Monday, October 28, 2019

10/28/19 College Algebra Has Gotten Harder? (Part 1)

    Javalina is taking a college level algebra class, one of the few reasons we agreed to let him go to Crockett HS when Akins HS is basically across the street from where we live.  After finding out he had been lying to us about doing his work these current six weeks, all hell broke loose.  Wife contacted his teacher and she expressed concern that he had not done any assignments so far.  For some reason though, she is giving the students until this coming Tuesday at midnight to submit any and all work.  Plus, she was good enough to say that they can work in groups, with open notes, open books, and even ask her for help to complete the quizzes.
    I did one of those cool turn my neck to an angle and made that cool cracking noise, thinking well, I'll just take a stabby stab at those little math problems and get Mijo up to an A and it'll be no big deal.  Don't worry, we are still pissed at the little chubby shit for being a liar and lazy as anything, but as much as I don't mind if the principal or counselors all take turns paddling his ass, I don't want him failing on his report cards because grades matter.  So we mapped out the weekend and hoped for the best.  We did one quiz Friday night and it wasn't too bad.  He submitted it and "we" got an 86, it would have been a 96, but he doesn't listen very well and chose his answer over mine.  On the first quiz, it was alright as he was doing the work and I was just acting as a mirror to make sure he was doing it correctly.  He has a lot of small errors from sloppiness, such as forgetting to carry negative signs or adding when he should be subtracting, but we moved on.
    Saturday afternoon, I wanted to get out of the house and he said he had started on a second quiz, so I thought great, I won't have to get that involved.  Before we left the house, we were also going to eat, with Wife not living here, we just don't do a good job of keeping food in the house.  But he submitted his quiz and he got a shitty 50.  I told him not to worry, I would help him.  I looked at the work and to my surprise, it was math I had never seen before.  What do you do when you think you're hot shit and then run into a brick wall where everything you thought you knew goes up in a puff of smoke?  I got panicky because I had no idea how to deal with the problems.
    We skipped that test and it only got a little better on another quiz which dealt with solving equations and graphing, very normal stuff.  We did this one and I think we got a 100, so now it was Saturday evening and we only had two of four quizzes done and the foreign stuff was starting to scare me.

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