Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

The Beast Academy approach will be useful throughout their years in math. The FCPS bad estimation algorithm won't be. OP's kid will be better served by sticking with BA and ignoring the FCPS teacher.

And some people wonder where the reputation for arrogance comes from...

I don't think this is necessarily arrogant. I agree that a kid displaying arrogant behavior to his teacher is not good. But politely remarking on some things that might not be accurate is ok I think. One of the first things his teacher said at the beginning of the year in math (it might even have been the first math lesson) is not to be afraid to be wrong and it is ok to make mistakes.

As for Beast, it's been an awesome program for my kid so far. It makes the math he sees in school trivial, especially because they don't seem to challenge the class with any kind of problem solving in math class (at least so far). The only conceivable argument would be that it makes him bored in class because he's doing math outside of school. But that seems like a silly argument to me. I know he would be bored even if we didn't do BA. The pacing is slow, and all the assigned work is highly repetitive. He normally gets bored when the questions don't change or ask him to solve something where he has to think.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

The Beast Academy approach will be useful throughout their years in math. The FCPS bad estimation algorithm won't be. OP's kid will be better served by sticking with BA and ignoring the FCPS teacher.

Only if the kid is homeschooled.

Why do you believe this is necessarily true?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

Not necessarily if they were blindly taught that they're always supposed to round to the hundreds place, LOL. E.g, if they're trying to estimate the difference or sum of two 8 digit numbers, rounding to only hundreds place might defeat the purpose of estimating.

Even worse, they would have learned not to trust their intuition, even if their intuition wasn't the problem in the first place.

Exactly, that's my main priority to make sure his intuition is not undermined. This is probably one of the saddest things I see with many many kids coming out of middle school where you ask them any kind of question (even something pretty simple) and they are grasping for some algorithm from memory then they draw a blank and are done. They stop thinking altogether. I know it's not natural as I've seen many elementary aged kids run circles around these older kids. I've concluded that this is a learned habit coming from school, especially from math class.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

Not necessarily if they were blindly taught that they're always supposed to round to the hundreds place, LOL. E.g, if they're trying to estimate the difference or sum of two 8 digit numbers, rounding to only hundreds place might defeat the purpose of estimating.

Even worse, they would have learned not to trust their intuition, even if their intuition wasn't the problem in the first place.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

The Beast Academy approach will be useful throughout their years in math. The FCPS bad estimation algorithm won't be. OP's kid will be better served by sticking with BA and ignoring the FCPS teacher.

And some people wonder where the reputation for arrogance comes from...

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

The Beast Academy approach will be useful throughout their years in math. The FCPS bad estimation algorithm won't be. OP's kid will be better served by sticking with BA and ignoring the FCPS teacher.

Only if the kid is homeschooled.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

The Beast Academy approach will be useful throughout their years in math. The FCPS bad estimation algorithm won't be. OP's kid will be better served by sticking with BA and ignoring the FCPS teacher.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An estimate that varies by approximately 20% from the real answer?

The practicing engineer in me would be screaming at the teacher or the idiot who made the curriculum.

As the unit continues, they will estimate using larger numbers. It will be more useful then.

Not necessarily if they were blindly taught that they're always supposed to round to the hundreds place, LOL. E.g, if they're trying to estimate the difference or sum of two 8 digit numbers, rounding to only hundreds place might defeat the purpose of estimating.