My Mad, Mad Love for The Teaching Company

When kids make the transition into True Teenhood, it can be hard to satisfy their innate curiosity without boring them to tears : that is, the format in which they learn may bore them excruciatingly.


For instance, while Neal may love to read, he finds that most textbooks are mentally anesthetic. They give stock answers to unenticingly-asked questions, then proceed to make it sound as if all the answers have been found. This make subjects like science, which are intrinsically  fascinating, into Butt-blasting Boredom with a capital 'B' or two.


Happily, Neal has taken quite well to dvds and such from The Teaching Company (no $$ or free products have exchanged hands here, : we have really, honestly used and enjoyed them after paying with our own hard-earned monies.) We've used ones on Algebra, history (we're currently using The Early Middle Ages set), World History (the ones for High school are great fun and very memorable) and science (cosmology and more.) Neal gets college-level teaching that respects his curiosity and caters a bit to his need for a bit of entertainment and variety. It works well all around.


The DVDs are pricey, but watch the site for sales. All of the sets go on sale quite regularly at amazing discounts. Occasionally, used ones are available on Amazon or Ebay. They have a great resale value also!

Halloo, hooray!!

Calloo, callay!

Allie is actually asking to do math! She's even been heard lecturing Neal on the joys of math. Amazing!

Must be the entertaining combo of Life of Fred: Fractions and Math Doesn't Suck...

Neal is doing fine with Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, but he's obligated to complain because his little sister isn't.

Using Cats to Teach Algebra

We'd tried scales, number rods and a few other gadgets, but Neal just wasn't quite catching on to the mysteries of algebraic equations. It all looked like a jumble of numbers and signs that weren't particularly connected or sensible. I was beginning to wonder whether I'd have to put the The Life of Fred: Algebra away and go back to arithmetic for a while.

Then our big tabby walked, or shall I say, sauntered, across the room. Brain flash! We'd use Tom Sawyer and Zahra to get the concept across.

We'd been over and over about the fact that doing the same thing to both sides of the equation leaves it equal. That's one of the basic rules that we use to find the weight of our kitties as well.

To find the cats' weights, we weighed Neal first, then weighed the chosen kitty. We drew a diagram showing the weight of Neal and the kitty on one side (in this case, 115 lbs) and the weight of Neal and the kitty as Neal + x (with x as the cat's weight) on the other side. To find the weight of the cat, we subtracted Neal's weight (100 lbs) from both side, leaving only the weight of the cat on either side: X = 15. Thus we proved that Tom weighed 15 lbs. (Zahra prefers not to have her weight disclosed.)

Neal went back to his equations and solved them easily.

Some kids really need to understand why before they can proceed with a new task. They can't follow a list of rules without knowing the reason behind them. This is actually a very good thing, though it isn't provided for very well in modern education. Kids who learn this way can often go much deeper into a subject than someone who would rather skim the surface.