working out for Disney

[Sans Souci]

There's also the new tower opening. Not sure if the rooms will be bigger there.

I checked. They are 320 sq ft, smaller than either of the standard Swolphin rooms.

 

[Sans Souci]

Hello-

I did a 40 min. pilates class this AM. I had a different class scheduled for the day, but when I looked at it and saw a bunch of burpees and jump tucks, I internally said "NO." I wasn't in the mood for that today.

I read in the Covid thread about someone's MIL passing away from a COVID infection that she had contracted from an employee at the long term care facility, where she was living. She was vaccinated. That prompted me to book a trip to see my grandmother. She is currently in another covid lockdown. So, yesterday, I booked a trip to see her in November. I have such a horrid feeling about this Fall/Winter. Ugh.

 

[StarWarsGirl]

I read in the Covid thread about someone's MIL passing away from a COVID infection that she had contracted from an employee at the long term care facility, where she was living. She was vaccinated. That prompted me to book a trip to see my grandmother. She is currently in another covid lockdown. So, yesterday, I booked a trip to see her in November. I have such a horrid feeling about this Fall/Winter. Ugh.

I just posted this in the covid thread, but a friend of my grandma's/aunt's died of covid down in Florida. Fully vaccinated, still picked it up. Awful.

 

[StarWarsGirl]

His mom suggested he stop. He has been having other issues and she said maybe the shots caused them. I think they go back to when he had shingles last year. His health has not been the same since then. But it's his body. I think he had the living daylights scared out of him on Friday. He did send an email to his GP to see what he thinks, but ultimately, I think he is going to stop.

How long has he been getting the shots? I had them for five years and it was very very gradual. Never had issues.

 

[HouCuseChickie]

Also, whatever she does, don't take AP statistics. And when she gets to college, if they say there's an easier version and a harder version, take the easier version. @Figgy1 remembers the whining with statistics.

I'm still whining about college stats! I barely passed College Stats I. I did so badly in College Stats II that I wound up taking it a second time at University of Florida over a break. It was an absolute nightmare.

 

[StarWarsGirl]

I'm still whining about college stats! I barely passed College Stats I. I did so badly in College Stats II that I wound up taking it a second time at University of Florida over a break. It was an absolute nightmare.

I had to get a tutor. I was a tutor, so that was admitting defeat. My tutor admitted that she'd taken it twice.

I was up until 3 am studying the night before the final since the final was at noon. They had online tutors, so I worked with one of them studying for the final. Thankfully, the professor let your final exam grade replace your lowest test scores for the class. I had failed an exam, so I went with that option. I ended up with an 85 on the final, so I got a B for the class

 

[HouCuseChickie]

Do you know if the other high school has more levels than just on-level and AP? Would that school be a better fit? It was a huge adjustment for me mentally when I came here because high schools are set up SO differently. And I came from a tiny town where we had one school for all of junior high through high school (7-12), where the next town over had 2 junior highs (7-9) and 1 high school (10-12) and their high school was overcrowded but they had a powerhouse sports program and didn't want to build a 2nd school and split their sports teams into two and be less competitive, so they sent some overflow to our town starting in my senior year. They have since built a 2nd building, but call it "South Campus" so it's still the same school. But each of their junior high schools AND their high school buildings have an auditorium and a couple of gymnasiums so different teams can practice at the same time. We had no auditorium and 1 gymnasium for both junior high and high school sports. When I was in junior high basketball, we had to go to the elementary school to use the gym, and later they built a gym at the rec center so some sports teams used that as well. But when I was teaching, one of the aides in my school was invited to my home town for a concert for her neighbor girl who was part of the "overflow" who were bused to my town. So she was wandering around the school looking for the auditorium and couldn't find it. I said we didn't have one. She asked me where the concerts were held and I said "In the cafeteria" and she was shocked! The Gillette people had been told for years that we had all the facilities we could want and we were just a bunch of whiners who wanted more than Gillette had. All the funding went to Gillette. They had no idea that we didn't have an auditorium, or a track, or multiple gyms, etc.. Then I came here. Schools are divided by level. So you have multiple high schools in town, but rather than it being a zoning thing, you pick a school that offers your level. There are several different levels. There's even a level for kids who are really below average so they basically skip traditional education and go straight to job training in some trade. There are a couple of levels for below average where you do a lot of stuff more geared to a specific career along with very basic math, science and social studies classes, and then you have an average level, an honors level, and an AP level. It's so nice to have them split up that way. They get instruction in every class at their particular level. Granted there are always kids who do really well and kids who don't. E is at the top of her class, doing the AP level, but one of her friends in the AP level barely passes and isn't motivated at all. She should never have made it through last year, and probably not their 2nd year, either....Corona worked in her favor because they were a lot more lenient because of remote learning, so she didn't HAVE to be motivated. But anyway, you pick the school that meets your needs. E chose her school because it was the only one that had the dual immersion program, and it was the only one that has technasium. BUT, it's also the only one that DOESN'T have Gymnasium (it's the AP level plus Latin and Greek) and she would have had to take the train to Arhnem every day to have both Gymnasium and Dual immersion. But funding is based on enrollement. The schools get a certain amount per student, so they have to be competitive to recruit students to their schools and use the funding to build their programs. There's not really one school that's better than the others, it just depends on what programs you want. I really wish they'd move to a similar system in the US. The one-size-fits-all education is so obsolete. It really doesn't work for anyone! You've got some kids struggling just to pass, some who can't pass, some who are bored waiting for the others to catch up, and some who are so far ahead they can't even see the stragglers. None of them are getting the education that fits them....it's sad. But if the other school in your town offers more options than on-level and AP, maybe that would be a better fit for K? When does Sam move on to high school? Will she have this same issue? I don't know how it goes where you are, but I know when I was in school, and my daughter is the same way, yes we had classes with some kids my mom definitely didn't want me to associate with, but I wasn't involved in those circles. Those kids wanted nothing to do with me, and I wasn't particularly bothered by that...my friends were all more or less like me. We were the kids who did our homework, were respectful, got at least passing grades, etc. We weren't the kids hanging out in the parking lot smoking at lunch, skipping school to do drugs, etc...So even if K had some kids in her class that wouldn't necessarily be good influences on her, she wouldn't necessarily be traveling in the same circles outside of school. E's unmotivated friend is still a pretty good kid for all intents and purposes....she's just lazy. And it drives E nuts, so she's not emulating that behavior. You know K's personality, and I don't, so it's absolutely your call, but is K really easily influenced by others? Is she likely to join in with a group who's on the wrong track just because she has a couple of classes with them?

I believe this is the model used by Texas schools. I don't know of any public schools in the greater Houston area that offer anything other AP and On Level. Things here like that often get decided at the state level. There may be allowances made for more rural areas with fewer schools and resources, but you won't see that in the areas tied to major cities. I was talking to a mom friend yesterday who is going through something similar with her son...freshman...totally different high school. While I know every educator would like more, we're certainly not missing things like what you've described between your school and what they had in Gillette. Kendall's high school has a football stadium, track, softball stadium, baseball stadium, soccer fields, tennis courts, an Olympic sized pool, two indoor gyms for volleyball and basketball, two theaters for stage shows, a commons area for less formal shows, etc. The football stadium located at the school is more for smaller games, but we have a larger district stadium that holds around 15k people for bigger events. Our school and the other high school in our district are pretty much the crown jewels for the district, but many of the other schools have resources like this as well.

I've heard from a number of teachers and counselors as well as 20+ parents that you do not want your child in any of the area schools in on-level classes. You also have to factor in how your school rates to college admissions boards. If you're going to a school with a better quality rating and you're only doing on-level, it looks like there's something really wrong with your kid. Like you have all of these things and you still can't be in AP? There's also a reverse of that. My friend's eldest graduated from a lesser high school in our district (couldn't get her transferred in to one of ours), and I remember Harvard and University of Chicago breaking it to her that she'd have to find a good angle to even have a slight chance of getting in because her high school's rating just wasn't good enough...even though she was at the top of her class. Ultimately, right now nobody is recommending K switch out of AP, so we just need to work on making this better.

 

[HouCuseChickie]

I had to get a tutor. I was a tutor, so that was admitting defeat. My tutor admitted that she'd taken it twice.

I was up until 3 am studying the night before the final since the final was at noon. They had online tutors, so I worked with one of them studying for the final. Thankfully, the professor let your final exam grade replace your lowest test scores for the class. I had failed an exam, so I went with that option. I ended up with an 85 on the final, so I got a B for the class

I had to a hire a tutor the second time I took College Stats II. I had a friend who was part of the math department at UF, but decided it was a conflict of interest, and wound up recommending my tutor. That sounds about where I ended up grade wise as well. Of course, it's also one of the many courses I do not use in the real world.

 

[HouCuseChickie]

While today is my rest day, I've been keeping up with my workouts...barely! Life is just so busy. I wound up working out around 8pm last night and did whatever I could. The day before, I had to get K and her friend to the mall for Homecoming dress shopping, so I had to squeeze in what I could before doing all of that. I had to work later that day...project testing...which was 5 solid hours of work on a day when I'm normally off. So, that ruined my chances of getting anything else in later. I'm hitting that exhaustion point where I've started feeling sick even though I'm probably just tired. Right now, I feel like I could curl up in bed and take a nap, except that my lunch ends in a few minutes and I have a meeting. Never ending stuff.

 

[StarWarsGirl]

I had to a hire a tutor the second time I took College Stats II. I had a friend who was part of the math department at UF, but decided it was a conflict of interest, and wound up recommending my tutor. That sounds about where I ended up grade wise as well. Of course, it's also one of the many courses I do not use in the real world.

My tutoring was free at least. Benefits of private college...

 

[HouCuseChickie]

My tutoring was free at least. Benefits of private college...

Lucky! I went to a private college as well, but you had to pay if you needed tutoring.

 

[StarWarsGirl]

Lucky! I went to a private college as well, but you had to pay if you needed tutoring.

Yeah, I was really spoiled by my college. I'm going back to school for my second bachelor's, and this time I'm going to a state school for working adults, and it's occuring to me already how very spoiled I was by my private college. We had free tutoring, usually peer tutoring, sometimes the professors tutored as long as you weren't taking their class (so I was an accounting tutor, and my professor was as well, but he couldn't tutor his own students). There was also free online tutoring 24/7. Which is how I had a tutor working with me at 2 am.

Even little stuff was nice, like during finals, they'd put out snacks for us. Never had to pay for printing either. I took Spanish at one of the state schools and all of the students there were like, yeah you're spoiled by your home school.

 

[Songbird76]

Haven't been to the Swan in 3 years now, but I recall that the rooms weren't all that big. Choice was either 2 queens, or 1 king. Not sure if there's a fold-out sofa or not. What I also noticed was the small closet/storage area, in some of the rooms.

For me, I was there solo and none of this mattered; but if you're talking 4-5 people, you might want to check out their web site to get the square footage of the rooms first. As for the Dolphin, that might be a little larger, but as I recall the Dolphin had two full (not queen-sized) beds. I think they also had kings, but I'm not positive, as I haven't stayed there for over 8 years now. (Swan was my favorite of the two.)

Also to keep in consideration, is if you all just need a room to sleep and take a shower. If you're hardly there (and mostly out at the parks etc. all day long), it might not matter too much if all were sharing 1 room only.

Yeah, we've always gone with our 4 and it was fine because mostly, we're just there to sleep and shower, except A. But being with another family might be an issue. I don't know what their style will be or if we'll split up part of the time. I think we'd mostly be touring together, since it's a best friends/daughters trip. We hardly ever get to see each other....we're going to want to spend time together while we can. Though when we went to Paris together with our husbands, we did split up a little because we were in completely different hotels. Her's was a luxury hotel overlooking the Eiffel tower, and ours was a budget hotel right on the outskirts of the ring in a neighborhood you didn't want to be alone in at night. So we made plans the day before and would meet up wherever after breakfast, etc. But that was when we had the husbands with us and no kids...so a different kind of trip. I also don't know how long she'll want to stay. Since we don't get to go often, we usually plan on 2-3 weeks. I doubt she's going to want to go to Disney that long, and her husband usually has some pretty strong ideas about where he wants his daughter spending the summer months and it doesn't include hanging out with me. She was going to meet up with us in 2019, but they had just moved back to the US from Australia and he wanted A to spend the summer with her grandmother, so he put the kabosh on them coming to Florida. I haven't seen her since 2013, and I'd love to have 3 weeks of touring Disney and Universal together, but they aren't huge Disney people, and I don't know if her husband will want her to go that long. So it may just be a few days at Universal and E and I will do Disney either before or after, depending. But 4 women sharing a shower might be a bit intense.

 

[Songbird76]

I had to get a tutor. I was a tutor, so that was admitting defeat. My tutor admitted that she'd taken it twice.

I was up until 3 am studying the night before the final since the final was at noon. They had online tutors, so I worked with one of them studying for the final. Thankfully, the professor let your final exam grade replace your lowest test scores for the class. I had failed an exam, so I went with that option. I ended up with an 85 on the final, so I got a B for the class

I never had to take Statistics, thank goodness. I heard it was really hard. I had to do Finite Math and then I don't remember what the other one was....I remember I had a Brazilian Grad student for the 2nd math class and a lot of the kids in the class had a hard time understanding him, but we had 5 brazilian exchange students in the music department and I was used to their accent, so it was no problem for me. I think the other class I had was maybe Problem solving? And then I had Quantatative Reasoning, which my friends and I would never have passed without my husband because we had an absolute IDIOT as a teacher. He was a grad student studying social work, and he needed a Grad Assisstant position, and the only one they had open was QR, but he knew NOTHING about the subject matter he was teaching. He tried to explain something and got confused and he was like "You need to multiply this by 15%" and a girl raised her hand and said "How do you multiply by a percent?" and he didn't know. My friends and I had all done it so we raised our hands and said "You multiply by .15" and he says "No, it needs to be 15%, not .15" so we said "15% IS .15...it's just the decimal representation of it" No no no, it wasn't the same, but he didn't know how it wasn't the same, he just knew it wasn't. Then we had to make some sort of a graph....it was a bar graph that represented something with populations each decade so I put the decades across the bottom, and the populations in the millions on the left, so the bars went vertically. He told me I had done it wrong, he wanted the bars to go horizontally. So I changed it around, and then he told me I did it wrong, because I needed the populations and decades to stay where they were, just make the bars go horizontally instead of vertically. I was like...um....no, that's impossible. You can't do it that way. He insisted you could, but the computer wouldn't let me do that, I asked multiple people who I knew were good with math, including my engineer husband (prior to our being married) and they all said the same thing....you can't do it that way. So he gave me a zero because I wouldn't give him the graph he wanted. M came to visit that year in December and he came to that class with me because he was curious about this "professor". We came out of that class and he was like WHAT AN IDIOT!!! He actually corrected him a couple of times in class when he made mistakes and the guy argued with him. Thank goodness our final was a take home test. All 4 or 5 of us who were in that class together (all the music education majors) got together at one of their houses and M helped us with our final because the teacher hadn't taught us a dang thing. We made sure that each of us purposely answered question or two wrong, and different ones so he'd never know we did it together, but man that was a tough class, simply because of the teacher.

 

[Sans Souci]

How long has he been getting the shots? I had them for five years and it was very very gradual. Never had issues.

Since the beginning of April. It is a series of 29 shots. He can't get his shots this week anyway, if he wanted to. The company that makes his epipen is backordered and they won't give him his weekly shot unless he's got both of them with him.

 

[Songbird76]

I believe this is the model used by Texas schools. I don't know of any public schools in the greater Houston area that offer anything other AP and On Level. Things here like that often get decided at the state level. There may be allowances made for more rural areas with fewer schools and resources, but you won't see that in the areas tied to major cities. I was talking to a mom friend yesterday who is going through something similar with her son...freshman...totally different high school. While I know every educator would like more, we're certainly not missing things like what you've described between your school and what they had in Gillette. Kendall's high school has a football stadium, track, softball stadium, baseball stadium, soccer fields, tennis courts, an Olympic sized pool, two indoor gyms for volleyball and basketball, two theaters for stage shows, a commons area for less formal shows, etc. The football stadium located at the school is more for smaller games, but we have a larger district stadium that holds around 15k people for bigger events. Our school and the other high school in our district are pretty much the crown jewels for the district, but many of the other schools have resources like this as well.

I've heard from a number of teachers and counselors as well as 20+ parents that you do not want your child in any of the area schools in on-level classes. You also have to factor in how your school rates to college admissions boards. If you're going to a school with a better quality rating and you're only doing on-level, it looks like there's something really wrong with your kid. Like you have all of these things and you still can't be in AP? There's also a reverse of that. My friend's eldest graduated from a lesser high school in our district (couldn't get her transferred in to one of ours), and I remember Harvard and University of Chicago breaking it to her that she'd have to find a good angle to even have a slight chance of getting in because her high school's rating just wasn't good enough...even though she was at the top of her class. Ultimately, right now nobody is recommending K switch out of AP, so we just need to work on making this better.

Wow, that sounds like a really really nice school!! We didn't have a pool, though Gillette did, so there were a couple of kids who went to school in Gillette so they could be on the swim team. One boy a few years younger than me was an olympic hopeful. He was really close to making it one year....I think he just barely missed at trials, but then he got into an accident while skiing and is wheelchair bound. But we had our football field in the middle of the track that they ripped out, and a gym. We didn't have tennis, soccer, swimming, softball/baseball or any theaters or anything. I doubt our school would have looked good to schools like Harvard. Cornell called my brother to talk to him about coming there, because he had a 33 on his ACT, but that's the only one of the big names, and they wouldn't do much for him with scholarships, so he went in state where he got a full ride. My ex boyfriend got a 35 on his ACT....the only section he never got a perfect score on was Math, and he got a 35 on that. He was the top ranked student in the state the year we graduated, and even he was never recruited by Harvard or Yale or anything. We just don't have the schools to compete with some of these schools that are designed specifically to prepare the kids for the best colleges.

This was our football field/track. You can see the track behind us has bald patches where the gravel has been brushed away, exposing the dirt underneath. (That's me, far far left, not completely in the picture)

 

[Sans Souci]

I had to get a tutor. I was a tutor, so that was admitting defeat. My tutor admitted that she'd taken it twice.

I don't know what your HS covered in terms of stats, but my exposure to stats in HS was minimal. There was a quick unit on very basic concepts like mean, median and mode, but never any real world applications. I think a lot of people get smacked in the face when they take a class that is all Stats. It's a math class, but it's not. You can crank out answers like nobody's business and still suck at Stats. It's more about which test is appropriate for the answer you're seeking. There are so many ways to go wrong in between, too!

 

[Sans Souci]

I believe this is the model used by Texas schools. I don't know of any public schools in the greater Houston area that offer anything other AP and On Level. Things here like that often get decided at the state level. There may be allowances made for more rural areas with fewer schools and resources, but you won't see that in the areas tied to major cities. I was talking to a mom friend yesterday who is going through something similar with her son...freshman...totally different high school. While I know every educator would like more, we're certainly not missing things like what you've described between your school and what they had in Gillette. Kendall's high school has a football stadium, track, softball stadium, baseball stadium, soccer fields, tennis courts, an Olympic sized pool, two indoor gyms for volleyball and basketball, two theaters for stage shows, a commons area for less formal shows, etc. The football stadium located at the school is more for smaller games, but we have a larger district stadium that holds around 15k people for bigger events. Our school and the other high school in our district are pretty much the crown jewels for the district, but many of the other schools have resources like this as well.

I've heard from a number of teachers and counselors as well as 20+ parents that you do not want your child in any of the area schools in on-level classes. You also have to factor in how your school rates to college admissions boards. If you're going to a school with a better quality rating and you're only doing on-level, it looks like there's something really wrong with your kid. Like you have all of these things and you still can't be in AP? There's also a reverse of that. My friend's eldest graduated from a lesser high school in our district (couldn't get her transferred in to one of ours), and I remember Harvard and University of Chicago breaking it to her that she'd have to find a good angle to even have a slight chance of getting in because her high school's rating just wasn't good enough...even though she was at the top of her class. Ultimately, right now nobody is recommending K switch out of AP, so we just need to work on making this better.

This reminds me of this woman my husband used to work with at this one bank. She couldn't afford to live in an adjacent town that had a top notch HS, but she had a friend who did. So, her friend let her use her address so her son could attend this HS. It was all very dodgy.

 

[Sans Souci]

Good morning.

I did a "High Intensity Interval Pilates" class. I got pretty sweaty because it had a few cardio intervals interspersed with mat work. It took 35 min to complete, too.

We were able to reschedule our cancelled dinner for Sunday. I am hoping for weather that is suitable for dining outdoors, because my husband won't dine indoors. TBH, as long as my son remains unvaccinated, I am not either. My grandmother yelled at him over the phone the other day about it, he just handed the phone back to me as she was yelling at him. It was kind of funny, but mostly frustrating.

 

[HouCuseChickie]

Yeah, I was really spoiled by my college. I'm going back to school for my second bachelor's, and this time I'm going to a state school for working adults, and it's occuring to me already how very spoiled I was by my private college. We had free tutoring, usually peer tutoring, sometimes the professors tutored as long as you weren't taking their class (so I was an accounting tutor, and my professor was as well, but he couldn't tutor his own students). There was also free online tutoring 24/7. Which is how I had a tutor working with me at 2 am.

Even little stuff was nice, like during finals, they'd put out snacks for us. Never had to pay for printing either. I took Spanish at one of the state schools and all of the students there were like, yeah you're spoiled by your home school.

I will say our school definitely had us covered with food of all kinds in a wide variety of places. The freshman 15 was more like the freshman 50. Even after moving out of student housing and into my sorority house, we had tons of food that was covered by our dues. We may have also had resources I didn't know about. We were private and they certainly charged enough, but we are also classified as a large private (current undergrad is around 15k students)...so it was common to miss out and find out about things after the fact. It was early 1990s, so just having online information with resources wasn't even a thing. You often found out about things by word of mouth or by luck if something good wasn't buried in a stack of papers or things stuck to bulletin boards. My advisor was a joke, so no way he would have known about anything helpful. I know we had free printing, but I remember a friend having to sneak me into the journalism computer lab to get access to better software and printing. Although, the class I used it for wanted the project put into booklets, so I still wound up paying for that.