Since my sixteen year old recently failed his geometry test on this very topic a week and a half ago, I vote yes. He told me he was confused before the test so I wasn’t terribly surprised, but...

Have you looked at aleks math? It says it goes by mastery and it would cover the necessary material. It tends to be algorithmic and some people find it extremely dull. I believe it has a free trial so you could check it out that way and see if it would work. https://www.aleks.com/

Re: the classes at the community college in California transferring to UC or CSU campuses. This is actually really easy to figure out. Look at the course listing it will say if it transfers or not. If is says it transfers, then it does and that is all. You might be best off making an appointment with the college advisor at the community college she is attending. They have the latest information on in state transfers. Both of my older kids took classes at a California community college before going to a four year school, one as a freshman the other as a transfer student. Neither had any issues with the school accepting the credits. This is one state school in Arizona and one private school in New York. The classes transferring part was not the biggest part of our decision making. Other things like financial aid and distance from home were more significant factors.

I have two kids that did physics first. One is getting a civil engineering degree. The other has already gotten a computer science degree. Both had to take calculus based physics in college. Both say that doing algebra based physics first was a good thing. It separated out learning physics and learning the math. They essentially got to stagger learning the math and learning to apply it. I don’t know about the provider you are talking about but for us physics first worked.

I am ready to part with books and games but I don’t know how. Just putting them in the trash seems horribly wasteful but I don’t want to deal with lots of people coming and going to pick them up either. I would love to have a place I could just drop the lot of them off at once. (Anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area want games and books?)

I would get a really cool aquarium with bright colorful fish and have someone come in weekly or so to keep it looking amazing and the fish healthy.

I saw the turkey vulture today. It seems appropriate. I did see a mallard pair a little while later....

LiveOnlineMath does math classes. They meet three days a week. https://www.liveonlinemath.com/

I don’t believe the quarantine is enforceable at this time. The sheriff in Los Angeles has more important things to be doing than monitoring people at the airport. But, and this is a huge but, Los Angeles is not currently in the super strict stay at home order that went out yesterday yet. If and when that happens I don’t know what the situation will look like.

Amazingly, there was better news today. The doctors are going to do an angiogram and place a femoral stent tomorrow at about 10 South Dakota time. It was a conference with five doctors, K (mom’s sister who is a nurse), S (K’s daughter also a nurse), R (mom’s brother) and another specialized care nurse. They all decided that this had a good chance of being in grandma’s best interest. I have to believe them. No news on the second COVID test. If you have positive thoughts for grandma, her doctors and all the other people who are involved tomorrow that would be appreciated. Grandma is Betty Jean and mom is Carol.

This is a good idea. I will suggest it. Thank you.

My grandmother is 96 years old and lives in South Dakota. A couple days ago she got very sick and went to the hospital. The hope was that a few days there would deal with the dehydration and urinary infection and she would go back to the place she lives. That has not turned out to be the case. Despite the negative COVID test, done when she was admitted, she has all the symptoms and pneumonia and blood clots. She had surgery late yesterday to deal with the blood clots but they had to stop because she wasn’t stable enough to continue. She is in pain and has told her doctors ‘to let her go’. They are repeating the COVID test. It does not look good. My aunt K (mom’s sister) is a nurse and has been with her and giving updates since this started. My mom’s brother R and his wife are in South Dakota and are going to the hospital where all of this is going down. My mom is a complete wreck. Since she has not said anything about traveling I am thinking that she has chosen to stay in Arizona (relatively low COVID rates) instead of going to South Dakota (seriously high COVID rates) and potentially exposing herself and then my dad to COVID. My dad has every risk factor on the list. It would be extremely dangerous for him to get sick. All this to say, how do I help my Mom? I can’t be there in person. I can’t make this not hurt. I can’t make it better. What can I do?

I would add italki or some other way of talking to native speakers. Other than that I don’t know. My kids went to Saturday school with the kids of second and third generation Japanese Americans. -Jennefer

My middle child did this. His got his AA degree and his high school diploma on the same weekend. He was 17. He was also determined to spend as little time in college as possible. He did not want to go to grad school. He wanted to ‘do real work and be done with school!’. So that is what he did. He went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They accepted all his credits and he graduated two years later. He was 19. He is now working for the big search engine company that starts with G. He still thinks going fast was a good idea. Given the COVID mess, he might be right. He graduated in May and only had to deal with part of one semester online. I don’t know. I really enjoyed my time in college and needed all four years of it to mature. Ultimately it was his choice and we got out of his way and let him do it.

Nothing. We have had the opportunity to move back there before but there is no reason to. (Actually I suppose I would like to be able to wear my baseball team jersey out of the house. I can’t do that where I am now. I have been harassed about it because the local team is a major rival. But that is not enough of a reason to put up with all the bad stuff. Especially since I have no relatives there. Everyone moved somewhere else.)

Does it count that I did it once and then COVID hit? The real solution for me was to reduce my stress levels and treat the underlying depression issues. It worked. I was happy. I was down 50 pounds. Life was good. And then covid happened. My stressors were causing problems again. And new stressors too. The meds still worked but not enough to overcome the stress problems. So I am back working on getting the quarantine 20 to go away. It is truly difficult. I am finally able to get to the gym which is helping massively. I am walking lots and lots and lots (a little over 11 miles today) to avoid the stress that is in the house. I don’t know when my stress levels will go to more manageable levels. It won’t be until at least January for sure and it may be more like June. (This is the introvert nightmare. My extroverts have no one to talk to but each other and I can’t get away except by walking, which is why I am walking so much. But it only helps while I am out and then I come back... ).

If you are still within the drop deadline AND the kids are seriously unhappy AND you have a reasonable substitution then I would drop the class. But while we have had bad fits before I never had another alternative that I could shift to. In particular I wasn’t capable of teaching English. I just could not do it. Therefore they just had to cope with the class. It was not fun. I listened to a ton of complaining. But bad fits happen in other situations and it was good practice in dealing with it. I was annoyed at having spent so much money on something that didn’t work, but that was a sunk cost.

Desks were places for the desktop computer and all the monitors and not so much for anything else here. Writing at a desk? Nope. But doing programming at a desk? Yes.

Extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, textures, lighting, food.... everything. Extremely sensitive to routine... everything had to be done the same way every time. Extreme interest in something to the point of not being able to think, talk or do anything else... in our case reading a certain series of books, earlier it was Thomas Trains, before that the tv show Arthur Done differently? Nothing. The way autism was diagnosed changed when this child was a teenager. The label and resources simply did not exist when we needed them. I did ask questions and was told I was wrong.

The smoke here is awful. We are under a Spare the Air order until at least Monday. This means no grilling which means using the oven in the middle of a heat wave. This is no fun! We aren’t packing to leave We are not in any danger at least not now. We have Bay about a mile away on one side, a creek on another and freeways/expressway on the other sides. Our biggest issue is definitely the smoke. Stay safe everyone.

My middle child took physics in 2018 and used a later edition of the same book I used in 1989. We compared the pages. They were the same. Newtonian physics hasn’t changed since... Newton. You should be fine with the old textbook. (When I used it the authors were Halliday and Resnick. Since then Walker has been added. Walker redid the entire solution manual and got himself author credit.)

My oldest was supposed to do a study abroad year this year. It is the fourth year of a five year program. Oldest was supposed to go to Germany and be at the University of Dortmund. There are other kids in the study abroad program that were going to other schools. One was also going to Germany but to a different school. Many were going to places in South America, they learned Spanish. Some were going to China and Japan. There were about 30 of these kids going to various schools around the world. In March there was chaos, first at the kids in China were recalled and then later when all the kids came home. The kids that were in the middle of their study abroad time and had it disrupted were in a confused mess. I don’t know how it worked out for them, but there was a great deal of fear for the kids that were supposed to be leaving now, this fall. About 8 weeks ago, University of Dortmund decided that they were not taking any foreign exchange students. Not from America. Not from anywhere. At first we were unhappy. Other schools were still going ahead with the program. That would change. And then we read the next paragraph in that email. University of Dortmund was offering online study abroad for all the kids who were not going to be in Germany as planned. Since then the university has been figuring out how to organize these kids across many time zones to get education in. With the hope that in the spring the kids could come and do the internship part of the study abroad year. The problem? Part of the reason the school part was first was to improve the fluency of the spoken German so that they could communicate during the internship. The solution? A German language intensive online class. Beginning in early September that is what is going to happen and then when the fall semester starts the kids will continue with the German online classes and as much live German as possible. Followed by classes taught in German but in major. We thought the early cancellation was a bad sign. It wasn’t. They have a plan and it looks pretty good. It is way better than the kids who still thought that they were going to be in another country until about 2 weeks ago when NAU made the decision to not allow anyone to go. Those kids are trying to get housing in Flagstaff and get into full classes at NAU. They are in a mess of chaos that we are avoiding. Lucky us. University of Dortmund made an early call to not take the foreign exchange kids and then had a plan for them. So my oldest is studying at a German college through a school in Arizona from a bedroom in California. What a crazy world this has become!

My middle child graduated in May with a degree in Computer Science. He has a job and starts at the end of the month. He is also sharing a room with his 16 year old brother. This was not his plan. The plan was that he and a friend were going to get an apartment. The friend is in another state. He isn’t sure he really wants to be alone in an apartment anyway because of shelter in place rules and he doesn’t want to be that isolated. Oldest child is doing online study abroad. That is very weird too. Everything here is very weird.

My kids did their time at the local community college until they knew what they wanted to major in and were ready to put in the effort to get there. My daughter has told her profs at the four year school she was at that “Mom said I could figure out what I wanted to do at $50 a credit hour and living at home. She wasn’t paying big money to be on the wrong road.” So far every one of them has said it was a good idea. My son knew what he wanted to do so that wasn’t a issue. He was just young and did his time at the community college too.

We counted both of the college kids that should be at school out of state as being here. But we also marked that it was possible that they would be counted somewhere else. We figured that was the best we could do.