OK had a shower, face feels better. Had some time to contemplate the fact that it is tough being the mom. Everybody dumps on her and she has noone to dump on. So sometimes she does crazy shit. Like forward your emails to the person you were talking about. For instance ...

"Last year I got Meg slippers that I had to go to three different stores for. When I finally found them they were on sale so I was able to buy her a bottle of Vodka and then I saw a bunch of flavored vodkas in a candy cane shaped plastic thingy by the checkout line so I had to get them too. (I always go over). I guess I should have known how little my gift meant to her by the fact that she never opened the candy-cane of vodkas"

and then I got...

"Thank you so much for my Christmas presents last year. I didn't mean to not drink the flavored vodkas, I forgot about them and was only reminded of them when I saw the empty bottles on the counter in the kitchen. I apologize for forgetting about them. Please forgive me."

Holy shit! What do I say?

Mom says, " think I've done enough damage for tonight..............I'm signing off..........."

!!!

Urp. But honestly, probably not a bad thing to have happen. I'd just say that you understand how that can happen, and of course you forgive her, but what you really want them to understand is that these gifts mean something to you, it's not just an exchange of $50.

I have to tell my roommate because he drank the vodka too. We toasted her being gone! We thought she left the vodka behind on purpose as a final "fuck you and your christmas present too!"

Maybe it was more of a "you'll enjoy these more than i will" gesture? Um, ok, stretch. My family stopped exchanging gifts when i was 17, after the year my stingy aunt gave me a broken pink tiffany watch. Sorry that yer family is being jerky :(

maybe I'm attaching too much importance to the gift exchange.

The actual subject matter doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the reasoning.

This is exactly my point, though. For the students that actually learn how to reason abstractly using quadratic equations, it's great content. But the current system doesn't require that - they need to know the skills, not the reasoning. And I believe that most students don't need to learn each and every Algebra skill in order to reason abstractly and, indeed, being forced to learn them all actually overloads many of them to the point where reasoning is the last thing they do.

I don't know if I'm making sense. It's late. Bedtime!

Holy shit! What do I say?

The truth -- I'm sorry, I never intended for you to see that email. I'll forgive you if you forgive me.

I agree, the algebra curriculum can sometimes be overly broad. I think that quadratic equations would more logically go in Algebra II, with all the other conic sections. Also, I've seen a whole lot of students who seem to have gotten lost somewhere in pre-algebra and never got found again -- I'm specifically thinking about ability to work with fractions. If they can't add fractions, then they can't add rational functions. My university has a course called "College Algebra" that's really Algebra I and the beginnings of Algebra II -- enough to get people up to speed to be able to take actual college-level math.

And, I totally agree with you about too much stuff overwhelming students to the point where it negatively impacts their reasoning. When I'm working with students who seem to either have a really spotty math background or are math phobic, I've found that asking, "Does this answer make sense to you?" to be helpful. Gets them to focus on thinking about what the problem is really asking, rather than getting too bogged down in the mechanics of it. (Also, I love graphing calculators or math software with an overhead projector for demonstrating stuff about how the equation relates to the picture. Change this coefficient, the graph moves this way, the roots change like this.)

I also think that I'd put some basic probabiity into Algebra I. Not for future math courses, but for general ability to understand the world.

We are sleeping on our new mattress tonight!

I bought it with money from my book advance. (The second half they pay when you turn it in.)

This is very satisfying to turn my words into a bed.

The previous mattress? Fourteen years old and swaybacked like a cartoon pack mule.

Thinking about this a little bit more, I think that also, some kids get frustrated with math early on because they're presented with material that they aren't developmentally ready for yet. Things like, say, borrowing in subtraction, require the understanding of place value, and how subtraction itself work, and how the numerals written on the paper relate to the actual numbers, and so on. And some kids might not get that level of abstraction at age 6, but maybe they would understand it fine if they learned it at age 8. But by age 8, they're already moving on to multiplication and division, and the kid now has the idea that "I'm not good at math, it makes no sense, and all I can do is memorize the rules and follow the steps to get to the answer."

(I was one of those kids. Just no good at pencil and paper math until about fourth grade. I remember lots of times breaking down in tears and screaming, "I'm no good at math!" Got moved down into a lower math group, which helped because we weren't expected to do as much, and had a teacher in third grade who spent a lot of time on place value, which seemed to be the missing piece I needed. And that summer, stuff just clicked in my brain. Played Math Blasters, a computer game that drills arithmetic problems, a lot that summer, and by the time school started in fourth grade, I was fine at arithmetic. Actually, that seems to be the time when a lot of stuff had that "click" -- that was also the year that I finally understood phonics, and could sound out words.)