Now see. That's why I love EM -- no right answers but divergent thinking.

Outcome DON'T DO IT!! Don't finish that book LOL well unless you want your child to be HATED for going against the system !
BAD BAD BAD. So BAD We have to remove him from the school!
Teacher hates him now. How dare he go ahead!

yikes. Not good. I don't get why sometimes teachers take things so personally. She should be amazed and appreciate the fact that he went through all that which certainly wasn't fun for him doing work that was probably quite simplistic. Sorry : (

Yep that is exactly it , she took it soooo personal. My intent was not to insult her. I just didn't know how else to get the point across. But man was she insulted! WHOA!

So now she has lost probably her only mensa student but I think she will be happy to get back to "routine"

Val, did you read the entire post?

At the end, I wrote:
"* sample size n = 2. Be wary of statistics; they can be very misleading. ;-)"

When I took upper division math courses, we sometimes had to get up and show our proofs to the class. Then the professor would ask open-ended questions like, "Why do you think your answer is correct?" So I take no offense to Q like that on my kid's homework.

Math is open-ended. Arithmetic is not. There is a big difference. Some people can't believe I was a math major, because I don't particularly excel at arithmetic. Neither does my kid.

The EM developers are trying to build math intuition. It may not be an effective approach for some kids (or teachers or parents), but I was impressed by the curriculum I saw. My kid is very intuitive.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2006/11/math-intuition.html

Has anyone tried to homeschool algebra? I tried:
http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Algebra...4234&sr=8-1

She has to do every problem in section 1, every other in section 2 and discuss how she would develop a solution for section 4. If she misses too many of the Q on section 2, I make her do the ones in section 3, which duplicate the practice problems of section 2. It's a very good book, but both mommy and kid don't have the discipline to do it regularly after a day of work and long division.

I have to say, for me it is less of EM being a problem and more of the level of math work not being appropriate.

I love partial quotients as I understand them--much easier and more efficient than long division. I don't use EM though, so I'm not entirely sure that it means the same thing within that curriculum. I always think of partial quotients as just using the easiest multiplication chunks to solve the problem. I like it because it doesn't obscure the place value and it lets me pull out the "easy" parts first. For instance, with a problem like 5,468 divided by 4:

rather than go through it in a long series of steps, I can look at what's obvious to me based on what I know about 400, 60 and 8: 1,117 x 4 is 4,468 and then know I still have 1,000 left to divide (250)for a grand total of 1,367.

However, I have to say that I was a long division disaster--so many sequential steps, so little patience on my part....

LOL...long division doesn't bother me too much. And actually, it seems that DS has taken to it pretty well (for a method that has to be shown on paper). But those partial quotients are just crazy for us. I had to sit here for a minute and actually think about how I do division in my head and it goes something like long division, but I 'see' it, if that makes any sense. I just can't 'see' the partial-quotient method.

I don't know why that particular one stumps me, but it does. Maybe it's because the setup is the same as long division or at least that's how DS has shown me. Of course, if DS has it wrong, that could explain a lot . Thank goodness the teacher lets the kids use their "best method" on tests.

I totally agree here Shelly! The program has worked fairly well for my GT girls, and I personally think the word problems are quite challenging (in working with "average" in the class). But for DS...he just needed to be bumped a few years. This would have been true in any program. In fact, the situation is improved by a more "scattered" math program, as rote skills would have bored him completely. The alternative in a lock step classroom is not going to work either, .

Don't get me wrong, there are things I really dislike about EM. But there are things I love, and overall....it can work. My kids have all now graduated, so it's less personal for me, but I do still see it weekly at my private school. I really do love the problem solving aspect, and that's coming from a math loving engineer starting point.

My own personal experience was good for our situation too, in that DD15 didn't start it until 3rd grade, DD12 was always 2E, and DS10 was always accelerated. This helped smooth out the bumps for all three.

As for partial quotients, if you think of it by it's scary original name of "guess and check", at least the mentality is more obvious. To me that's a pain in the butt way, but some kids really do need it broken down like that to get it.

I should also add that at this stage of the game, I work only with the workbooks, and not the homeworks. IIRC, the homeworks were always easier, particularly in the early grades.

GS10's school uses Math Investigations. It uses something like that 'partial quotients' but GS10 called it something else. It is slooooowwwwwww. His math teacher has added in Sikore math sheets for practicing adding/subtracting/dividing/multiplying. GS10 was resisting it because of the dividing. I saw what he was doing and then showed him long division the way I learned. All of a sudden he was flying through the sheet. His teacher saw what he was doing and said as long as he understood what he was doing, it was OK. She also said, "I guess your grandma showed you that, too."