martinzoo

Because I’ve been pulling my hair out all afternoon!

Today was one of those awful homeschooling days that makes you wonder about it all.

GB was in the most uncooperative, annoying, distracted, disinterested mood EVER!

This was a weird morning. I did something this morning that I haven’t done in many, many years; I overslept. It caused my dh to be late to work, too. Basically, if I don’t wake up, he doesn’t wake up. I am the family alarm clock. So it was a very strange start to the day.

So I decided to flip-flop our usual day. Usually GB does his curriculum until lunchtime, and then he does his unit study after lunch. That way, we get our most important work done early. But since we only had a small part of the morning available, I told him he could work on his unit study.

This unit is going to be TOTALLY self-directed learning. GB wants to learn about Delta Force Special Operations Teams. This is not my forte. So I told him to do some research and find some key bits of information. I wanted him to learn the history of Delta Force, the main figureheads who drive the team, special equipment that they need, special training that they go through, and some of their more widely publicized missions. And he was very happy to go off on his own and do some self learning. He worked diligently all morning on it.

After lunch, I told him we would do our curriculum studies, which were all Math, since this is Monday.

And we hit a brick wall.

Ugh! Frustrating!

It was not a complicated concept to learn. In fact, we went over it easily last year.  We were working on the properties of multiplication.

Multiplication Properties

There are four properties involving multiplication that will help make problems easier to solve. They are the commutative, associative, multiplicative identity and distributive properties.

Commutative property: When two numbers are multiplied together, the product is the same regardless of the order of the multiplicands. For example 4 X 2 = 2 X 4

Associative Property: When three or more numbers are multiplied, the product is the same regardless of the grouping of the factors. For example (2 X 3) X 4 = 2 X (3 X 4)

Identity Property: The product of any number and one is that number. For example 5 X 1 = 5.

Distributive property: The sum of two numbers times a third number is equal to the sum of each addend times the third number. For example 4 X (6 + 3) = 4 X 6 + 4 X 3

But all I kept getting from GB was a blank stare……….. He just kept looking at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. Then he would giggle and laugh at my frustration. Or, he would shrug his shoulders and say, “Um, I don’t know.” Or, too often to count, he’d just give me any old answer, not usually the correct one. I should have just quit and came back to it another day. He was so bad that I ended up punishing him by taking away a toy he has been fascinated with. He’ll get that back on Thursday…. It would have been Wednesday, but he back-talked me.

I need to get better at coming back to things later. It’s hard for me to go with the flow. I have my plans, and I try really hard to get through them in an orderly manner. And it is frustrating to realize that so many hours of our day, today, were wasted.

It didn’t help that I got SO many phone calls today, either. Other people are forgetting that we are busy doing school also. Maybe I should just turn off the ringer………. But then, what if there were an emergency? Maybe I should just not answer. USE that caller ID. Then I could call people back later.

Man! I’m sorry to post so negatively. I just needed to vent.

Thank you……….. I’m going to go fix my bald head now………..

Tomorrow is a new day.