Ranty-cakes ahead:
I have finally figured out why I hate 6th graders and need to figure out how to correct their thinking. They think their exploratory classes = recess. Ummm...no. It is a class with a grade and work is expected. I reiterate this on almost a daily basis, and yet, they come in the next day with recess on the brain.
One of my classes gets it now. The other? NSM. They get mad for having to do actual work. Mad 6th graders don't know how to handle the emotion and turn into evilness. I don't know how to get it across to them that this is a class with academic expectations.
And, the fact that my head is full of snot and cold medicine isn't helping matters very much.
PEMBAS, baby!
Heh - Emmett introduced me to PEMBAS this year. Yeesh, I've got Math homework to do with him tonight. He was sick last week and we've got about three days to catch up, which will be about 50 or 60 problems, and they ain't arithmetic, baybee!
I would be thrilled to retake my college Shakespeare class with Prof. Turner, who was British and enthusiastic and a polymath and did all the voices. Would also love to do the classics course again. Great professor. And theater history - that was a fun course.
Hello fellow worker bees. I understand in the world of accounting, you get a lot of papers across your desk. But always calling me asking which account to charge something to when there is a spot from Fed Ex to list that, and I use it, is growing tiresome. If I got the invoice first, I'd happily circle it repeatedly. Alas, you get it first. So kindly look in that box.
"Gee, I don't know. What does it say in the box? Okay then."
t click
PEMDAS
That might be it. Parentheses...E-something to do with powers...multiplication...division...addition...subtraction.
Oops, typo. PEMDAS, of course. And the E is exponents.
I know this would be like the least popular event in the history of EVAH, but I kind of wish we could have a little "Math - WAY more fun than you remember" thing at a F2F sometime. We could play games, do logic puzzles, get all excited and enthusiastic over number theory and imaginary numbers, and generally try to reverse some childhood trauma.
Oh, and also, your brain can totally handle the math. Whether you get a teacher who opens the right door for your brain to go through is the problem. Er, I think. I mean, maybe you have dyscalculia and your brain literally can't handle the math and I'm being all insensitive and "all you need is some gumption, dagnabbit" about it, but as far as your intelligence goes, you see, you can totally..
As a teacher who wishes she could do a better job with teaching maths (and wasn't daunted by the prospect of teaching maths to the big kids) I would
totally
go to that. In the AU where I got to attend a F2F ever again.
I'm pretty sure one of my kids has discalculia, and it leaves me just baffled as to how to best help her. I mean, kinaesthetic stuff is all well and good, but I need her to be able to make that intuitive leap that 30 plus 6 will be 36
because you can bloody hear it and see it in the numbers
rather than feeling desperate and baffled and trying to count to figure it out. Gah. Poor kid has no grasp of abstract number, and no sense of whether she should be counting forwards, backwards, up or down - hundred squares just make things more complicated for her, because she has no sense of direction or sequencing.
(DJ)
::brain go splodey with math talk::
I managed to graduate high school and college without taking a single chemistry class. Um, yay?
I'd pretty much like to take every humanities course out there. I'd also like to redo all of undergrad knowing what I know now. Man did I not know how good I had it back then.
In whiny news, I came home early and am feeling rotten again. This cold can go away any time now.
I'd like to retake my poetry workshop classes from undergrad. Loved those and they forced me to write regularly.
