RegGuheert
-
Posts
3,891 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Classifieds
Store
Posts posted by RegGuheert
-
-
8 hours ago, lewelma said:
I wrote down that my grading system was based on mastery, and this is not based on a numerical score.
This. The concept of training to mastery is so foreign to the public school system that they have trouble comprehending many homeschools.
-
2
-
-
8 hours ago, RootAnn said:
I no longer have all the % grades (if I even gave them a %) for classes taught 3 years ago. I'd be arbitrarily assigning a %.
My question is why is a letter grade not sufficient for a homeschooler who does their own transcript but perfectly fine for one who uses an umbrella school or a public/private school student?
Precisely. And I seriously doubt that more than about 1% of homeschool parents actually have records of ALL their students' numerical grades all through high school. Why should we?? Our children's transcripts only REALLY need the letter grades, so who keeps this stuff? We certainly never needed anything like that for any of the college or scholarship applications for our six older children, THREE OF WHOM ATTENDED UAH!!
Furthermore, I will say that, for our homeschool, our transcripts have letter grades. Our son has also applied for a National Merit scholarship with UAH as his first choice. Does it make sense to certify letter grades for the scholarship and numerical grades for admissions? Like nearly every other entity on the planet, NMSC accepts ONLY letter grades.
Frankly, this requirement is an insult to the homeschool community. Are there some homeschool parents who do not have the high-school transcripts worked out for their students? Certainly. That will be especially true after the percent of homeschoolers doubled in a single year. And perhaps providing such a PDF as an AID for those homeschools is a good idea. But to essentially say that we do not trust ANY homeschool parents, including those who provide a professional transcript along with course descriptions, is similar to a typical public school approach: teaching to the lowest common denominator.
One final point to note is that the PDF I linked to above has the grading scale included, which is:
A 90-100
B 80-89
C 70-79
D 60-69
F 0-59
This is *precisely* the same scale that we use on OUR transcripts, so the idea that we should move back to numerical scores (somehow) so that we can fit their grading scale is nonsense. By including letter grades and signing the certification on that document, I am certifying that our son's scores are in that range.
ETA: BTW, why does UAH think it is appropriate to force ALL homeschools to fit within this particular grading scale? Do they only accept transcripts from schools who use this particular grading scale? I'm pretty sure they accept WHATEVER grading scale the schools happen to use. Given that, why aren't homeschools also allowed to use other grading scales? (All this notwithstanding the fact that we adopted the exact same grading scale they use.)
-
7
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, fourisenough said:
We encountered a couple of schools who wanted things submitted their way; we simply refused and just gave them what we gave everyone else. If they don’t want to look at my well-organized and professional documents for my high stats kid, too bad for them.
That's kinda my position, too. If we, as a group, simply jump through every single hoop that every single admissions bureaucrat feels like creating, they will continue to make things worse for ALL homeschoolers. If, instead, we push back on onerous overreaches, then we have a chance to keep this kind of stuff in check.
Good luck for your student!
1 hour ago, SusanC said:I haven't been through the process yet, but I wonder why they couldn't just accept what people turn in and then, if necessary, flag the crazy, non-standard ones as unreadable and send the pdf to those people. Seems like it would give a more complete picture of the homeschooler who is under consideration.
Simple answer: That's not how bureaucrats work. A homeschooler wasted their time once and that's simply time wasting going in the WRONG direction. Corrected.
-
3
-
-
7 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:
I absolutely believe you. I never said that what you submitted was unreadable. I think you are paying the price for homeschoolers before you that didn't submit proper applications. I doubt any poster on these boards would ever be in that group.
I was just chiming in that my personal experience was not that UAH didn't want homeschoolers but that they had problems with the applications they submitted. For whatever reason they didn't feel like what they were getting from homeschoolers was making it easy enough to tick off the boxes they needed to when they reviewed the application.
I'm sure it is a problem with homeschoolers.
My point is that THEIR form is unreadable. So they didn't FIX anything bur have made the process much more onerous than it used to be, regardless of their intentions.
ETA: The main issue is that their transcript is extremely non-standard in that they *require* numerical grades to be provided.
-
1
-
-
7 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:
He indicated that they had gotten really strange transcripts and that they were difficult to read and make sense of. He didn't seem adversarial towards homeschoolers at all. He seemed to be trying to make sure they could read what was submitted. He literally said "we need something we can read."
If only. The transcripts and course descriptions we submitted were very clear and readable. The PDF form they provide is much *less* readable for the transcript, but the course description form is, literally, unreadable. If you don't believe me, you can download it from the link I provided above. Note that the field for the description of the course is the same size as the field for the course name. If you paste an actual description of the course in there, the font gets so small that you cannot possibly read it once printed (and they require an ink signature, so electronic versions are no good anymore).
-
Our seventh and youngest child just applied to the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Our twins are currently there and we have been pleased with the education they are receiving.
But the application process at UAH has become much more daunting for homeschoolers. In fact, I would say that they have worked over the past three years to make it much more difficult for homeschoolers to apply to the school.
Three years ago, UAH had a permanent employee working in admissions who had graduated from the school, but who had also been homeschooled herself. She was the contact for all homeschooled students applying to the school. At that time, the school had one additional requirement for homeschoolers that did not apply to public-schooled students: They required us to provide course descriptions for all courses listed on the transcript. We had already created such a document for scholarship applications, so this was not a big deal to us. Long story short: The twins were accepted, with very generous scholarships, the very next day after the school received their applications. It was quick, easy, and, frankly, welcoming.
Today the requirements for homeschoolers are seemingly the same, but looks can be deceiving. They no longer have a homeschooler on staff to work with homeschooled applicants. In addition, they have decided that homeschools cannot submit high-school transcripts for their students like every other school submits. Instead, UAH has a new fillable PDF which MUST be filled out by homeschools. So, instead of simply sending our student's transcript to them along with the course descriptions, we must spend hours struggling with this form to create something which is virtually unreadable. (They even emailed me instructions explaining how to deal with the form's idiosyncrasies.)
But I did it. I spent several hours carefully copying the information from our son's official transcript into the schools bureaucratic form, printed it out, signed it, and mailed it to them. It was unreadable, but how could I fix that?
A couple of weeks passed before receiving an email from them entitled "Complete The UAH Application Process Today" which included the sentence "Our records indicate that DS17's application is incomplete." Later that day I got a call from the Admissions Counselor for our state who told me that the PDF which I sent to them was not acceptable because I had provided letter grades for my son's classes rather than numerical grades. I told him that I had just spoken with our local high school and asked if they EVER provided numerical grades on transcripts. The answer was a clear "No."
So I asked the Admissions Counselor why UAH was requiring homeschoolers to provide numerical scores for each of their classes while they do NOT require this from any other schools. He didn't have an answer for that and said that I could just make up numbers for the form if I didn't have them.
So I'm now left with this option: Either fabricate scores for my son's high school transcript and then certify it or let it sit "incomplete".
I told the counselor I am more inclined to contact the school's upper management in order to find out why they are being so adversarial toward homeschoolers all of a sudden. To his credit, he indicated that he was sympathetic and he promised to take the message to upper management himself.
Anyway, I find it frustrating that this school, which has a strong contingent of homeschoolers on campus, has decided to erect such high barriers to a group which now comprises one in nine high-school students in this country.
Because of this frustration with the weird application requirements combined with big reductions in scholarships now available, I am inclined to send my son elsewhere. In any case, I have no intention to fabricate this transcript data just to suit some anti-homeschooling bureaucrat. Frankly, they could use such a fabrication as an excuse to reject the application if they really wanted to.
If you have a student to wants to attend UAH, you are forewarned.
Has anyone else found this form to be particularly onerous?
-
6
-
-
Bump. A friend of mine has just shown me the website desmos.com . I have now added links to the posts above for the line, the parabola, and the circle to online interactive graphs that I created to match my equation sheets. There are five graphs in total. These graphs contain sliders which allow you to adjust the coefficients in the equations and see their effects on the graphs.
Please try out these links and let me know whether you think these graphs will be useful learning aids for students.
-
While the controversy surrounding Griddy is understandable, I want to point out a trend that I have seen for some time now: Obfuscation of electricity bills.
While I live in an area where I have exactly one choice and no time-of-use metering, I have communicated over the years with solar users from around the country. Some of the plans available are so complicated that it is nearly impossible to determine which plan is best for a given customer. Specifically, I am talking about plans I have seen from PG&E where the solar customer COULD NOT DETERMINE whether he/she was better off with their old plan than with any of the new plans, even with detailed bills from previous months and years from PG&E. You would need a fairly sophisticated calculator to be able to make a valid comparison. And, frankly, I got the impression that obfuscation was EXACTLY the goal of PG&E with those plans.
In the case of Texas, additional complication seems to also come from the fact that there are maybe fifty different providers from which you could choose. Each of those has different plans that could be compared. It is a daunting task, IMO.
So I get that it is not fair that Griddy customers may get relief on high bills, but I also feel that many people may not have understood the risks they were undertaking. In fact, it seems that some of the electricity resellers didn't even know those risks given the comment above that some of them have been filing for bankruptcy. So, is it fair that those companies might get bailed out? It is almost the same question, IMO. (And, no, I am not opposed to bankruptcy, in general. That is another whole discussion altogether.)
-
2
-
-
4 minutes ago, Bootsie said:
What was the demand in Oklahoma versus normal/average demand for this time of year? Would the Oklahoma model have provided enough margin for Texas? That would be the question that would have to be answered. I doubt that Oklahoma maintains enough margin that no matter what demand is they could meet it.
Someone is paying for that extra capacity in Oklahoma. Who is that? I don't think it is just the Oklahoma utilities paying for it--I think it is the citizens of Oklahoma. Whether that is a wise choice is another question.
I showed a map of both states. Do you really think that this event was somehow much more of an outlier in one county in Texas than it was in the adjacent county in Oklahoma? Because I think it was equally as rare in both places. The ONLY difference was that the county in Texas had nearly 100% of their customers blacked out while the county in Oklahoma had NONE.
I don't understand your question about who pays for the extra capacity in Oklahoma given that electricity is CHEAPER in Oklahoma. Here are the electricity rates in those two states as of June 2018:
Texas: 11.36 cents/kWh
Oklahoma: 10.72 cents/kWh
So here is a much better question for you: Why do Texans pay MORE for electricity and get less reliable service?
And, finally, why would you defend that?
-
6
-
1
-
-
1 minute ago, Bootsie said:
You cannot compare costs by comparing one month's bill--you would have to compare bills over a period of time to tell if costs overall are lower in one state than in another. I have not seen any data on that, so I am not able to draw conclusions about it.
Of course I can. Oklahoma both maintains a capacity market AND does NOT ALLOW power plants to charge $9000/MWh for electricity. That's a "feature" of the Texas plan, as I posted above.
Put another way, In Oklahoma, power providers are paid to maintain margin to be able to address emergency needs as a matter of course. In Texas, NO ONE GETS PAID TO PROVIDE SUCH CAPACITY.
The result is that Oklahoma utilities incurred extra costs to maintain standby capacity but were already paid for that, so they are not allowed to gouge their customer when their standby capacity is put into play.
-
4
-
-
1 hour ago, Bootsie said:
The costs of repairs are a separate issue from what electricity would have been costing Texans in recent years under a different structure. Yes, those costs should be considered on a cost/benefit analysis from a societal issue (with the risk of an event being factored in.)
I suppose you can imagine that they are separate costs until you consider that electricity is an essential service in modern America. Our cities are not structured like those in parts of India where the power goes out several times every day (literally). Our systems depend on power being available 24/7. Anything less than that is a failure and results in costs being incurred by the electricity customers.
I will plot the maps of Texas and Oklahoma outages from last Tuesday morning for everyone's benefit (the first two were at the same point in time):
Texas (no capacity market and few interconnects to other states):
Oklahoma (has a capacity market and shared a grid with several other states):
Oklahoma had more outages starting later on Tuesday morning:
The point is that Oklahoma went through the same unprecedented cold snap that Texas did and their outages started later and were much less common. Counties in Oklahoma with 0% outages were adjacent to counties in Texas with nearly 100% outages.
And since we are in the thread talking about costs, I will point out that I do not see any articles claiming that Oklahomans are getting $10,000 power bills for this month. If I am wrong about this, I'm sure someone in Oklahoma will let me know.
The bottom line is that Texas' energy-only experiment has failed the people of Texas miserably. It needs to be fixed.
-
7
-
-
Serious question: Is this only a Griddy thing?
What is happening to customers of other providers?
-
1 minute ago, Bootsie said:
I think what I stated is grounded in basic economic theory. A company is going to want to be rewarded for risk (if it has to take the risk) or it will take its capital elsewhere.
I am not sure what it means for every state in the US to have a capacity market. Does that solve the problem? Or, have those states with a capacity market ALSO had times in which electricity output has fallen short of electricity demand? If so, then the fact that Texas does not have a capacity market does not indicate that it is the source of the recent problem or that if Texas did have a capacity market these problems would have been avoided.
I believe you are completely ignoring the GIGANTIC costs which have just been foisted onto every single electricity customer in the form of destroyed property which must now be repaired or replaced. Or do ERCOT and the electricity generators pay for all of those repairs?
As far as whether the capacity market solves the problem: It always has in the past. Please note that this recent event in Texas has been predicted for decades for Texas: ever since they eliminated the capacity market.
-
4
-
-
1 minute ago, Bootsie said:
But, if the utility companies were taking all of the costs and risks themselves, then consumers would pay higher prices for the energy they consume every month.
That sounds like a statement of faith, but you have not provided evidence. I will point out that every other state in the U.S. has a capacity market and that some of those states have lower electricity prices than Texas.
-
2
-
-
I personally think that ERCOT has created a system under which electricity customers are on the hook for both the consequences AND the costs of failures during extreme conditions. To use an economics term, they have allowed the electricity providers to externalize those costs and risks associated with extreme conditions onto the consumer. The problem is that THEY NEVER INFORMED THE CONSUMER THAT THIS IS WHAT THEY WERE DOING.
Have a look at this article and see how they have presented the idea of an energy-only electricity market:
Summer price spikes are a feature of Texas' power market, not a bugAs you can see, they tell you that that their energy-only market is a great thing. What they DON'T tell you is that there is another side to this coin: there is no longer any guaranteed capacity maintained. That is different from every single other state in the United States, including other states with large amounts of solar and wind generation, such as California.
My flippant attitude tells me that if the power companies cannot guarantee that they will provide electricity, then, by the same measure, the consumers should not have to guarantee that they will pay the bill. The response would go something along the lines of: "This was an extreme event which has not been seen in our lifetimes, therefore we are not going to be able to pay your over-the-top bill at this time. Once conditions return to being more normal, we will do our best to start paying our electricity bills again."
-
10
-
-
1 hour ago, Elizabeth86 said:
When I make a roast in the crockpot, I usually cook potatoes and carrots too. Most of my family doesn't care for how soft the potatoes and carrots turn out. Has anyone experimented with adding the veggies in a little later than the meat?
Wow! That's the best part of pot roast!
File this under "Reg can't help himself": I wonder if it is the lead leaching out of the crock that makes the potatoes and carrots so soft. 💨
-
2
-
-
1 hour ago, stephanier.1765 said:
Funny that you should say that because Coyote (who was named before we knew she was a girl) had a kitten with no tail. There is a gorgeous cat, that I think is a Manx, who roams the neighborhood and we feel certain he is the kitten's daddy.
Very cute kitten! How old is he/she?
-
1
-
-
Note that the utilities were paying $9000/MWh for electricity for a couple of days during the worst of the outages. That is $9/kWh, or about 100 times what we normally pay here in VA. On colds days like today when it got down to 10° F (just briefly), our all-electric home will consume over 100 kWh of electricity. Assuming a small markup to $10/kWh, that would cost over $1000 dollars for one day's worth of electricity!!
Here is an article with some more discussion of what may be coming to Texans who are already suffering from this event:
As Texas deep freeze subsides, some households face electricity bills as high as $10,000
-
13
-
-
7 minutes ago, ieta_cassiopeia said:
That link now gives "Error 16: Access Denied", with an email address to send a "valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources". This seems... ...peculiar practice. (I would have expected crisis management to involve talking about what is happening, not shutting off information sources).
Typical...
-
7 hours ago, Halftime Hope said:
I can't speak for homes built before the 90s, but "Texas houses don't have insulation" is baloney. We have insulation codes just like everywhere else, and selling an old home is tough if it doesn't have proper insulation. My FIL's house was built in 1965, and it had both wall insulation and attic insulation. Of course the attic insulation had to be topped off with blown insulation due to compaction, but there was batting insulation in the attic.
I just want to point out again that you can have all the insulation in the world and your pipes can freeze in cold weather.
On 2/17/2021 at 2:23 AM, RegGuheert said:There is also something about insulation that I don't think many people are aware of (including many who install insulation in warm climates!): Even a well-insulated house will have its pipes freeze in cold weather if the pipes are not installed closer to the indoor sides of the walls and the insulation is stuffed on the outside of the pipes.
In fact, it's not O.K. to put the pipes in the middle of the wall and have insulation both on the inside and outside of the pipe. While that is better than having the pipe toward the cold side of the wall, it sets up what is known as a "thermal divider" where the temperature at the pipe goes to the average of the inside and the outside temperatures. For instance, if you insulate a pipe equally on the inside and outside and you have 0F outside and 50F inside, your pipe will still freeze because the temperature at the pipe will be 25F.
The simple fact is that many houses are built "up north" that have a pipe or two that has been improperly insulated and that fact is not discovered for YEARS because the right weather conditions did not exist for that pipe to freeze. Those problems are handled on a case-by-case basis, corrected, and then that house is good going forward.
Since Texas recently received weather that was more extreme than had occurred since many (most?) of the houses there had been built, ALL of the construction got tested at the same time. Likely many installers were not insulating pipes correctly, but the problems never led to catastrophic failures before.
I will liken this to when we had an earthquake here in Virginia some years back: We do not build structures to the earthquake standards as California does and basically every structure in the area was tested all at the same time. Compare that with California where structures are repeatedly tested by earthquakes: the poorly-built or poorly-designed ones are long gone and only the strong survive. The same happens with water pipes further north. But places like Dallas or Houston just got all their pipes tested all at once just like we got all our buildings tested all at once.
On top of all that there were houses in Texas that got down to below freezing INSIDE the house. Once that happens, all the pipes are doomed. Perhaps some PEX pipes can withstand that, but even those might burst.
-
3
-
-
4 hours ago, busymama7 said:
The point is that it would work temporarily without power. It was for an emergency. Not general use when the pump was working. There was some way to switch something over so it could still draw water without the pump but was not meant to replace the pump. I guess that wasn't clear in my first post. Of course a generator would be a good option as long as you had enough fuel for it for the duration of the emergency.
I get that. That is what my sister installed. I had a bunch of issues with that thing:
- Her well was hand-dug in the 18th century and is only about 60 feet deep. Mine was drilled at the end of the 20th century and is 250 feet deep with the main pump at 240 feet. I think our water level is pretty far above that level, but still it is much farther down than theirs, meaning that pumping would be more difficult.
- Most modern wells have plastic do-dads every 30 feet or so to dampen the twisting of the pipe in the borehole at pump stratup. Those would make it hard to insert another pump into the hole beside the main pipe.
- The pump she bought used leather seals that had to be replaced about every five years. My pump has been in the well since 1995 without needing ANY service. (Did I just jinx our pump?)
- Wells need to be sanitary. Opening the well and inserting a contraption that allows water to bring water through the cap sounds like an opportunity to introduce bacteria into the well.
- I'm not interested in taking an extremely-reliable system and adding equipment which will make it less reliable.
- I can generation electricity capable of running the well pump without the use of my generator or any fuel by using solar power. I have an 1800 VA 120-VAC sine-wave inverter which is more than capable of running that pump. (Even though the pump has a 240-VAC motor, I have it wired so that it is fed by 120-VAC through an autotransformer that steps up the voltage to 240-VAC before it goes out to the wellhead.) It's just that the way my system is configured, the generator is a bit quicker and easier to set up and use.
4 hours ago, MissLemon said:The generator might operate the well pump, but if the line from the well to the house freezes, you're still out of luck and out of water. That's the situation a friend of mine in San Antonio is in now.
If it is so cold that the water is frozen in the line from the well to the house, I'm willing to bet the hand pump will also freeze up after you pull some water to the surface.
-
39 minutes ago, busymama7 said:
My parents were on a well in their last house but they had some kind of manual option for an emergency. Obviously not able to bring up tons, but it would have been enough to sustain life. Is this not standard for backyard wells?
No, it is not standard for backyard wells. My sister had a similar setup, but it sounded like a major PITA. Who wants to go out to the well to get water when a pump can provide it directly into the house? Most wells have a submersible pump which is over 100 feet down the borehole (ours is 240 feet and many are deeper than that). Generally, if we want water in an outage, we need to depend on a generator.
-
Now that we are out of suet, the starlings have stopped coming.
-
1
-
-
4 minutes ago, stephanier.1765 said:
Wow! He really does!
The only difference appears to be that Coyote has a tail. Bucky is a manx.
UAH admissions becoming adversarial toward homeschoolers
in The College Board
Posted
Let me try to show you what it looks like. I won't show the transcript, because, while it is not great, it is *nothing* like the course descriptions part. Plus there is nothing particularly personal about the course descriptions.
Let me start with a simple capture of WE format our course descriptions for a few English courses for *other* schools (or UAH three years ago):
That is how UAH received course descriptions from our homeschool three years ago. Now, let's look at how that information looks once put into their PDF form and then printed. I zoomed WAY in to be able to show what is actually there, but I will tell you that I cannot read that myself without the aid of a magnifying glass:
So, yes, my printer is capable of making letters small enough that *some* of the course description fits into the tiny space provided, but not all of it. The question is this: What is the point of doing this? Are we trying to learn how many Bibles can be written on the head of a pin?