My brother's in occupational education, and he came up today saying he wanted to move back into regular education. One of his biggest problems before we moved him to occ ed was Algebra I, which I'm taking for high school credit. So we decided to see how he'd do out of my algebra book.

We tested him on writing a problem from words (like "the sum of j and 12"). Then we tested basic problem solving, stuff like 3*5-4^2 and all that. Then we did very basic algebra, where you just replace variables with constants. I had to guide him through the order of operations step-by-step, and tell him where and how to keep his thought process on the paper. He struggled on every problem.

My brother's 18 (formally 17...18 later this month), in 11th grade. I got really emotional, just seeing that I could do what he couldn't, three grades behind him. I don't understand how my mom dealt with it for 18 years, head-on. I've only touched on some of my brother's most basic problems. I really admire my mom for how remarkably gifted she is with autistic kids; I'm glad she's going back to college to get a job as a special needs teacher.

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Well...I got reaaaally mad at my history teacher today. Three people in my class didn't do homework - me, a kid I call Stewie, and another kid named Nick (I keep saying here when they call his name for attendance; I haven't had another Nick in my classes since 5th grade).

Well, anyway, Stewie and Nick didn't do any of their homework. I spent an HOUR doing her insane workload. I forgot to type in "Do Vocab" on iCal. So she was up there, literally singling us three out and explaining how important it is to do homework and using us as examples. Then she called on me to answer a question, and I said that I wasn't totally sure it was right, and she didn't even give me a chance to ANSWER before she moved onto someone else.

I really hate her. xP All the rest of my teachers I don't HATE - actually, all my teachers are pretty good. Except her. She's really terrible - it's all bookwork and nothing interesting. At least in math, language arts, and science we do cool stuff that still gets the concept across. No originality in her teaching. It's just a really dull class.

Ah, well. Can't expect to be babied with fun projects and things. Math and language arts in high school's probably gonna be mostly bookwork; may as well get used to it. At least science'll stay pretty fun; labs are still pretty important in high school from what I've seen.

Well...this is a long entry. xD