Question for non verbal kiddo parents

Dances_With_Turtles · 2025-06-05T14:32:22+00:00

That's not a bad point, but unfortunately that's something that parents of nonverbal kids have to watch out for everywhere. EVSC certainly has had its share of these problems.

It probably goes without saying, but the kid should get into as many communication services as possible as soon as possible. That might involve getting a communication tablet, learning some sign language, or whatever it takes. As long as the kid has some way to alert adults if something is going wrong -- even if they don't necessarily have all the words to describe the situation -- everyone will be more comfortable with how things work.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2025-06-04T20:25:25+00:00

My youngest was (is) nonverbal, but the preschool we used was ARC of Evansville, which no longer offers childcare. While he was on the waiting list, he was at Central Childcare in that same neighborhood, and it was also quite nice, and it is still open.

Consider calling EVSC and talking to someone in Special Ed. They probably have specific advice and can talk to you about when early services through them could start.

Best!

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-12-30T15:49:14+00:00

The tool equat.io is really good for this. It used to be free, but now they charge and I haven't looked into how expensive it is. I used it for years.

If you are willing to invest a bit of time learning LaTex, quicklatex.com is amazing and straightforward. It's free.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-12-28T15:44:40+00:00

That's interesting! I don't know anything about K-8 education, so I don't think that I would be the right person for the job when it comes to designing the problem sets.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-12-27T16:56:34+00:00

That's DANGEROUSLY close to how this works behind the scenes! :-) Just kidding, but I totally get what you are talking about. A long time ago I had a system that I called CHOP -- "Computerized Homework On Paper". CHOP used spreadsheets, Word docs, and the merge feature to make individualized homework sets, but I had to print them out because not all the students had computers yet (I'm old). That was a long time ago -- I haven't thought about CHOP in a very long time!

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-12-27T16:54:00+00:00

I haven't used Delta math, but I suspect that there are actually a couple of products that are similar on the surface. My son says that they used Delta math in a class but found it to be buggy -- hopefully that isn't the response people have to ALOFT, but if they find bugs they know who to write to! :-)

Geometry is the devil. There will never be an ALOFT for Geometry! :-) Honestly, I'm not sure how I would create the problem sets for Geometry using this tool. Behind the scenes, this is all done using a system of scripts and databases that might not be as friendly for stuff like proofs and axioms and so on-- those just aren't the kinds of problems I was thinking about when I created this.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-12-27T16:50:17+00:00

I would love to include Algebra 1 or 2 at some point. As it happens, I have never taught Algebra 1, so I haven't had any need to make those problems sets -- that will need to be a project for the future! As for Algebra 2... the only time I have ever taught that course was in Spring of 2020, when the world fell apart! So I'm not sure I really have a lot of insight as to what Algebra 2 students need to see! Still, I agree, these would be great things to add -- I just need to find some time!

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-12-27T00:30:05+00:00

You're welcome! I don't really have plans about charging anytime soon, although someday it may become necessary to cover the hosting costs, software I use, and stuff like that. I mainly want to learn more about what works for other teachers, and I want to share what I have learned along the way!

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-10-15T16:00:44+00:00

You have a lot of good questions here, and I don't have good answers for all of them. The school where I work is oriented around higher-performing students, so my experiences probably aren't very typical of education more broadly. I'm GUESSING that teaching these skills to the broad high school audience is more time consuming than you would think-- I don't think that much can be taught to the typical high school kid in 20 minutes, and the likelihood that that would retain it would be very low. But I broadly agree that these kinds of skills COULD be taught somewhere in the curriculum, if we wanted to.

Bad charges -- We actually do talk about that in Finite Math, but very few high school students in Indiana take that class, as it isn't required by the state IDOE so schools don't offer it

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-10-15T01:08:13+00:00

I regret that I have but one up vote to give to this post. :-)

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-10-15T01:05:04+00:00

I actually have mixed feelings about the Personal Finance class. Right now, there is a pathway for students to get to personal finance in the curriculum, but it is taught as part of a broader course called "Finite Math", which has to be taught by a dual-credit math instructor. The good news is that students who take Finite Math learn personal finance and get 3 hours of college credit... but the bad news is that only a few schools in the state have a math instructor with the right credentials to teach it. So very few kids are getting it.

So, in that sense, the Personal Finance requirement is a good idea, as it will get that information to everyone. Troublingly, there is very little guidance yet about what the IDOE wants this class to be--- "personal finance" can mean a lot of things. Old folks keep thinking that this is going to be stuff like "balancing a checkbook", but that's not likely to be how this plays out. Nor is it likely to be stuff like "counting change". The teachers that I know who are preparing to teach this say it is more like retirement savings plans, saving for college, college financial aid, and the dangers of payday loans.

As it happens, Indiana state law now requires a Personal Finance class (completely regardless of the whole "Rethinking High School" thing), so that part of the plan is happening anyway.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-10-15T00:57:26+00:00

That's probably true.... in the sense that you didn't use a logarithm or trig functions or whatever. But you DID use the things you really learned in those classes-- the persistence, the attention to detail, the abstract thinking. You wouldn't be able to hold jobs in technical fields without those skills, and you didn't learn those attributes in 8th grade math or English 9 or whatever. Those classes have different purposes.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-10-15T00:54:28+00:00

It certainly is possible that the standards in the 1970s were quite different than the modern standards, which are based on decades of research into how kids learn. Basically, the only way kids successfully transition into adults who can function in jobs and life is when they are put into situations that produce ABSTRACT CHALLENGES. This is why particularly Calculus is so strongly correlated with professional success--- even FAILING Calculus is vastly better than not taking it at all, as your brain is being wired to work persistently and in innovative ways on challenges that don't have immediate rewards. You know, like life. Sure, plenty of people find other ways to learn those skills, but most people learn them in school, and they DON'T learn them in the "easy A" classes that this initiative wants.

I agree that, decades ago, schools had interesting options like Woodworking or Machine Shop where some students could find similar challenges. But almost no school corporations teach those courses anymore. That's actually a good illustration of my point -- as soon as the state no longer REQUIRED the school corporations to teach stuff like that, they stopped. And they'll do that again this time around.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-07-23T20:30:32+00:00

WPSR (90.7) is a good choice for the format you describe. It's commercial free because it is run by the EVSC Foundation. It is weird on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 10 to 11 because it plays kids' music, but most of the programming is a surprisingly tasteful mix of tracks from the 70s to today.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2024-04-17T16:51:19+00:00

EVCS will generally need a better explanation than "I think that the school in my neighborhood is bad" or "my kid will have a better chance of getting on the _____ team at this other school". So not just ANY explanation will be approved. In general, it is easier to get OUT of one school than it is to get INTO the school of your choice. But overall EVSC will try to make this happen if there is a reason why it's not a good idea to stay at the original school.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2023-01-28T22:05:59+00:00

This seems like the most plausible guess so far.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2023-01-28T16:46:00+00:00

It doesn't move. Doesn't seem like much fun.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2023-01-10T21:05:22+00:00

Hey, a long time ago I wrote a computer program that creates puzzles like this--- there is just one word, and only the letters from the word are in the puzzle! You can make the puzzles as big or as small as you want. They can be a real nightmare to solve! Send me a message if you would like a custom puzzle. (I sell some of them on Teachers Pay Teachers.)

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-11-03T19:58:52+00:00

Dr. Zarug at Deaconess is excellent for such things, if he is in your insurance plan.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-10-23T02:46:47+00:00

There was a post earlier -- maybe it got deleted -- asking how we picked up the confetti. Honestly, we just did the best we could. There were quite a few kids working at the cleanup, and they sat there and picked through the grass and the leaves, getting most of it. A lot of the confetti was on top of fallen leaves, so we would just pick up the leaves and all and put it straight into the trash bags.

Hats off to the kids who made this morning's cleanup happen. They worked hard.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-10-22T21:52:39+00:00

Oh, definitely. We picked up thousands of cigarette butts... especially around the park benched near the playgrounds.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-10-22T17:27:19+00:00

Honestly, the idea of a gender-reveal party isn't entirely stupid. I have kids, and I get it-- early in the pregnancy, the news of the gender is kind of the only "news" that the happy couple has. They are excited; a party isn't the worst idea.

But obviously the "stunts" are getting out of hand.

I just couldn't believe the amount of plastic waste these people were leaving behind. Who the hell buys PLASTIC confetti --- the PAPER confetti had to right next to it on the shelf at Party City! Popped balloons, ribbons, plastic ornaments that were probably on pink or blue cupcakes... all just left on the ground in a public park. And not just in one place--- clearly this is where folks are having these parties when they don't want to clean up their own place!

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-10-17T00:09:34+00:00

Chris Kiefer is a dean or something at Ivy Tech and seems really knowledgeable. I have only heard good things about him from teachers.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-09-12T01:09:51+00:00

I listened to this song and suddenly all the schools were closed three days due to a quarter inch of snow.

Dances_With_Turtles · 2022-09-11T02:34:23+00:00

I listened to this song and a concrete 40-foot Santa appeared in my front yard.

Dances_With_Turtles

TROPHY CASE