. I'm starting to get antsy now because there hasn't been a sale in a while and I've only got like 2 week's worth of vegetables (even though intellectually I am perfectly aware that I could go out and buy more vegetables and actually pay the full price for them). If food is sitting out I can't leave it alone (this was a serious contributing factor to obesity). Parents, please don't ever use food as a weapon/punishment. Frugality. I'm tremendously incapable of spending any money on myself. I can just about justify it if it's for fitness or physical health or something like that, but when I see people talking about enjoying going out for a manicure or a haircut or a dinner out I cannot relate or understand.