There is a big difference between questions like "when was a time you felt sad like Sara?" and questions like "How does Sara feel when she sees the letter on the table? How do you know?". The second type of question--making inferences from the text--can seem so simple to adults that we assume it's busywork, but it can be shockingly difficult for even an older child. They think they know the answer, but when they try to articulate it, it's clear that they cannot and do not. So I would be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

"Christian perspective" is such a broad thing: I know people that consider "Christian perspective" to be "No dating of any kind until after 18, formal courting after that, but always highly supervised, first kiss at the altar" and I know others that would consider "Christian perspective" "No dating until 16, making out is ok but no sex until engaged, if you live together between engagement and wedding you have to keep it a secret from grandma and you can't share a bed when visiting the parents". I would actually suggest that the first step is getting it clear in your own mind what you consider acceptable and unacceptable, and why. I think a lot of parents are vague on this themselves.

And beyond just comprehension and retention, it's such an important skill in its own right: so many people can't read something and then fluidly tell you what they just read. I think that's why different types of narration are a great idea: you need to be able to read a newspaper article and tell the basic story to your spouse. skim a TPS report at work and extract out which bits are the most important to relate to your staff, listen to a story from your grandmother about her childhood and be able to relate the whole thing to your own kids later, write notes during a lecture and get all the important information down and in the proper relationship to other information, etc., etc., It's a whole cluster of related skills that are probably more important than the bare facts of Rome.

SAT can't just become an extension of common core: Texas isn't going CC at all, and Texas represents a meaningful chunk of their market. They will have to keep the test generic enough that Texas standards also apply.

Thanks for clarifying. I do think that a lot of people think learning to read music is a waste of time for anyone, and there's a kind of reverse snobbery involved: they think the only reason anyone learns to read music is sheer pretentiousness. And while I agree with you that there are a lot of ways to make your brain do something different, I think that they are all different differents: nothing else makes your brain do what learning to read and perform music does, just as nothing else makes your brain do what learning calculus does, or what learning yoga does. There isn't time to do all of them, but they would each bring something different to your cognitive ability if you could do them all.

I am confused. If you "can't see the point at all", then you disagree with me. Saying "I can't see the point at all" suggests that you think other people are wasting their time. Saying you agree with me, but there are other ways, suggests that you do see the point but that you don't think it's absolutely mandatory, as there are a million valuable things to do and only so much time--and I agree with that.

All the people I know who were successful--hell, even stable--without a college degree have two things in common: they work very hard, and they have a great sense of initiative. When they were 18-20, they were ambitious enough to find a job that had some sort of growth potential (i.e., not delivering pizzas) and worked that potential: they busted their butts, were reliable as could be, and were not afraid to take on tasks they didn't really understand if those things needed to be done, because they had the confidence that they could figure it out as they went along. Those people do fine without a college degree. They eventually learn how to do things that other people can't do, and that's the key to making a living wage. It's easier to become one of these people in period of rapid economic change and expansion (say, the 90s), because employers are more willing to hire and train. Not so much right now. The other path is more common: drop out of college, spend two years on mom's couch, delivering pizzas, smoke too much pot, play too many video games, eventually move up to a shift manager at something retail. They stop there, because they don't know how to do anything a 16 year old couldn't do, and they haven't a clue how to figure it out.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I think it has to do with making your brain do something really different. It's not just a different alphabet, it's a notation system where the relationship between the parts, more than the parts themselves, carries the meaning. It also requires you to respond physically to what you see--to translate visual input into immediate physical action, without any intermediate step: you don't thing "C-A-B-E-E", you just see the notation and your hands (and/or lips) follow. Nothing else is really like that. Even if you forgot it 100%, I think the growth of your brain to do this new thing is a permanent advantage, in the same way that I think higher math leaves your brain more flexible, even if you forget the details.

I do think reading music and converting the abstract symbols into action, and then using the feedback from your senses to modulate thoat action is a different sort of cognitive activity than anything else, and I think that generally it's in a kid's best interest to perform as many different cognitive activities as possible. Brains should be flexed in all directions. It's not the "being able to produce music" part that is the goal--it's the "being able to use your brain in a different way". But I don't think it's essential, and parenthood is a long series of choices. You can't do everything.

I think you need to figure out her motive. If it's just laziness, obviously, you throw the book at her. But if it's desperate panic, I think it needs more careful handling. Some kids are able to be literally perfect up to a certain point: they begin to feel like anything that isn't perfect is crap, is utter failure, is shameful. To be not perfect is the greatest sin of all, and if you think that way, "cheating" is the lesser of two evils, because you have to, you have no choice: it's literally like stealing bread to keep from starving. Fifteen is a pretty normal age for this. There's simply too much going on to give every single thing the amount of effort it needs to be perfect. The choices are to do less, and make it perfect, or to accept that perfection costs too much and find a sense of balance. So I would talk to her and find out what's going on. If she's always been a great student, then I think it's likely that this is qualitatively different that just normal bad behavior. Obviously, there have to be consequences, but if all you do is throw the book at her, she may learn that her mistake was getting caught.

Just because you don't remember learning anything in 2nd grade doesn't mean you didn't learn anything in second grade: somewhere you learned that George Washington was the first president or that matter is made of atoms or that there are fifty states. The "what I know" and "where I learned it" parts of memory are separate, and develop at different rates--which is why it's easy to imprint false memories in kids: you tell them something happened, and they remember that they know it happened, they don't remember that the reason they know that is that you told them. So expecting a kid to remember what you studied the year before is likely to be frustrating because they don't know when they learned what they know. But, as mentioned above, a lot of that knowledge is still there, and will swim up and connect with other things they learn.

[emphasis mine] A curriculum that avoids religion but also avoids things because they contradict a particular set of religious beliefs are not what I would call "secular". I would call that "neutral". As a secular person, I don't just want a curriculum that avoids teaching ID/YE, I want one that actively teaches evolution/Big Bang, etc.

You can grade open-ended questions on a bubble sheet: you do it the same way you bubble in your name. There is a series of columns and each one has 0-9 under it. There are 4-5 columns to the left of the decimal and 2-3 columns after the decimal. You write in the whole number of your answer, and then bubble the corresponding oval under each digit. That said, lots of standardized tests have free responses sections that have to be hand-graded: AP and SAT exams, for one. Texas requires a great deal of writing for their high school standardized tests: ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades require three "short answers" on the reading test that are each 9 lines long, and three essays on the separate writing test--each a full page. Free response sounds great, but what, IME, happens is that in order to be consistent, the graders tend to be inflexible, which encourages teaching the kids very specific techniques that have more to do with technically matching a rubric than with good writing/clear thinking.

Wikipedia is a pretty good source for understanding the basics of the various organizations you listed--WTO, IMF, etc. If you are focused on history, not economics, they will get you and your kids the sort of basic information they need to move forward. Understanding money is a lot more complicated. Money gets weirder and weirder the more you study it, especially when you start talking about international trade, because then you also have currency--and currency is not the same, though they are related. I am normally all about context, but I personally, found it much easier to learn economics in sort of a theoretical vacuum and then applied it to history than to try to understand the theory alongside the history: the theory is so abstract, and takes so long to really get, that the history grows cold. I've read pretty most of the major introductory economics textbooks out there, and Krugman has the most straightforward descriptions of money and the federal reserve system (and it's a neutral textbook: introductory economics is not controversial. He's just the most readable. Mankiw is also very good, if more technical.). If you want to go down this rabbit trail, that's where I would start. But make sure you also read the chapters on international trade, comparative advantage, and the open-economy. The book linked to above seems fairly agenda-driven.

Here are the free-response questions for the last decade or so, along with scoring guidelines. I think the test is still reasonably rigorous.

You might have him read the material you are going to discuss aloud to you once or twice. One, this gets him warmed up to talk. Second, you can watch his face as he reads and sees which bits he reacts to emotionally, and which bits confuse him. Start by asking questions about the bits he reacts to emotionally, because that gets him going and makes him feel confident. Then start asking about the parts that confused him, and help him figure it out.

My son is 15 months, but my husband, who is a SAHD, speaks to him exclusively in Latin, and has since he was born. He's not saying much in either language yet, but his comprehension in both is equal. The plan is to home school as much as possible in Latin, and add in a modern language where WTM would start Latin.

One thing to think about: going chronologically is a bigger problem in the later years, when you want the kids to be reading more and more primary sources. If someone were committed to the whole 3-cycle process, I think you could usefully do the last pass through backwards: do the moderns in 9th grade, when there are lots of things like newspaper articles and letters and even photographs and films from the time period, and then get to the ancients when they are seniors and really ready to tackle heavy philosophy (and if Latin is still a focus, they will be more ready to read stuff past Cesar). This could work if the first two chronological sequences gave them a solid spine and a sense of the connections between eras.

In this book, about child brain development, it talks about how memorization is one of the most "trainable" aspects of intelligence: there's no doubt at all that people who memorize things early and often get better at it, and keep that skill for life. That seems tremendously important to me: I can't tell you how much time I spend going back to look up something I just looked up, or having to recheck something. It's useful to be able to hold large chunks of information in your head at once: to be able to remember people's names, and details about them. To be able to remember phone numbers and addresses after only hearing them once. To look at the price of things at one grocery store and be able to remember what you pay for them at other stores. You know those cats' cradle things you do with a loop of yarn? How complex they can be is, of course, determined by how dexterous you are and how many tricks you know, but it's also about how many fingers you have. I think memory is like that: being able to hold more stuff in your mind all at once makes it possible to see complex interactions and connections. Having no memory is like losing fingers: having an above average memory is like adding them. I know that when I was in college writing research papers, it was absolutely mandatory to be able to remember what each of the 5-6 sources on the subject I had read said so that I could figure out how I could use them together to support my position. Synthesizing information requires that you remember one (or more) thing while looking up another. So I plan on doing memory work with my kid, because the learning to memorize is the point, not the thing memorized. That said, I think there are a lot of ways and approaches to this, and I don't think CC is what would work for us.

I want to point out that you can recheck books out of the library. I went to the library every week from pretty much birth to discovering boys, and there were books I probably checked out 30 times. It's a lovely feeling to be wandering down a library shelf and see a book you read a year ago and get a little thrill of happy memories. Somehow, if I see the book every day on the shelf I don't ever get quite the same jolt, the "oh, sweetheart, I forgot about YOU! Oh, this will be great!" vibe. Even with my toddler we re-check out board books six weeks later because he interacts with them so differently as he grows. Again, I think there's a value in having the books completely gone and then reappearing so that he has to reassess them. This is not to discourage anyone from buying books, but I don't think 'Will they reread it?" is the only question you should ask. How and when and why they will want to see it again is more important.

There's always a tension between wanting kids to learn some specific thing, and wanting them to learn how to learn. Both are vital, but they work against each other. For example, if you give a kid a difficult passage to read, and he knows that afterwards you will give him the "grand tour", showing him not just what he could have seen himself, but wonderful things he would have missed, he lacks incentive to do the work to figure it out himself: mom's gonna do all that and more. But, on the other hand, it's really hard to have a kid walk away from some beautiful piece of literature having missed 95% of what makes it special because they didn't see it themselves. I would suggest looking at his materials and deciding which things are things that he really needs to learn, and which things are things that can be more "learning to learn" activities (and you can have both types within one subject: spelling rules are things you need to learn: specific vocabulary is more a "learning to learn" topic; this story can be about practicing comprehension, but that story is about you learning that particular work.). Only you know which is which for your kid. Then, when its something he really needs to learn, you accommodate, slow down, scaffold, whatever, because your goal is putting the specfic content/skill in his head. But there are other things where you can make it more about learning to learn, and on those you back off and let him be more in charge, so that he can experiment and practice those meta-skills.

I think you will be surprised at how well they DO stand on their own. The topic sentence is like a mold, and when you remove the mold, the structure is still there. And it works for things like birthday cards: Cut the topic sentence off that, and it's a perfectly fine birthday inscription. I don't know if this would work for you or not. It's the kind of thing that I do a lot with my students: they need the structure to get started, but as they grow they internalize the process and need fewer and fewer explicit cues. They usually come off with no problem. As writers develop, I prune as much as anything.

Literally take a sharpie to a good traditional essay a student has written. Cross out the topic sentences. See if what is left reads as a coherent paragraph. If it is (and with good writers, it likely will be) then you are already accomplishing your goal.

That's why I suggested removing the topic sentences afterwards, like taking off the training wheels. It's like teaching a kid to say "This shows that" at the start of commentary right at first, and then cutting it out.

Topic sentences exist as much to help the writer as the reader. For developing writers, the topic sentence forces them to state, clearly and completely, what the function of that paragraph is. You want this to be part of the essay proper because if you tell them that they just need to know, themselves, what the paragraph is there to do, they will think they know when what they really have is a vague impression. A topic sentence makes them write it out in a way that is clear to anyone. A second important role of a topic sentence is to keep the writer on track. It's very important that when a kid gets stuck, they go back and read the topic sentence, not the last sentence they wrote. If they read the last sentence they wrote, you get a wandering vine instead of a paragraph. All this is to say that topic sentences are scaffolding, which sets you up to do a magic trick. Take a good essay and cross out the topic sentences. Now read it aloud. If there is coherence and unity, the essay will suddenly be tremendously improved.and lose nothing. This can be amazing, like ripping the tape off a painted wall: what looked good before suddenly looks professional. I know this works with an essay. I suspect it would work fine with a greeting card: just draft the inscription with a topic sentence, then cut it off. If it did its job, you won't miss it. I think concluding sentences are generally a waste of time. If your paragraph has completed it's function, it should be obvious. If it hasn't, no last sentence will save it. In longer works, transitional sentences (at the end or beginning of the next paragraph) are important, but those serve to transition and connect, not conclude.