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From:	Sharon (24.110.201.194)
Subject:	math and decisions
Date:	March 4, 2009 at 11:39 am PST

In Reply to: Need some math advice Please! posted by Michele C on February 27, 2009 at 12:32 pm:

I caught one of my children cheating once. I explained to him that because it "looked like" he was getting all the "right" answers, his work was telling me he was ready to move on to **harder** work! (We has been using a reading program where the students checked and scored their own papers.) That was all it took, because he was NOT interested in being placed where he would be required to do harder work!! His motivation was 1) to get done faster and 2) to ensure that he got perfect grades. But if the high scores achieved by cheating indicated to me he was ready to be placed in harder work (plus not being able to cheat his way through) - he didn't want that!!

So...I think it depends on why your children cheated, and how they did this. Did they get hold of the answer key - do you let them score their own work? Or do they collaborate and give each other answers? Was it simply to get through the work? Are they able to do the work, but they are bored with the material?

[This is such a bad age to decide not to like to do math, isn't it!! This is the foundation for the later math. They will need the later math concepts to ensure *they* do not get cheated when they are older (now there's an irony). They will need to make sure no one steals from them because they hated to do math so they might never realize when someone was cheating them -- like a car dealer, or a mortgage broker, or their own bank if making them a loan or paying them interest, or even a cashier giving them change.]

Saxon is kind of boring. And if your children are bright, you might be able to move them ahead and push their pace a little. One of my other kids was like that, and so - right in the middkle of the school year!! - I jumped him from 65 to 87 and that solved all his problems (the opposite of my one who cheated -- this one just dawdled and took so hours to do his work, even when I cut him down to only doing half the problems on any given day. I finally realized he was bored and when the work became more challenging it was so much better). It has not damaged him to do this - he is a high school senior now and is in a second year of Advanced Placement Calculus. So don't be afraid to advance your children if you feel they are bright enough to move ahead. That's why we homeschool -- to tailor education to our own individual kids' needs -- we don't have to move in lockstep with some program designed to teach the masses like they are in a factory or something.

Also - you may not want to do this, but I will mention it in case. If we finished a book early (and that did happen quite often), we just went to the next book, no matter when in the year it was. Instead of giving a break one day a week, you might consider adding something extra or different at the end of the year, such as the "Keys to.." books, or a book teaching problem-solving strategies, such as Crossing the River with Dogs.

If your children have mastered all the basics and are simply biding time waiting for algebra, you could switch them to the "Keys to..." series and do the books on fractions, decimals, and percents. They are inexpensive and pretty no-frills but they are also no-drills, so they don't waste a lot of time for kids who don't need that.

I used to be very much "for" drilling, but when I had that one child skip 2 years of Saxon math, I learned what someone else had told me - they will pick up what they need as they go along, because they will actually be applying and learning that stuff in more complicated problems.

(When your children get there, they might enjoy Jacobs Algebra. Harold Jacobs does a lot of the same kind of thing Saxon does but his materials are filled with colorful and clever algebra problems, comics, puns, and sometimes jokes. My math dawdler really enjoy the Jacobs Algebras and Geometry and they set him up for success for the later maths.)

HTH

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