> hand wave You are are hand waving that 7th grade students are not yet ready for 5th and 6th grade work. Why the heck not? If we take your hand waving serio

> hand wave You are are hand waving that 7th grade students are not yet ready for 5th and 6th grade work. Why the heck not? If we take your hand waving seriously, then there are problems much more difficult and serious than elementary probability. I have no patience with your assumption: If I had a child in such a class, they'd be home with home schooling or some such alternative before the teacher first touched chalk to the board. No patience at all. Can't build a strong house on a rotten foundation. The school I went to expected the students to keep up with the right material. I have no patience with lowering the standards to meet poor students. > understanding the comparison is what makes probability useful in everyday life Where can one get the really strong funny stuff someone needs to be smoking to assume that such a triviality is "useful"? That "comparison" is just triviality from trying to bend education down to students not ready for 7th grade work. You are welcome to pursue such things if you want, but any of my children would be out'a there and home schooled, charter schooled, privately schooled, etc. in a nanosecond. The teacher, the principal, and the school board would all hear from me loud, clear messages. There are some good reasons for a local school board: Parents can scream bloody murder at incompetence and trivialities. E.g., my father in law was on his local school board, and my wife was Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, 'Summa Cum Laude', two years of NSF fellowship in one award, and Ph.D. There wasn't a lot of patience with grotesque incompetence. My father got transferred to a new city and for a house first he looked at the schools. He picked what was by a wide margin the best school in the city and then picked a house in the district of that school. It was a decently good school although could have been much better. We need much less patience with incompetence. "No child left behind" can't be permitted to mean leaving all the children behind.