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So the question is....do I want to roll the dice again, and see if I can pick the correct Teacher Wraparound Edition (scroll down) for C's brand-new, groovy, four-color Glencoe Algebra book, New York edition on my second try.
?
No.
Enough with the Teacher Wraparound Editions.
I've got so many Teacher Wraparound Editions at this point I'm in danger of being crushed by avalanching Teacher Wraparound Edition stacks, like that hoarding twin in Harlem in the 1940s.*
Also, where Teacher Wraparound Editions are concerned, I feel my record has peaked. I'm not going to surpass last year's Wraparound triumph, when Ms. K began sending home problem sets she'd Xeroxed from some other textbook, not the one C. was using in class.
The problems were about symmetry, translations, transformations, rotations and the like, a topic I had never been taught. I had no idea what the particular worksheet was asking C. to do, and neither did he.
As it turned out, this wasn't a problem, because she had copied the homework set from the Workbook for the Phase 3 textbook, and it just so happened I had purchased the Teacher Wraparound Edition for that book when we were thinking the school would display ongoing support and cooperation in the matter of moving C. to Phase 3 for the remainder of the year, then moving him back up to Algebra 1 for 8th grade.
I pulled it out, read the appropriate material, figured out what the assignment was trying to get across, found the answer key, retaught the content to C, had him do the problem set, checked his answers, and had him re-do problems he'd missed.
All of this on a subject I'd never studied, as covered by a textbook my kid's class wasn't using.
I'm never going to top that.
* Correction: apparently Langley Collyer wasn't crushed by a falling stack of hoarded items, but rather by a booby trap he'd built to keep people out.
Ghosty Men by Franz Lidz
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5 comments:
M used this text in her Algebra I class last year (8th grade), and it wasn't awful. Of course, we don't have the results of the 8th grade ISATS for Math, so I may be singing a different tune after that. FWIW, K, our older daughter, kept periodic tabs on M's Algebra progress, and she didn't hate the book either (K loved Algebra, I might note, and scored a 33 on the Math portion of the ACT).
Also, I sent you a link via email for the teacher's website that has online practice quizzes for each of the units. We found them to be a particularly valuable resource.
I should also note that M's 8th grade Algebra teacher did a fine job of teaching the material. The kids had almost nightly homework, which they then went over in class the next day, and the homework had to be corrected, and then turned in at the end of each unit.
The homework itself was a component of the grade, but if I recall, step one was completion, and then the grade was based on making the necessary corrections after having gone over the homework in class. Thus, the homework was a very positive component of the overall grade.
This year is going to be NIGHT AND DAY.
The textbook is profoundly difficult just TO SEE; the one comment Christopher has made thus far is, "It's hard to read, it's distracting."
The one thing I love is that it has the NY state standards WRITTEN OUT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK.
I can actually open up the book AND SEE THE STATE STANDARDS, as opposed to spending hours of my life hunting them down on the godforsaken NY edu-web site, and then reading through the mush to get to the actual standards.
I intensely dislike page splatter in textbooks; I'm wondering if the version/edition that your school is using to comply with the New York standards is markedly different from the version that M used last year.
It's horrific.
Just a freaking mess.
Glencoe has zillions of algebra books out, and with each edition the books tend to get more garish, not less.
It's probably the same basic content, reshuffled to meet NY standards, and with more gunk in the margins.
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