Re: meeting with just the principal - I don’t disagree, but I also don’t feel like I can rely on her to be effective. By all accounts she’s scared of this particular teacher, and tends to rely on avoidance tactics. By having her present in a meeting with the teacher, I can push her to do her job, and prevent her from avoiding or delaying.
Given the choice, I’d just switch my kids to another school, but that has proven to be difficult. My other daughter actually switched to a school with the English school board, but the bus trip was an hour each way, and the homework load was about tripled. After three months, she decided she’d rather come back to the bullshit at the local school. Switching within the french school board is basically impossible (we’ve tried) because all the schools are overfull.
Right now my strategy is to have a concise letter detailing what’s going on medically, as well as a request that if he has a problem with any notes we send him, he needs to take that to us directly. If he accepts that, then I wait for the next incident before pulling the kids out of his class. Because, I agree, he sounds like a bully, but I don’t feel like I can pull them out just based on what’s happened so far. And I don’t believe there’s any other phys-ed teacher at this school so it would be pulling the kids out of phys-ed entirely, not just requesting a switch to a different class
@Missy_Pants - that’s a good point about having a letter from the GP. I wish I’d asked for something written when we were at the hospital but I didn’t even think of it at the time. I guess it would be good to get a regular GP involved in long term management now anyway since syncope is now established as being not a one-time thing. I don’t expect that I’m going to be able to get anything from a physician before I meet with the school though, so I’m going to have to rely on a written note in which I say what I heard the doctor say…
Ugh… this guy sounds like a real piece of work… what is he a former drill instructor?
Good luck! Just remember that he’s in the wrong. if she needs to rest, he needs to let her. You aren’t out of line for insisting that the medical advice you received be followed. He’s out of line for ignoring it.
Got a letter from a former friend today, asking to talk things out.
To be true to myself I had to tell him he was forgiven, and I thanked him for writing, but no, I had no more energy to spend on the subject, and to please not write again. He won’t.
I’m living with this too (see upthread). I’ve mainly stopped giving our dog the pills she was resisting (except the anxiety meds when she really really needs them), since the pain seems much less and she clearly has more interest in life when she’s not doped up. I just hope I can keep her alive and comfortable until my wife - her real owner - gets home later this month, so she can say good-bye.
So, aside from having to help take the dog to the vet tomorrow, I have one more.
I bombed my linear algebra final spectacularly and I don’t think I’m going to pass. This is weird for me. Mainly because the material was less challenging than other classes I’ve taken, and the only thing that threw me off was really the proof intensive nature of it. Still, the final was only two hours long, no proofs, just depending heavily on abstract mastery of concepts. That’s normally where I shine.
I know the reason. The writing was on the wall before the first midterm. I wasn’t engaged in the class and I didn’t keep up with the material. I bombed the first (now extremely easy to me) test and when I woke up enough to actually study for the next test (read:cram for four hours beforehand) I got a near perfect score. Then I let my attention flag again. It’s ridiculous and I’m angry with myself. I know that one or two days of studying would have netted me a great score on this last exam, but I’ve gotten so backed up this semester I had to let some of that slide.
Every semester, I write up a little progress report for myself and post it on Facebook. It’s partly a way to keep myself accountable and partly a way to have a record of where I learned certain things. This semester’s post-mortem is the story of an energy crisis. I’ve gotten a lot better about getting assignments done ahead of time, managing my time better, and getting work done. I’m more organized now than I have ever been, possibly in my life. The problem is that I dropped something that actually turns out to be critical to my success. I used to spend too much time reading books about science and technology or science fiction, or watching documentaries or sci-fi movies. It took up precious time, but when I cut all of it out this semester, I lost something important- I stopped being interested in what I was doing. Everything was a long, slow, slog. This semester has been the worst by far in terms of my morale, and I genuinely think it has a lot to do with not feeding my heart as much as my brain.
I took or rather dropped early my 300 level linear algebra class 4 times. Between the shit book, and grad students that would just recite the book back and couldn’t teach, and well it isn’t an easy class. 5th time was with a prof that could actually teach and a new book, oh boy worlds of difference.
I can’t, in good conscience, blame the professor here. We did have two different subs at a couple of points during the semester that I really liked though. I might have done better with them? I dunno. I do hate the book though. I looked through a few in the library and this book’s actually got a very weird way of explaining orthogonal complement and Gram-Schmidt. It was yucky. I spent most of my time looking at outside resources. Khan Academy has potentially the clearest explanations, but have incredibly low bandwidth. I often needed one solid example buried in the middle of a ten minute video.
I’m sorry to hear that. If it is any consolation to you, linear algebra at this level is often the first real challenge for good math students, and many of the best students, who are used to getting by on cleverness and easy mastery of algorithms, often find themselves exactly in your position. It doesn’t help that all of the best applications usually don’t show up in the course itself, but rather in courses for which it is a prerequisite, leaving some students unmotivated (as well as unsure of which material they can safely downprioritize).
I don’t know about good math student. I love math, but I’m not exceptionally good at it. Or rather, I always underestimate how much practice I’m going to need. Calc II was difficult for me because it had been so long since I’d last taken a math class, and getting the practice I needed was hard. It took ten hours a week to complete a homework coming into it six years after Calc I. Though now I’m down to two, so I have definitely improved. I’ve discovered that I’m capable of kludging my way through problems I don’t necessarily have the practice to solve quickly and that has saved me a great deal.
Linear algebra wasn’t hard, but it was different. I had a similar issue in Calc III, where I was expected to do proofs. No one really explains to you how to prove things at any point in the process, and it’s difficult for me, because I tend to see the relationship without being able to really know how to put it into ink on paper. It’s a matter of practice, I suppose. I think the learning curve for math in university is just a little steep when going from one style of problem solving to another.
Stuff like that is what’s going to get Higher Education sued (eventually!) for fraud.
You go there on the promise of a highly-trained content master of some esteem teaching you a subject with attention and diligence.
What you get is a disinterested grad student half-assing a massive room full of students without so much as knowing their names. How it’s not a bait-and-switch I don’t know.
/rant off.
Between college and grad school, my best teachers were usually the grad students or junior non-tenured professors. Tenured professors were often too tired, jaded, or busy with the research/public appearances that made them high-flyers at the school to bother with anything more than giving lectures that were almost memorized because they’d been given verbatim for so many years.
Could be worse. The first time I dropped it I didn’t switch to the other session specifically for the prof teaching it. He was one of those graduated college with honors at 14 wonderkids. He had no clue that most of us even though we had a desire to learn the subject that we didn’t just understand it magically. I heard from someone that he flunked all the undergrads in that class. I had enough of him with the modern math class I got a D in. Which the next semester I got an A from a different prof who besides taking the time to explain things in other ways to us when we got lost was really good at showing us the actual thinking tools and processes needed to understand and do the work. Heck he even hosted a lunch at a nearby pub after the final where he bought the first round.
It always boggles some people who know what I took in school when I ask for a calculator for and I have to explain to them no, that’s arithmetic which is totally different beast. Just cause I could make a proof of 1+1=2 does not mean I can easily add 1+1 in my head (or on paper even) and get it right.
Of course 20 years later and working as a server admin I remember fuck all of any of it now.
300 level class for math and physics majors. I grok vectors through physics, but we were dealing with vectors in R^n mostly, and it wasn’t visualizable beyond R^3 which is where spacial intuition counts for anything. The class was not applications based (which I’m 100% okay with- I didn’t want applications.) I don’t need it for my major, where they teach you the bare minimum about eigenfunctions in physical chemistry. I just like math, and am not disciplined enough to teach myself. Yet.
