"But I thought this was a science class!"

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I could buy some cool toys.

It's hard for me to understand how kids get to 7th grade without knowing how to multiple or divide decimals. Or how to calculate averages. Or how to multiply or divide by multiples of 10, without doing it longhand (what ever happened to simply moving the decimal?!!) I spend more time teaching math this week and I did science.

We are learning physics - the first time they have ever seen it!! How it THAT possible? Right now it's all about motion, distance, speed. Well hit a road block at distance, since most of my kids are not sure how to convert mm to km, etc. So, out with the lesson plan for today and the rest of this week - they need to get that down before we talk about speed! Yikes.

In response to the question my kids always ask, I simply say that math is one of the tools that we use to describe science, and if they knew their math, I could get on with teaching them science :-)
The state of public education today is scary.