Math and other stuff.....
I am stepping out into uncharted territory. This should be surprising to no one as I am especially good at taking my foot and inserting it firmly and directly into my mouth. Tonight's escapade is in part talking about the boy and school.
First off, I stink at math. My brother, who is UBER smarty pants used to be drafted to try and tutor me in math.....he wasn't so good at teaching me but he is super smart (physicist smart which is really sick but kind of cool). Anyhow I really stink at math; like so bad that I used to write my son's elementary teachers notes: "I have helped with the math homework and it is automatically wrong and please help him make the corrections because I don't know how to" bad.
Tonight was among the first really using the expensive calculator required for HS. This thing is almost as smart as our car and not quite as smart as our computer. Our kitty Garfy is pretty smart too, he can turn the printer on and off with a step of a paw.....that kind of inanimate object smart that makes parents cringe and kids smack their hands together so that they can learn a new gizmo to scare the old people half to death. This calculator is ridiculous and ironically now that he is in another math class because it does so much automatically he is not allowed to use it....he has to go back to the ones he had in middle school. The middle school ones were pretty blue color and did some neat stuff but nothing like this newer bad boy.
Thankfully, my cuter half is much better at math than I am. Being married to him makes me look smarter than I really am. He is so smart, and right now his smartness is getting him frustrated with the boy. The boy is changing his mind about a lot of things and apparently it is happening without our knowledge. First off is the likely change of major....it is gonna happen. The boy had a, well lets say "unsupportive" teacher in a cooking class. She basically changed his mind about anything to do with cooking and after meeting her I totally get where the boy is coming from. He says that she is a "screamer" and for an Aspie that automatically goes over really well (sarcasm here).
Anyway, in HS there were nights that the cuter half calls "teaching calculator" not teaching math. Put it this way, the cute one was so annoyed at those evenings he wanted ME to contact the math teacher and let her know that she needs to teach math and not calculator....SERIOUSLY? What in the world would I have said???? I like this teacher, she is super nice and really smart....and here's good ole Mom who could barely pass a math class to save her life. This ought to be good.
I will say this for one HS teacher HE TAUGHT MATH. He might not have been good at some things(social interactions with parents were not his forte) but HE DID teach math and got our son caught up to almost grade level in a years time. Which from what we can tell has dropped dramatically this year....as we were wasting the year learning calculator......thus the cuter half's frustration with the Special Ed math teaching system.
Teaching the traditional methods (sans calculator) may be the best way to go....how do you know what to plug into the blasted expensive calculator when you don't know what to do in the first place??? At least with the old way you learned the formulas and other stuff and how it all worked (at least the other people did, I think I was hiding in a band practice room pretending I knew what I was doing)..
Anyway, today's lesson kids: TEACH MATH NOT CALCULATOR!! - from the cuter half.
First off, I stink at math. My brother, who is UBER smarty pants used to be drafted to try and tutor me in math.....he wasn't so good at teaching me but he is super smart (physicist smart which is really sick but kind of cool). Anyhow I really stink at math; like so bad that I used to write my son's elementary teachers notes: "I have helped with the math homework and it is automatically wrong and please help him make the corrections because I don't know how to" bad.
Tonight was among the first really using the expensive calculator required for HS. This thing is almost as smart as our car and not quite as smart as our computer. Our kitty Garfy is pretty smart too, he can turn the printer on and off with a step of a paw.....that kind of inanimate object smart that makes parents cringe and kids smack their hands together so that they can learn a new gizmo to scare the old people half to death. This calculator is ridiculous and ironically now that he is in another math class because it does so much automatically he is not allowed to use it....he has to go back to the ones he had in middle school. The middle school ones were pretty blue color and did some neat stuff but nothing like this newer bad boy.
Thankfully, my cuter half is much better at math than I am. Being married to him makes me look smarter than I really am. He is so smart, and right now his smartness is getting him frustrated with the boy. The boy is changing his mind about a lot of things and apparently it is happening without our knowledge. First off is the likely change of major....it is gonna happen. The boy had a, well lets say "unsupportive" teacher in a cooking class. She basically changed his mind about anything to do with cooking and after meeting her I totally get where the boy is coming from. He says that she is a "screamer" and for an Aspie that automatically goes over really well (sarcasm here).
Anyway, in HS there were nights that the cuter half calls "teaching calculator" not teaching math. Put it this way, the cute one was so annoyed at those evenings he wanted ME to contact the math teacher and let her know that she needs to teach math and not calculator....SERIOUSLY? What in the world would I have said???? I like this teacher, she is super nice and really smart....and here's good ole Mom who could barely pass a math class to save her life. This ought to be good.
I will say this for one HS teacher HE TAUGHT MATH. He might not have been good at some things(social interactions with parents were not his forte) but HE DID teach math and got our son caught up to almost grade level in a years time. Which from what we can tell has dropped dramatically this year....as we were wasting the year learning calculator......thus the cuter half's frustration with the Special Ed math teaching system.
Teaching the traditional methods (sans calculator) may be the best way to go....how do you know what to plug into the blasted expensive calculator when you don't know what to do in the first place??? At least with the old way you learned the formulas and other stuff and how it all worked (at least the other people did, I think I was hiding in a band practice room pretending I knew what I was doing)..
Anyway, today's lesson kids: TEACH MATH NOT CALCULATOR!! - from the cuter half.
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