sailingpj

"In my state, there's a company that sells chicken excrement to other states." Yeah, Chicken farmers mix that stuff into the feed for their chickens.

And we like it that way Beavah.

If you look closely at the picture the frames do look a little bent. So I don't think they are salvageable.

I was thinking, I would pay a couple bucks more to get a manual that came with a nice binder that had sea scout stuff on the front and back. Something to make it stand out from the other dozen binders of stuff that I have.

"What's really fun is when the boy knows what you're going to say and you don't. The "Look" works really nice, even better than Sign's Up!." I have that one down, I can look a a group that is talking when they shouldn't and within 10 seconds they will have stopped and be looking back at me very guitily.

"Why do the adults have to drag themselves along in herds?" That sounds like my current ship, the adults usually outnumber us at meetings and events. Sometimes even as much as 2:1

Or tie a midshipman's hitch on the rod, it'll hold much better than that two double half hitch. ;D

Notice something else, they specify that the name tag should be "Nameplate, white letters on black plastic." I think that is supposed to mean that you shouldn't be wearing name tags that are other colors than black and white.

If the school doesn't make any money off the textbook sales then why are they charging $40 more for the same book than the Barnes & Noble a couple miles down the road? Why are they charging twice what Staples charges for a dozen pencils? I can make those comparisons all day. I didn't think about the accreditation stuff. I should have though, a school I went to last year was having problems keeping their accreditation (I don't know the specifics).

Yeah, unfortunately those teachers are few and far between. I have had a couple math teachers like that, but most are not that good. Heck, my geometry teacher often played fantasy football during class instead of teaching us. He would just tell us to do the problems on page ___ of the book. As for colleges that keep people who are failing in the school, don't forget that the college is a buisness trying to make money. That is one of the reasons the prices at the bookstore are so high. I can get a textbook from Borders cheaper than the school bookstore usually. Some of the textbooks cost more than a SCUBA tank, but that is what amazon is for. The schools know that they can make more money by having failing students paying for the class than if they kicked them all out. It makes financial sense to lower the bar for passing. That is why there is so much competition to get into a 'great' school, the just good schools are only getting worse.

The Honors and AP classes are bs. The teachers often don't teach them any differently than any of their other classes, or if they do they simply give "harder" books to read. Or you read a "more difficult" short story. The level of the stuff that is assigned is very low IMO. I think I have read 'The Outsiders' 3 times for school now, and like 'Animal Farm', while there are good points being made the reading level on them is not very high. Personally I think 'Fahrenheit 451' makes just as good of a political point as 'Animal Farm', but it is written a little more subtly. A person should not be able to spend 30 minutes throwing words onto paper and still get an A. Especially in an Honors class, but that is what often happens. Another thing that is wrong with school today, they don't teach logic. I can't tell you how many times I have seen people frantically trying to memorize 20 different formulas for math when with a little logic they could derive those 20 formulas from 2 equations. In my math class at least once an hour someone asks, "So is that the formula you use?" Sometimes the teacher will say "Don't be trying to memorize all this alphabet soup, here is how to get these 3 equations from this other one." Then the students just go and memorize all the equations anyway. People are not being taught how to think and reason for themselves. Everyone just expects everything to be spoon fed to them, and they never learn how to exercise their brains. That is what our elementary, middle, and high school systems are doing right now. There was this private school up in Connecticut that was teaching basic algebraic concepts to the lower grades (1st, 2nd, 3rd), but then the kids would go home and ask questions that their parents couldn't answer. The parents got together and demanded that the school go back to teaching "normally", so now that school teaches their students that 5*5=25, but not why 5*5=25. That is a fundamental problem with our school system.

It is amazing how you can read something a half a dozen times and not notice a couple words. emb - I don't like to assume that because someone is doing something that they are doing it correctly. I already made that mistake.

You can either take trig or precalc (precalculus) as a senior normally. The senior math course is also available at some schools, it is usually for those who need math credits to get into college, but don't plan on taking calculus or other higher math. It is very much a fluff class from what I have seen. Below are the course descriptions for two math courses copied directly from my college's website. I am taking the first one right now. "MAC1105 College Algebra (AA) Credits/Clock Hours 3 credits (3 lecture hours) Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisites: A grade of C or better in MAT 1033~ Course Description This course includes: functions and functional notation; domains and ranges of functions; graphs of functions and relations; operations on functions; inverse functions; linear, quadratic, and rational functions; absolute value and radical functions; exponential and logarithmic properties, functions, and equations; systems of equations and inequalities; applications (such as curve fitting, modeling, optimization, exponential and logarithmic growth and decay). A grade of C or higher is required for this course to be used as a General Education course. Course is designated as a Gordon Rule course. (*)" "MAC1140 Precalculus (AA) Credits/Clock Hours 3 credits (3 lecture hours) Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisites: A suitable score on the placement test together with two years of high school algebra or a C or higher in MAC 1105~ Course Description Topics include relations and functions, systems of equations, matrices, determinants, quadratic equations and inequalities, exponential and logarithmic functions, linear programming, sequences, series, induction and the Binomial Theorem. A grade of C or higher is required for this course to be used as a General Education course. Course is designated as a Gordon Rule course. (*)"

As an addition to the original question, are knots allowed on youth Sea Scout uniforms? I have not seen anything in my manual or in the online insignia guide that talks about it. I have been wondering about this since I saw youth sea scouts wearing knots at Jambo, and I was presented a SCUBA knot recently. From the insignia guide: "Wearing medals and embroidered knots Only five medals may be worn at a time pinned in a single row immediately above the seam of the left pocket. Knots are worn above the left pocket in rows of three. The order of wearing of medals and knots is at the discretion of the wearer. It is suggested that the medal or knot deemed most important by the wearer be worn on his or her own right. Embroidered knots are representative of pin-on medals or around-the-neck awards and are designed for the convenience of the wearer. In the case of the District Award of Merit and Professional Training Award, the knot is the only wearable insignia. The knots are listed here in alphabetical order." http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/Media/InsigniaGuide/10K.aspx (This message has been edited by sailingpj)

I am not a fan of the loose leaf format. The pages will get torn out really easily. Especially when the manual is bouncing around the ship for summer cruise.

That is no different than what my old ship was charging people for their manuals. When you joined there was a certain amount of ships dues due at that point, they gave a breakdown of the costs and for the manual it was $25.

Actually, I am mostly a product of a California education. Algebra 1 in the eighth grade, geometry in the 9th, algebra 2 during the 10th grade at the local community college in California; then I tried to take a college precalc course here in Florida last semester and I found that even though my SAT scores were high enough for me to take the class I hadn't seen half the stuff that I was supposed to. So now I am taking a college algebra course. I could have passed the precalc class, but I wouldn't have learned much. I don't just want to pass my classes. I am actually interested in learning.

Okay, those explanations make sense. Just finishing up High School myself I don't see it as preparing students for anything, not a job, and definitely not college. I am taking college courses in place of my senior year, and for the first time ever I actually have to study. That is a completely new skill that I am learning. I am learning how to take notes and prepare for tests. High School doesn't teach any of that. I am even having to redo algebra courses because the algebra I took in High School really didn't teach me enough to go into precalc.

Eagle1982 said: "So many parents are afraid their kid won't get into a good college (although there's too many kids going to college, but that's a different rant)." I would like to see some elaboration on this comment please. Why do you think that there are too many kids going to college?

YAY!!! Finally. I can't wait to check it out.

"ok so what if the pack is chartered to the parents of the pack? what service project would count and benefit that type of COR?" Where does the pack meet? Do a service project for whoever owns that property. OR Call it environmental cleanup and do maintenance on the CM's yard.

If you really want to do laser tag just go out in the woods shortly after sunset and use flashlights. I am assuming that the BSA does not have a problem with scouts running around waving flashlights at each other.

I like it because 32 degrees sounds warmer than 0 degrees.

My Ship goes diving once every month or so. It seems that we mostly look at the calenders for the other ships in the council and tag along for their events. I turns what would be a few people going diving into 10-12, or more, going diving. We do the same for sailing and workdays. I am new to this ship, but they dive mostly year round. Last weekend we went and dove a spring 1/2 hour north of Orlando. Between the two ships there were 12 divers. Actually, we saw some Boy Scouts going hiking while we were getting our gear together. It was a nice place, the water was a little chili though, and there is a 1/4 mile walk from the parking lot to the entry stairs, then a 300 yard walk/swim upstream to reach the mouth of the spring. Our problems mostly stem from other ships canceling their events, then we actually have to plan something.

Yes, 24 hour time, the metric system, and YYYYMMDD or DDMMYYYY are much better systems, but I like Fahrenheit better than Celsius because Fahrenheit often seems warmer.