Weekly Report 8/19/11

Co-op classes start Monday, and the kids have been getting emails from their teachers with assignments to have completed by then. Time to start gearing up!

Thalia:

Has started Kinetic Physics. Has never had to deal with significant digits before, so we found a couple of printouts via google. Also viewed a Khan lecture on the subject, but I think she liked the handouts better (or maybe that was me -- I'm not very patient with videos, preferring to skim through a page for the exact info I need instead). So far she's giving a thumbs up to the writing style of the text.

Has also started Notgrass World History. She says the writing is acceptable, although not too exciting. She likes the format -- each day read a section, answer some questions, take a quiz at the end of the week, write an essay, then repeat it all the next week. She's only doing the history component (it also has a Bible component and a lit component, each of which could be worth a credit).

Speaking of lit, THE ODYSSEY IS DONE! Woot! We stormed through several books of it this week, had Elizabeth Vandiver tell us what they meant via The Teaching Company DVDs on the subject. Now we need to watch O Brother Where Art Thou and wrap this Ancient Lit class up. I don't remember Brother well, but I think it will contain significantly fewer bath scenes than the book.

We also spent some quality time with Dave Ramsey learning about Personal Finance. We're blazing through this course, hoping to have the entire half credit done sometime in October.

She's supposedly studying for the ACT in September, too, although I think only about an hour was devoted to that this week.

Since she wants to take a tech theater class this year which we'll count for a half credit, I decided the desire to go see Joseph and the Amzing Technicolor Dreamcoat at a local church this week could count as homework -- we could look over sets and lighting and all. It was a free performance, with an offering taken partway through. We got what we paid for -- they had changed the musical to be churchier or fit their theology or because they couldn't competently do it as written or something. I threw a couple of bucks into the offering in hopes they'd use it to pay someone who knew how to do lighting. The amazing thing was the place was PACKED (and this was their 4th performance of 7) and they were getting a standing ovation ("If we stand up we're leaving NOW, okay?" "Fine!" so we beat all of the traffic out of the parking lot). Okay, seriously, there were some bright spots -- some people who were talented, some scenes that were well done. But it was a few hours of my life I'll never get back. "A few hours" because when we got home I HAD to watch the 1999 film version, partially to prove that yes, they really DID change the words to that song, and partially because they had ditched Any Dream Will Do (objectionable theology? bad vocal range? desire to substitute really insipid song about family that made for an incredibly botched ending? who knows). Annabeth said Any Dream Will Do was one of her favorite songs from the film, and it just wasn't right to have the musical without it, so we HAD to watch the film to hear the song.

Which reminds me,

Annabeth:

Has been reading Shepherd's Life Science. And sewing horse blankets. And has been reminded daily that she needs to get back to doing math sometime soon.

and finally,

Me:

I've been throwing Mentos into bottles of diet soda and coming up with reasons this is a valid thing to do in a 3rd to 5th science class. I mean, valid reasons other than "it's pretty much fun." You know, some educational aspect. Because the class I'm teaching starts Monday, too. And I had to give an extemporaneous class description last week (it was extemporaneous because I'd neglected to read the meeting agenda and thus discover we were expected to do it), so I summed up my vision for the class with "Um, well, I think we're going to blow things up." Let me tell you, if you announce that in a parents' meeting, people tend to remember it. So I guess we need to blow some things up right off the bat and get THAT out of the way. Then we can get on to whatever other interesting Physical Science experiments I can come up with. Like setting things on fire (I need to check the location of smoke alarms on Monday).