Woohoo! She did two pages of math with no complaining, and she did them easily! Go Primera! Meanwhile the stupid math homework she got from the district was something like, "There were two cars with four wheels. The number sentence is 2 x 4 = 8. Write another number sentence like it, and draw pictures." Perfect. She came up with five dolls, two legs apiece, how many legs. Which was fine, so I said, "Great, now figure it out in your head." Which she didn't want to do--she wanted to draw the fecking picture first. At which point I turned into Mental Math Nazi and had her figure it out in her head, which she was able to do.

But when I bring up the problems with language load for special needs kids, I get, "But there's an emphasis on visuals and manipulatives." Right, and if they're badly used, they actually make things worse for kids by making them over-rely on the visuals. But that's what I got Singapore Math for: she's actually learning how to compute very nicely.

She is upstairs waiting for the bus. She is as pretty as a picture. She let me brush out her hair, and she has on these rainbow tie-dyed sweatpants and a black top, and she looks lanky and coltish.