Brain Cobwebs!

OK, so we took a week off of school for our trip to sunny Florida. Today we are back in the swing of things with school and you would think that we were back to day one!

Can I just say that I am sick and tired of Saxon Math 7/6? My oldest is doing splendid with it... but I am doing really poorly. I have to re-teach myself what my dear old 7th grade math teacher was trying to pound into my head ages ago! And what is with these Investigations? I loathe the Investigations. Here we are rolling along happily doing lessons and the occasional test when WHAM! an Investigation pops up and it leaves my daughter and I in a "Huh? What are they talking about?" kind of funk. Personally, who really cares how to do a model of a bathroom and then figure out the actual length and width of the bathroom-rounding to the nearest foot mind you. Just give us the cold hard facts folks-teach us how to simplify fractions, how to figure out the sum of the angle measures of triangles and quadrilaterals, and how to find a whole number when a fraction is known... because that is what you will use the rest of your life right? UGH!

I talked to my sister Colleen today and asked her if she had done all of these blasted Investigations when her daughter was doing Saxon. She said "Oh Good Lord no!" That was good enough for me because my niece Jessica is a top student in her freshman class, so obviously those Investigations were printed in the Saxon books by mistake... they are somewhat like a yellow street light, you can ignore them and roll on through~

Actually, my daughter really enjoys math. Saxon is challenging-especially since she is in 6th grade and doing 7th grade. Next year she gets to skip on to Algebra. That is when I will start sneaking the book into my bedroom at night and re-teaching myself the lessons before we start them. I will tell you, it all makes so much more sense now than it did when I was a kid! This math stuff is a piece of cake to understand now that I don't need to learn it.

I am just thankful that we are homeschooling math-seriously! When I was a kid I did not understand this stuff and before I knew it, the teacher was moving on to Chapter 23 and I was still confused about chapter 11. Homeschooling gives my children the opportunity to be confident in what they have learned before moving on to the next challenge... or in my son's case, it offers him the opportunity to finish his Phonics and then go stuff his little sister in the hall closet while he stands guard in full military gear until I say "Hey! Get over here and get started on your math!" Not many kids can make such bold claims about their school day.

Having said all of this about math... I intend to keep a deep dark secret from my children that the day I fear most is the day my battery dies on my trusty calculator and I have to add and subtract my checkbook using long division and so on (yes, I am aware that I would not use long division to add and subtract my checkbook totals... please don't email me and tell me this).

As the teacher to my children for their math, all I can say is "Thank God for the solutions manual!"