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What are your thoughts on parents keeping their child's gender a secret?
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At 6 she starts making me dinner and it better be on the table when I get home.
Way to dance around the subject there, chief.
"Not everyone likes math."
"Yeah huh!"
What good is unschooling them gonna do?
Public school at least tries to teach them. What good does not teaching your kid that sometimes you can't just do whats fun and need to do what WORKS?
I'm not that optimistic about Jazz.
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
Well how can you expect him to grow up well adjusted when he has a stay at home Mom? Thanks a lot Mrs. Stepford
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Also, all sorts of fuckmuppetry about unschooling going on in here. From the fucking FAQ on fucking unschooling.com:
Oh, and from another part of the same site, cryptically called "questions and answers:"
Yeah I'm calling bullshit.
really?
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Well I guess if you have enough rooms to teach them algebraic equations with.
Anyway, the whole thing makes it sound like they thing public school is a 1970s british boarding school.
All their fun little games to teach kids math? They do that in public school.
It's a statement but it doesn't say much and it's not insightful or inciteful.
This all sounds great - as a supplement to a real education. Unless you've already been introduced to the concept a decimal point on a cash register doesn't mean anything. Dividing in the supermarket in one's head is something that many adults cannot do (and is why many stores have signs that break stuff down to price per ounce) let alone children. Yes, I know that 5 lb / $1 means 20 cents / lb. My children who will one day learn about fractions, decimals, and division will not just magically know that without being actively taught. Elementary school teachers spend a lot of time getting their degrees and certification not because fractions are super hard, but because the pedagogy that goes into teaching children is complex. How do you teach somebody what division is? Or addition? This is what they're learning. It's more involved than "hey honey, let's go to the supermarket!"
Real life is a great education, but you're just plain not going to learn geometry (from quilts, miniature golf, or anything else) until you sit down, learn about angles, and break out the protractor, compass, and pencil. And (and I'm sure there are some exceptionally motivated homeschooling parents out there) you've also got parents who just keep homeschooling even though either they're not good at it or it's not a good fit for their kid. My neighbor's son is 12. His parents are unwilling to teach him how to speak properly. He has no speech impediments (they've had him tested), but you'd never know it to listen to him. Yellow is yewwow. Cool is keel. Awesome is ah-sohm. He also can't spell - because he doesn't want to so his mother avoids the subject in favor of math which he enjoys. Even if he wasn't going to start winning spelling bees, in a real school he'd be exposed to and graded on the subject matter.
Most of us aren't amish quilt makers and I hire people with objectively less skills (and probably a horrible grasp of algebra) at math to paint my rooms for me.
Honestly, if you want real world math that you can use on a daily basis stick to algebra, exponents, and logarithms.
The thing is that everyone I know who "doesn't like math" all seem to have had shitty teachers. The idea that some kids just don't like math and that such a thing is a good argument against homeschooling strikes me as bizarre.
I mean, I could've also replied with "obviously this method is not suitable for those kids then" but then we wouldn't be on this awesome irrelevant tangent now would we?
I hate to get off topic, but I have friends who have never stepped foot into a public school but can do advanced math (hell, even program) etc. etc.
I also have friends who can't use two, too, and to correctly. Street runs both ways I suppose.
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Or wait - and I know this is a crazy idea - why don't we have people who have degrees in teaching show children this kind of stuff during the day? Then when you go grocery shopping, you can supplement your child's education with all this other stuff!
Because by itself, it sounds like a load of goose shit. It's like people think that when a kid comes home from school, their learning must stop. Who says you can't teach a kid at school and at home?
Into MMA, pro wrestling, fitness, health, drinking coffee and reading.
Height: 5' 11" Weight: 217 Goal: 200
"It takes Gary 4 hours to paint a house. It take Sue 3 hours to paint a house. How long will it take them to paint a house if they work together?"
EDIT: No, really, how long will it take them? If you can't solve the problem, consider the possibility that the traditional way of learning math has failed.
What makes you think they aren't being actively taught?
I had great teachers and I was only fired up about math when it could be used in financial calculations and stats. Anything relating to pi and degrees can go fuck itself.
A lot of these things require highly specialized and applied uses of "the maths" and for the most part are not something that the vast majority of people need to know to get the most out of life on a daily basis.
Which argument are you referring to?
1) "I'm an adult and I've never had to use calculus in the real world."
2) "We can teach kids math in the real world; we don't need a classroom."
I'm assuming (1) but I wanted to be sure.
:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:
Is that why Joe the Plumber is a tax expert?
Did you just not read the quote? The whole point is that you teach them that. You're supposed to actively engage them about it. It's not that hard if you're willing to spend a lot of time on it.
So? I don't need to know that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, but I learned it in school and you don't see me whining about it.
Nut up and learn about our world, bitches.
The fact that your quote proposes the grocery store should double as a primary means of education. Nobody is setting up a desk or pulling out pen and paper in the King Sooper to figure out which bag of oranges is the better buy and why. It's a good story problem though, I'll grant you that.
What the website says, and how it's practiced are two different things. Have you ever met an unschooling parent? I have. Her kids couldn't be integrated into a regular school at this point because they're too far behind. But by God they've been to Denver a bunch of times to go to the aquarium!
1, yes.
I view the attempts to remove math curriculum from schools as follows: yeah, many of the people won't need calculus in their adult lives. Some of them will. By lowering the requirements for everyone, you WILL be taking away from some of the students that need it.
I think it's fair to say that those are professions which should be actively avoided by the (many) math-phobes of the world. While it's extremely awesome that there are cool, high-paying jobs for people who are good at math, I think it's also realistic to draw a line somewhere in the educational process which allows people who hate math (and those people are legion) to stop studying it without hamstringing themselves for life in general.
Now obviously, if someone has their heart set on being an engineer they will have to suck it up. But not everyone needs to study calculus. It is not a "general knowledge" subject, nor is it a thing you need in life outside of particular professions.
I've always wondered why liking math is the main way a lot of people judge a math education. I'd prefer my kid to be competent in math over liking math. Really, making a subject fun is only a positive insofar as it conserves teacher time and effort by motivating the kids to work on it without active monitoring.
I mean, it may make them happy in the short run, it might not, but in the long run our society is geared in such a way that there is a pretty massive and very well-documented link between the ability of people to delay gratification and their success. I would think that any kid in an unschooling environment would naturally tend to seek out as much and varied stimulus as possible (I think the "lol they'll just watch cartoons" is a bit of a red-herring, though; these seem like the sort of people who wouldn't own a TV, or maybe even a computer), and would probably not learn, well, "hard work."
And yeah, entrepreneurs all have ADHD blah blah blah -- in all odds your kid is not going to be Richard Branson. He's going to be someone who needs to sit at a desk and complete tasks on deadline whether he would choose to or not.
I'm sure kids can learn algebra this way, I'm just not sure they can learn to not eat the marshmallow.
How can you learn about the world if you're ignorant of how we arrived to the current world we live in?
So she's doing it wrong?
I guess I don't see what that has to do with anything unless your point is that for the vast majority of parents it probably isn't a good idea. Which is something I can totally get behind because it's an incredible amount of work.
Not all classrooms teach math effectively, this is true, but many do. Dismissing the entire education profession is just silly and dismissing teaching math traditionally because kids don't like it is also bad. I applaud tying it to the real world, because that is missing from most classroom environments and is vitally important, but there's a lot of very good traditional teaching techniques too.
Basically jclast said it
When I say I don't "need" to know, I'm using the same definition of "need" as the people who are arguing that most people don't "need" mid-level math skills.
I would be more ignorant if I didn't know that, I agree. Which is why I'm glad I learned it in school, even though it's not critical to my day-to-day life.
Eh, I don't want to remove math curriculum from high schools, but I do think the core curriculum should focus more on basic number theory, probability, and statistics. I'd also like to see more done with math at different bases, which a lot of curricula shy away from because it was unfairly derided in the 80s as "new math" (even though it is a really, really good way to teach kids math).
High schools don't - and can't - teach everything useful in the real world. Some material gets left behind for college. High schools should be teaching the most important general knowledge useful for the majority of students. "Calculus isn't used in the real world" is a false statement and I don't support it. However, "There are forms of math other than calculus that are useful for more students and currently are undertaught" is a statement I can get behind.
I'd agree with that, probably.
I don't think you need to remove any math from any curriculum, I just don't see a prime directive to teach as much math as possible to everyone in the world.
I believe the objection against normal schools is usually not so much about the techniques as it is about the schools generally sucking at keeping kids interested.
That's pretty easy. Gary paints one quarter of a house an hour, while Sue paints one third. I had a very standard education that taught me to boil everything down to numbers and formulas. I still hate math because there's no challenge on paper and my memory is too shitty to do calculations in my head (I can't even remember how to spell my middle name).