Please sign my Guestbook.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Too much homework

Rebecca and I went on strike tonight. She brought her work home, I gave her a short break and we started. She must have had 5 pages of triangles. I was proud of myself for remembering the formula for computing area. A = 1/2 B X H. Was that what they wanted? No. They want us to reproduce the triangles on graph paper, extend them to rectangles, find the area of the rectangles and then divide by two. We fought our way through some of those and then got to the algebra section of the triangle. She had to find the base given the Area and height. Or the height given the area and base. We did some of those (actually I did but she never did catch on to it). She doesn't understand backing into things and she was frustrated. Maybe I can work out a simpler procedure. I was just too tired tonight. We put in a lot of time and covered 2 of the pages. I said nuts and let her go skating with her sister. We were glassy eyed and spinning our wheels by that time. I'd send a note to her teacher but he doesn't read them, at least according to Rebecca. Conferences are next week. I may ask that she be resourced out for math. Obviously something isn't working. I can do a lot but I'm not willing for either of us to spend five hours on top of a full school day with this. No one can accomplish much when their head hits the table sound asleep. Also, she needs some balance in her life. It should be an interesting conference.

L. Was Rocky Horror in English with Japanese subs or Japanese? I'm trying to get a mental picture of the whole thing, especially the time warp.

Girls are back from skating and getting ready for bed. Me too, I think. Rochelle is selling candy for the school. I guarantee payment for one box to support the PTC. Whatever she sells is fine, what she doesn't we eat. I pocket the money. When the campaign is over, I'll write a check or a money order for the total. I can't afford to guarantee two boxes so Rochelle is the official salesperson and Rebecca is assistant. We did the same thing last year only possibly in reverse. If the salesperson receives some junky prize, I'll take care of the "assistant" at the $ store out of my pocket. Whatever works. Elcie is selling holiday items for her school. I'm not sure I can do both in one month but I'll strongarm my two sons. The problem is all the neighborhood kids are selling the same things to the same people. Elcie's school is out of neighborhood but her items are much more expensive than a dollar candy bar. I might buy one trinket.

Personally, I'd rather make a donation to the PTC and get rid of all these sales. Door to door isn't safe although some of the kids do it in spite of the warnings from the school. I can only hit up the relatives so many times. I might try the church but every school in town has fund raisers. We used to hold bake sales and things like spaghetti suppers but with the Public Health laws now, that's out of the question. I can't even send cupcakes to school for a kid's birthday. Everything must be prepackaged.

I think I'm going to watch CSI with my husband if I can stay awake that long. See what grotesque stuff they come up with tonight.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hello! I am here via Gawdessness's! You have a lot on your hands with all that math!! I must say I agree with you about the donation vs the selling. I have no idea who is supposed to buy all this stuff. Sometimes I give kids $5 and say, no, I don't want your stuff. Sorry.

Gawdessness said...

Good morning Ann!

When my oldest was in Grade 4 he had a brilliant teacher (yes, I homeschool and my kids were in school once) - when I came to her after 4 nights in a row of struggling for hours and hours to get his homework finished - she said to forget about the homework altogether. The only time she would expect my son to do it was if she felt he hadn't mastered a concept during the day.
Loved her!

When I was a kid I was horribly uncomfortable selling stuff door to door for whatever reason (girl guides/school) and having to do it didn't make that any better in fact it made it much worse. Some organizations now do just accept cheques but still do many of them don't. Here there is also the option to work bingoes for funds and I hated that. I miss bakesales too. The nice thing about homeschooling is that we end up having a lot of big potlucks so I still get to eat a lot of homemade treats!
HOpe CSI was entertaining. I have only seen a few episodes during our thrilling month of cable in Sept. and it was gross but kind of fun.
Have a good day.

L. said...

I dimly recall, Rocky Horror was in English with Japanese subtitles, but this was 13 years ago so I don`t know if I remember correctly.
I wonder if they still show it there.....

The Rainbow Zebra said...

Sortof late commenting on this (I'm catching up on your archives) but just donate the money to the school instead. Fundraisers make me crazy!

And WOW, my daughter is also in 5th (and her school is rather advanced) but she's not even doing that kind of math yet.