20150913 MEET TLG:

She is just a little girl.

I introduced TLG (The Little Girl) in MAKE THEM MAD, and even "shared" two pictures of her taken when she was much younger. She does not look nearly like this. She is six years old, and she just started her kindergarten year.

I am still homeschooling TLG. My goal is to teach her numeracy, not leaving reform math any chance. She just started doing long subtraction (10 digits and more), she knows all the operations (and she even understands they are operations) and she got many gifts from pre-algebra treasure chest. Or, maybe, algebra. I don't care what they teach any more.

According to its proponents, reform math was supposed to be a blessing for women and minorities. TLG is a girl. She is an offsprings of a pretty poor minority (and a very small minority, as a matter of fact). Yet it does not look like she belongs to "most students" of Steven Leinwand's article.

On average, our lesson takes 30 minutes per day, and it's not only numbers. I would much prefer to do something else, but we can't afford much of it. TLG just told me, pointing at her forehead, that she constantly reminds herself not to hate math after the first grade. I only mentioned it, maybe, couple times, when she did not want to learn.

Otherwise TLG is a normal American girl, and her interests are normal for this part of the population too, except she is more advanced than her peers in every aspect. It's not my words, it's official. Fortunately, the officials have no idea how advanced, and, most importantly, how different she is. They prefer to be professionally blindsided. As for TLG, I am telling her that truly smart people do not show how smart they are.