Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The start of an Era??

I have decided to try my hand at blogging. I have been reading my brother-in-law's blog for a year or so now (hopefully a link will be on this page if I understood the instructions correctly!) and, although I can't possibly compete with his organized ramblings, I feel I should at least try one or two posts and see what this is all about.


So what to write?.......

I have been helping my 8 year old daughter Emma with her math homework. She is currently learning about Lines and Rays. Now I like to think I am OK at math (I do have a degree in it), but, what the hell is a Ray? After reading her "Math Homelinks" note I discover that a "line" is something with arrows at each end, and a "Ray" has an arrow on one end. I can't imagine why this would be needed in life, unless you were the person who designs road signs for a living.

Another math topic she is currently studying is geometric shapes and understanding the difference between their edges, faces and bases. Now I'm comfortable with edges and faces. For example a cube has 12 edges and 6 faces (a bit like some people I know). But how many bases does a cube have? Seems to me that the number of faces has to be the same as the number of bases.....so why are they called different things? And why do we care?


Schools are so "touchy/feely" today. My son Robert has to participate in a CTR each day. What is CTR I hear you ask? Its a Circle of Trust and Respect, where the kids get a chance to share experiences and fears with each other. Hmmm...

To prevent teachers from being accused of not sharing infomration with the parents, I have to sign every test or homework instruction that comes home from school. I had to sign a note last week to acknowledge that I had forgotten to sign a note the day before.....has the world gone mad?

The schools in my hometown of Shrewsbury, MA complain about their lack of budget and how they cannot afford to buy basic school supplies. So at the start of every school year, the gullible parents troop dutifully off the Walmart and buy a whole slew of supplies; paper, pencils, erasers, permanent markers, colored pencils, crayons, paper towels, sanitizing wipes.....the list is endless.

At the end of every year my kids bring home multiple partially filled text books , and numerous partly used pencils. In my day we had to use every last page of our text books front and back. And we did not get another pencil until our old one was so small we had to use tweezers to hold on to it. And the schools have the cheek to complain that they have no money. I may not understand the difference between a ray and a line, or a face and a base, but I can give them a few ideas on how to save money.

Well, that was easy enough. Once I got in the swing of it, the words came tumbling out as fast as my 2 fingers could type. I'm not promising that this blog will be interesting, or regularly updated, but if it gives me the opportunity to rant occasionally, it can't be a bad thing. Thanks for listening.

1 comment:

  1. Welcome to the blogosphere. Now, the secret is to keep at it.

    ReplyDelete