Thursday, December 17, 2020

Snow Day!

 Yesterday was a rough school day. 

William was introduced to long division. Predictably, he got quite emotional about it, as he does when he is first confronted by something challenging. The mantra of the day was "William, no math problem has ever been solved by emotion. Math is solved by logic." (The second mantra is like unto it: 'William if you are guessing at a math answer, you're failing the test.') After a while, he settled down, and once he did so, we were able to sort through. He mastered it and got 100% on his test. 

Still, he required more time than usual, and by the end of the day, I was a little more frazzled than usual. 

We got a snow storm overnight. 

I got up early to make my coffee and sit at the computer and map out the boys' school days only to discover that there is a two hour delay.

That means there is no zoom classes this morning for either one of them. They can work at their assignments at their leisure. The first grader will have three classes this afternoon. The fourth grader has two classes, and they are his 'easier classes'. Although you can bet your bippy that there will be long division in William's morning, what makes it different is that the younger boy does not have zoom classes that I need to monitor at the same time. I can give him his worksheets one at a time, and we can talk about them. He'll do them independently while I focus on William and division. A lot less stressful. 

It's been a long time since I've been this excited about a snow day, let me tell you. 


16 comments:

  1. I would love to see a photo of your home in the snow.
    Your overhead photo, I am sure, does not do a family home justice .

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  2. It must be difficult for both of you if not all 3 of you.

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  3. I wish I had your patience Debby.

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  4. I hope they aren't teaching that complex weird long division that they attempted to teach my daughter. It required writing the same problem down three or four times and then adding up all the results to get the answer. It was very frustrating on both of us trying to figure out all those steps which only caused many more opportunities for error along the way. I had to teach my daughter the "old fashioned" way of long division which I felt was very straight forward and which one could do in one short column of paper space. When I complained to the teacher about it I didn't get much response other than I'm old, things change and kids need to know multiple ways to solve a problem. I think learning on efficient way should work just fine.

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  5. To me it is so simple. It's the answer that matters. If the answer is corrrct, methodology doesn't matter.

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  6. This sounds like it requires so much organization! (and patience) I admire you very much for what you're doing. I enjoyed math, but probably wouldn't like trying to teach it to a child.

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  7. So as long as you get to your destination, it doesn't matter that you drove 200 miles extra?

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  8. No, Ed. What I'm saying is that if your daughter was using a different method to come up with the right answer, it wasn't the teacher's job to check her method...her job is to check her answer.

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  9. I am in agreement. However, they had to show their work using this convoluted method that required a full piece of paper and about ten different steps in order to do a simple division problem like 144 divided by 12. The answer wasn't enough. You and I probably would write it the old way, subtract 12 from 14, carry the two and then write on top 12. It was really frustrating trying to figure out this convoluted method when most people would use a calculator followed up with our old standard as the backup. I didn't think it was necessary to do division for each decimal place individually and then sum up the answers.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. That's what I think is wrong. If the kid gets the right answer, how they are getting it doesn't matter. Allow me to offer up an interesting side story. A friend has a child who is autistic. The child could not learn to read by phonics. However, the kid is probably a genius. He learned to read words by sight. He could read any book in the classroom. However, the teacher made the determination that, because he could not sound out words, he was not 'really' reading.

    Now, if a kid can pick up a book and read it does it matter how he does it?

    These are the things that drive me crazy about public education.

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  12. PS, that boy? Last I knew, he was a college student. Plus he drives in Philadelphia traffic.

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  13. In my old job I used to help adults with their Maths and used different methods to do so. We all learn differently. So long as the correct answer was reached I didn't worry how they'd got there. Arilx

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  14. I'm still not sure I could do long division, to be honest! That's how severely math-impaired I am.

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  15. We have a friend whose son is autistic and he is a math genius. I can give him just about any math problem I want, doesn't matter how many digits any of the numbers are and he can give me the answer, or at least I presume is the answer. I stopped checking long ago because he was always right. I've heard other autistic people are the same way with music and other things. Makes me really wonder what we actually know about autism if we can't explain things like this.

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  16. It's late to do it, but I wish you good luck!!!!!!

    Greetings from the "North Pole"!

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