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    #221603 08/31/15 03:50 PM
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    DS12 is in Algebra II Honors this year, and I can already see that we're going to have a rough time of it. It's e-school, and the online textbook (Holt, and alarmingly titled as the Common Core Edition) has already shown us two practice problems with the wrong "correct" answers. The teacher emailed him back about one of his formulas in a test problem, *asking* him if it should be something else instead, and no, it shouldn't. And that same test problem was phrased as asking for an explicit formula f(x) when it should have been asking for a-sub-n exponential one instead. This is only week 2.

    And I didn't have Algebra II when I was in school, back when the world was young, so we're already out of my useful territory. I have to stay ahead of him in his class in order to have any hope of being able to help him sort these things out.

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    Oh, dear. Sounds dreadful.

    Nautigal, can you find a plan B? Which could mean a homeschool tutor (college students work for a reasonable rate), or an in-person course, or a different e-course with functional materials?


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    DD used the Holt curriculum for pre-algebra in a flipped math situation (she watched 2 min. long online videos with very little actual real-life teacher instruction). I wasn't very impressed with the book or the videos and feel like we now need to re-wind and start over.

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    Oh dear.


    I know that I have a few threads re: high school math courses taken under similar (woefully so) circumstances, Nautigal. People on the forum were VERY gracious in coming up with better supporting resources than we'd been given via the school.

    Working alongside your child is about the only way that I know of that actually works well under these conditions. I'm so sorry. frown



    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    Perhaps you can use Art of Problem Solving? From my DS12's experience it has been really great.

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    Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
    Working alongside your child is about the only way that I know of that actually works well under these conditions. I'm so sorry. frown

    Well, fortunately (?) I already have to do that with him, just to keep him focused and working. It's just tougher, having materials I can't trust, having to figure out what's wrong with them first.

    Seems I've looked at AOPS before, and it's expensive?

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    Oh, thanks -- I'll have to look at that and see if we can get anything useful out of the videos or Alcumus.

    I've started a log of errors, since we discovered two more in yesterday's work.

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    We started on section 1.3 today, and BOTH of the examples in the first demonstration page on how to find the equation of a line were wrong. How do they expect kids to learn from this?

    It really gets me questioning my methods, too -- I have to keep trying it over and over again to convince myself that I really am right and the book is wrong. Even when I come up with a formula and plug one of the numbers in and it comes up with the other one, I still have doubts, just because BOTH of the "solutions" they show are wrong. God knows what the KIDS are thinking!

    And the teacher hasn't once come forward in a discussion post or anything to say, "oh, by the way, there's this problem with such and such, so please ignore it," so I have to think nobody's asked her about any of these things yet.

    We're going to be having a serious talk soon.

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    I remember this very bitterly from the year that DD took algebra II-- and again for Precalc/Trig. I'm so sorry.

    What we found eventually helped was purchasing older editions of a few textbooks (thanks to the community members here who recommended resources)-- and I worked a lot of problems WITH my daughter. Basically, I took the place of a classroom teacher, since there, um-- wasn't any real instruction happening.

    I can't say that I think Pearson is BETTER than Holt in any meaningful sense, pedagogically. In fact, just-- no-- to that idea.

    What Pearson DOES have going for it is a website that includes homework "tutorial" videos that accompany each section in their math textbooks. There are also quizzes there to check in, and mostly, at least the solutions are correct. Pearson's materials are generally less error-laden than what you've described so far.

    I don't know if that helps you any or not, but that is what I would do under the circumstances. Another, better online course, naturally would be a BETTER solution-- but probably not realistic. If your online provider is anything like ours was (and I'm guessing you're with "the other one" here smile ) then it's simply not an option. Administration will never accept it, because they OFFER the course... yes, this is ridiculous, but it's what they'll say.

    Also true that it's not really fair to expect a student to learn everything through an EPGY/AOPS course and THEN also deal with this sort of nonsense on the side. It's like teaching someone to fly a highi-performance drone successfully while a swarm of gnats follows them everywhere. {sigh}

    All of that to say that I understand exactly where you're coming from, and the constraints you're up against here. Your child NEEDS this class. THIS class. And it's basically... um... well-- FUBAR, I think, is the military term.

    Learning the material is obviously very very important, as this is THE foundation year for the calculus sequence as it is now taught, IMO. At the same time, I have no idea just how students are expected to learn from anything so wrong-headed and error-riddled. My suspicion is that they DO NOT.


    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    I'm going to echo what HowlerKarma and black at wrote. In summary, the only way you'll win here (i.e. ensure that your daughter learns the material) is to not play the game.

    My daughter was given a miserable algebra book last year. You may find as time progresses that it's not just that the answers are wrong, but the material is presented in a mixed-up out-of-order way that confuses students.

    In our case, I met with the school and convinced them to let me teach her out of a decent book (Brown Algebra 1 supplemented with stuff I put together and AOPS books). The school lets her watch Khan videos and do Khan problems. Khan is at least mathematically correct in its approach and the problems are rarely wrong (and they ask yountontell them if they are). Would your daughter's school be open to that? Or could you not play the game at all and blow them off?

    Your daughter will likely do better with you acting as a co-learner while going through a well-thought-out curriculum than going through what you've described without really being taught anyway.

    The sad reality is that students don't learn mathematics from these kinds of corporatized materials. By this, I mean that Big Ed companies hire underpaid semi-knowledgable contractors to write the books, and their ignorance, combined with deadline pressure, ends in the mess you're experiencing. I'm a math book collector, and have seen this problem again and again. It's the rule right now (hence HK's note about getting OLD books).

    Have you tried a tutoring device like the Mathnasium?

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