Board of Ed meetings are an underutilized form of entertainment. Really--you'd be surprised what goes on.

But enough about that and back to me, to whom all roads lead. So today our second new set of math curricula came home: Singapore Math. Because, you know, Singaporean students have the world's highest math scores, and I think Saxon's pretty boring/repetitive, and the third grade math is pretty much a retread of the end of first grade. So I ordered the end of first grade book, b/c I figured maybe there was something I'd missed teaching the kids.

Word.

For starters, the whole more than-less than thing was deeply confusing. Actually, I think the younger version, who's the mathlete, got it, but he doesn't know how to read, so the older version (7.0) read it for him and proceeded to misinterpret. I'm hoping the shiny new workbookiness of it and the fact that they ask you to draw pictures a lot will persuade her to give it another shot. Anyway, I'm fixing the holes where the rain gets in, and God willing, she starts off next year about where Singaporean second-graders are. Of course, she'll be in American third grade, but we lag behind anyway.

One of our quasi-pseudo-homeschooling successes, though, was Story of the World, which despite its creepy fundamentalist underpinnings, which I edit for, is decent story-telling. She does have an idea of what makes for good read-aloud.

[imagine a segue]

The other night I was working at a baseball game--no, really--manning the Tutor the Overprivileged booth, and a couple of people came up and gave me capsule bios. One woman announced, apropos des bottes, that her daughter didn't need the course because she was fifteen and already at NYU, which she'd started when she was fourteen. I did not say "Mazel tov," though the words were there, fully formed, on my tongue. Then there was another woman who helped run a homeschooling collective and was "always looking for options." I think she may have been looking for freebie books, which we didn't have, but we did have some cool pens and frisbees 'n' things. I stank as a marketing person, btw: got a record low five people to fill out raffle tickets.