I went to college for this?

This summer I am a car farmer.

My son is the inventory manager for a local auto recycling yard.  Cars run in the family, and the family has been peripherals of this yard for the 3+ decades of our marriage.  I usually teach summers at the community college, but for a variety of reasons decided I would become a car farmer instead.

My job is in support of inventory management.  Every one of the 200,000 or so parts, from whole cars to a taillight, need to be located and tagged.  When that happens, the front desk can tell customers on the phone, on the web, or standing in front of them if we have the part and how soon we can retrieve it for them.  Sometimes it has to come off of a wrecked car.  Sometimes we can walk out to a shelf and bring it back immediately.

But when things aren’t where we expect to find them we generate frustration at the front desk, unhappy sales people, unhappy customers, distrust, and a poor reputation. Knowing where everything is and being able to lay hands on it in minutes means we can make money faster.  A strong reputation for being able to provide the correct part in the shortest possible time will bring back customers and these customers will bring in additional customers.

It is my job to locate every part and get a bar code tag on every single part.  In addition to the 13+ acres of cars (about 3,000 wrecked cars in the yard) there are about 4 more acres of storage containers and warehouses, some with 2 floors, others with 20’ tall ceilings, that are filled with motors, transmissions, doors, hoods, lights, mirrors, wheels, radiators, flywheels, etc.  Car parts.  

It’s not as easy as it looks!  Some Corvette wheels have left hand patterns or right hand patterns.  It matters whether it’s a left wheel or a right wheel, and the correct tag must be applied!  Sometimes there are three similar wheels, one with minor damage.  That wheel is worth less than the other two.  The correct tag must be attached to that wheel.  A customer may not want to pay for the perfect wheel and may be happy with one with minor scratches.  Let’s pretend we make a mistake and send that customer away with a perfect wheel but for the damaged price.  Later, someone comes in wanting two wheels of similar wear, but when we bring the wheels to the front counter one clearly has damage.  We may lose the sale altogether because the wheels do not look similar enough, or we will have to reduce the price for the mismatched pair.  But the yard is out of the money for one perfect wheel.

Perhaps you feel like a big establishment can eat such errors.  Let’s look at it another way.

There are about 60 people who work for this yard.  The efficiency of the yard most certainly depends on the inventory management.  The yard cannot make money when they can’t sell a part they have.  The correct inventory, properly located and tagged, means the yard is making the most money as quickly as customers arrive.  This money pays those 60 people, most of whom have families to feed, homes and vehicles with payments, children with dreams of college, and occasionally a nice vacation.  These owners are good people, who are happy to give raises when merited and the money is in good supply.  The possibility of this happening is greater when parts are available to be sold.  My job benefits every one of those 60 people.  My job also benefits the owners, who can find the best people to work for them in a well-run establishment.  Good workers who are unhappy move on.

Did I need a college education for this job?  Probably not.  But here are some job skills that my job requires.

Attention to detail.  Tags designating a right side door and a left side door can get mixed up.  I may have to have R and L tattooed on the proper hand!

Accuracy.  The first couple of days I was given the ‘easy’ job of comparing cars in the yard with a list of what was in the yard.  I’m a math teacher, and I felt the numbers would be easy.  But numerical labels are NOT numbers!  For a couple of days I thought I had early-onset Alzheimer’s.  My son was also a little concerned with the errors.  Once he showed me the data entry, however, things clicked.  I began to see the patterns that had meaning that were embedded in the stock numbers on each car, and why they were important.

Persistence.  Every part needs a tag.  Every single part, no exceptions. I cannot walk away from a mess of parts because the pile is too big or ugly.  It must be sorted out and every single piece identified.

Logic.  There might be four tags in my hand, but only three items.  Which one isn’t here?  Where is it?  Why?  How can the descriptions in the database help me decide which tag goes with which item?  Sometimes a location number shows a B instead of an 8.  Is it a different location or was there a readability error?

Willingness to be educated and learn new things.  I’m not afraid to learn new computer skills, but I dislike asking someone three times how to do the same thing.  Fortunately, everyone in the yard knows that I am there to help with their job security.  No one has lost patience with me yet.  Yet.

Inventiveness.  My smartphone has a ton of good tricks.  A chunk of database can be transferred to a spreadsheet that I can carry in my hand.  As I'm climbing over and around things in the yard, having my hands free of clipboards and pens is really important.  Being able to search the spreadsheet for a stock number can help locate an item not in the proper place, and make it available for those who need to find it.  Its photo capabilities mean that I can take or send data to someone who can interpret it, without making them leave what they’re doing and walk to my location.

A sense of order, pattern, and travel.  I am free to change the location of items, making them easier to reach or manipulate.  Sets of wheels shouldn’t go on the top shelf where a ladder is required to reach them.  It becomes enormously difficult to audit the inventory when things are not easily reached.  Each wheel has its own tag, and the barcode scanner needs to see every single tag.  Location changes must be reported, so that the front desk can find things!

Some knowledge of the field.  Anyone willing to learn could be trained to do this, but it goes much faster and more accurately when you can recognize the difference between a bumper cover and a fender.

Some knowledge of other fields.  A pretty flower out in the yard turns out to be a noxious weed.  I recognized it, and have alerted people to just pull it up when they see it.

Some physical strength, agility, and balance.  I am climbing over and under many irregular things, stretching to write numbers in a visible place, standing on tiptoe, crouching low, climbing on racks to reach things, lifting wheels down off of and up to shelves, pulling awkwardly shaped and balanced parts out to find numbers and tags without inflicting damage to either myself or the part, and avoiding wasps and sunburn.

Attention to safety.  The job rather ends if I slip in a puddle of grease and break a knee, or stab myself in the face with a twisted piece of scrap metal.  It’s very easy to get fingers pinched or skin scraped or to trip over something.  We all know this and take action to prevent this, but EVERYONE must do so.
 
Kindness for people who assist me, thankfulness that my coworkers are ALWAYS willing to help, feedback when someone has been helpful or done an exceptional job, an ear and an eye to look out for someone in difficulty or having trouble with a task.

Willingness to clean up after myself AND others.  There’s a lot of debris floating around a wrecking yard.  When I started, I hadn’t generated any of it.  But cleanliness applies even here, and everyone has to take ownership, even if they didn’t create the mess.  You’ll be happy to hear that our waste and runoff water collection ponds are currently full of tadpoles.

How does this all relate to education?

After just a few weeks on the job I've come up with some games and tasks that might help kids sort and categorize.  Understanding how the world works and being able to communicate what you know is largely about describing categories and sorting.  Sometimes one is easier than the other.  But this is wealth-generating stuff, whether or not you go to college.

WHY college at age 18, when most aren't ready?

I was reflecting on a conversation with another parent I had recently about a 21 year old child of theirs who is struggling at the community college level.  We talked about all of my little soapboxes:

• Most 18 year olds should not be in college.  They SHOULD be getting some life experience, seeing the world, traveling, gathering up experiences that will enrich their later college experience.
• A lot of brain maturity happens for a lot of people between 20 and 25.
• We expect college behaviors of high schoolers, many of whom aren't ready for it.  
• Kids should have some work experience.
• The possibility of the tech college as a stepping stone to further education.
• Students not successful in the academic setting should back off until they get a plan and a focus, and are ready to burst walls to make it happen.  
• A good track record opens doors, a poor one can cost more money in the long haul.
• Rocket science is often open to older students who couldn't do algebra at any time in high school.

And then I got to wondering, Why do we insist that all 18 year olds go to college?  It certainly isn't because of their guaranteed success there.  Only a fraction of the population ever attends.  Half of all who start never finish.

Why do we dangle college as the holy grail?

The answer is: To finish the student's indoctrination.  Their success in a field of study isn't important.

The indoctrination happens in an environment where the instructor is forbidden to speak to the parent, in the introductory courses in communications (literature, writing, speech), science, and the humanities, where students are told that capitalism is a bad thing, that government holds all the answers, that the working conditions of anyone who works is terrible, that humans are no more than a slightly glorified animal, that experiencing sexuality is a wonderful thing at any time and under all conditions, that one doesn't have to take responsibility for the babies made but that we should probably try to avoid certain diseases, that humans are a scourge upon the earth, anyway.

What better way to convey all of these things to the young mind!  They are separated from parents and families, grouped with friends under the same instruction, allowed and to some degree encouraged access to behavior-altering drugs, and given free rein and encouragement to try behaviors which their parents would not approve.

College!

ADHD - A Peculiarly American Problem?

Read this article, from the journal Psychology Today, no less:

Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD

Here are my thoughts.

Yes, ADHD is somewhat of an American construct.  But look at WHY we treat kids for ADHD.  It's predominantly because they're not doing well or acting out in school.  But the response of schools in America is quite different than the response of schools in France.

The psycho-social response to ADHD in France suggests that they actually believe the parent is the parent, and that the best place to treat a child with behavioral problems is in the home.

In the USA, the child belongs to the village, and at least for two generations now, we have taught parents they are incompetent as parents, that they had better let the village raise and educate the child.

Melissa Harris-Perry (click here to see her ad on MSNBC) puts her finger right on it.  But she isn't proposing that we ought to stop thinking about the kids being 'privately owned'.  She's actually verbalizing what has been taught to parents.  

Never mind that the village isn't much interested in feeding, clothing, or providing the child a place to sleep.  If the child turns out well, then the school gets the kudos and points joyously to the nice test scores.  If the child turns out badly, it's the parents' fault.  My supporting argument:  When did you ever see parents getting recognition for their children's test scores?

Certainly, then, schools have to use the resources available for adjusting a child's behavior.  The family itself is not often in their tool box.  American families run hither and yon to various child activities, and have little time for family activities.  About half of American families don't have both parents under the same roof with the child.  American families, intact or not, are often more interested in chasing the dollar than they are raising children.  Schools are for babysitting while they go do that.

It is no wonder to me that schools recommend the use of drugs to control behavior.

Common Core Curriculum Standards and math I teach

So, the new educational reform is Common Core State Standards Initiative.  And just like ALL of the other educational reforms, this one looks good on the surface:  "Let's make it so that everyone is actually teaching the same thing at the same time, so that if a student moves from one educational setting to another that there will be continuity in his/her education."

Nice thought.

But it's the industrial manufacturing conveyor belt model of doing education.  It PRESUMES that if we set the standard that we can just automatically meet it.

Before I begin with an example from the mathematical standards I have another critique:  These were written so that almost no parent and many administrators can know what is going on.  I read some of them and had to scratch my head over the vocabulary.  Here's an example I COULD follow:

CCSS.Math.Content.8.F.B.5 Describe qualitatively the functional relationship between two quantities by analyzing a graph (e.g., where the function is increasing or decreasing, linear or nonlinear). Sketch a graph that exhibits the qualitative features of a function that has been described verbally.

Translation for the general populace:  Use knowledge about how the equation affects the graph to match an equation with a graph.

Notice the first number after the phrase "Math.Content".  This exercise is intended for grade 8.  In our current lineup of math topics, this would occur closer to the latter half of a first-year algebra course, traditionally taken in grade 9. By then, students in the book I use have seen linear equations, direct and inverse variation, quadratic and exponential equations, and a few higher-degree polynomial equations.  Each draws a recognizable graph, and given enough of the graph you can tell what kind of equation generated that graph.  Given the equation a student can draw a quick sketch (no more difficult than any letter of the alphabet) that the equation should draw.

This is a first-year algebra exercise.  But the Common Core Standards have it as an 8th grade math exercise.  They are expecting to put EVERY 8th grader through algebra.

*long pause for my dismay and astonishment to bubble to the surface*

I work with adults at the community college.  Some of them had algebra shoved at them too soon, when they were 9th graders in high school.  The CC Standards appear to be putting the first half of algebra into the 7th grade, and the 2nd half into 8th grade.  I'll have a career, picking up the pieces years later, until I die!

I want to reassure parents of children with whom I work.  I fully intend to math-activate your student.  But I will NOT present algebra before it is appropriate for your child.  Do not bring me a 7th grader, insisting that I teach algebra because that's the CC Standard for the rest of the population.  The rest of the population will not be able to meet that standard, or they will dumb it so far down that it means nothing.

A cognitive maturity has to happen before people can work fluently with letters representing unknown quantities.  When that maturity happens, it happens.  It can be as young as age 12, and it might not happen before age 17 and sometimes later.  I will NOT frighten your child away from math because of a measuring stick someone else has created.  I would love the opportunity to take your child through pre-calculus, whenever s/he is ready for that.  For most students, that should happen before you send them to college.  College can wait until the student is ready.  As I have said in other entries in this blog, there is NO reason to hurry college.  Wait until you're well-prepared to take advantage of the coursework, without paying for 'remedial' coursework.

So relax.  The child learns to walk when God has ordained that will happen.  Every child without a physical impairment learns to walk.  We can do the same with algebra.  We will honor what God has created, and not try to bend the child to the will of a human standard.  When s/he is ready, we'll do the math.  S/he will be far better prepared than the student who has had to muddle through a class meant to meet the CC Standard.

By the way, you're invited to come along.  If YOUR math education needs refreshing, or if you didn't finish the course, you're welcome to take it alongside your child, for free.

Educational reform rammed down our throats

I attended the community college math conference today for Washington state.  One of the invited speakers was Amy Getz, from the Charles A Dana Center in Austin, TX.  She talked about Mathways, an educational reform project whose engine is the Dana Center.  The effort is to make a shorter path for community college students from pre-algebra to a terminal level math course.

In the Mathways project, it would begin with a pair of 'co-requisite' (meaning 'must be taken concurrently') courses, one in the humanities and one in the sciences.  The humanities course would focus on study skills and would have students sorting out their career choices and writing their college plans.  The math course would include exploring career choices in math/science as well as the math skills pre-requisite to a college-level course.  In Texas where they plan to implement this, they see this as a 1-semester course.

Students would then progress to one of the following:

   1. a college-level course in quantitative reasoning that would be suitable for a degree not requiring much math or science.  It would allow them to take a basic science class, but that's about all.  Think Early Childhood Education (ECE).

   2.  a college-level course in statistics, also pre-requisite to a basic science class, and appropriate for the lower-level health care workers (nursing, massage therapy, medical assisting) and perhaps some business fields that do a fair bit of market analysis.

   3.  a STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) path leading to calculus.

Currently, about all we offer at the CC level is the third one, anticipating that the more doors that are open, the more opportunities that students will have.  As hopeful as that is, there are a lot of students who wash out of college because of the college-level math requirement, and in some cases the math requirement is a little silly.  ECE folks don't need to factor quadratics.  They DO need to be able to gather some data about their students and talk about their progress.

According to the Dana Center, this sort of change needs to be a universal one.  For some time they have been working with educational groups and others interested in seeing this change, getting buy-in from colleges and universities across Texas and in other states where groups have indicated an interest in the project.  The number of bureaucracies that have to make the decision and implement changes is pretty vast.  At each educational institution there is a board of directors, some form of a curriculum committee, department chairs, instructors, bookstores who will sell new books, and people who work to meet accreditation standards; there are the companies who come to each college and do accreditation evaluations, there are agreements between institutions about what constitutes a college level course and the content they approve, there are agreements between the local community colleges and the universities to which students will transfer about courses and their content.  Ms. Getz said they had the stage all set to make the change to the new Mathways project in Texas, Fall 2014.

Here's the curiouser parts of this:

1.  There's no text yet.  Ms. Getz said that much of this would be online, and that they were on the verge of a publishing agreement with a book publisher, but of course couldn't say anything until that agreement was finished.  But they want to make this massive change in about a year.

2.  That means that NO ONE has done this yet, and there is no research about whether the outcome will be the desired one.  I'm just wondering here about all of those brave new students and all of the money they spend on college; all of the higher educational institutions and/or employers who will have to decide if these students are properly prepared...  But they want to make this massive change in about a year.

3.  The Dana Center representative said that the part they hadn't thought out well yet was the STEM path.  But that's what we HAVE been doing for a long time.  Why is that one so hard?

I agree that we need some changes.  And while I listened to this I thought "Ok, this is in Texas.  When they have it sorted out it will head this way."  (I'm in WA, remember?)  Now that I'm home and thinking about tomorrow's final sessions at the math conference, it's occurred to me that I've heard this all before.

1.  It happened with No Child Left Behind.  That began as America 2000, and was heavily campaigned for and sold to us by the Businessmen's Roundtable.  The current iteration of it is Core Curriculum Standards.  (The New Mathways project admits to being heavily informed by the Core Curriculum project.)  All of these have wonderful names, but the results have been flatly unimpressive.  This is busy-work that eats up people's time and taxpayer dollars.  It's not reform.

2.  There was a major overhaul of healthcare rammed through Congress not too many years ago.  The famous line was "We'll have to pass the bill in order to see what's in it." Uh huh.

3.  This sounds a lot like the 'transitions' course that was implemented when one of my kids got to high school.  Students in this course spent time learning how to be successful in high school.  It was silly to cause all students to take this course, just as silly as not continuing the course throughout more years of high school for those students who needed the extra support.

So, Dana Center.  Why don't you try this out somewhere?  Work the bugs out of it.  Get some research done.  See how effective it is.  Tell us how students like it, how transfer institutions view it, how successful those students are after a few years.  Come back and give us a report then.

A single item of educational reform

I've written before about my idea for one educational reform. It would be this:

We'll give you twelve years of education, take it when you're ready.

It would create a cascade of other educational reforms, all of which various efforts are trying to achieve right now.

First, schools would be able to dismiss students not ready for the educational setting.

This would include disruptive students. These students would absolutely be able to get an education, as long as the school didn't have to be the one to administer severe behavior management. They could come back when they can behave. Schools would be safer.  Classes would be more productive.

Schools should be able to dismiss under-performing students. Some kids just really and truly need to not be starting school at age 5, or for that matter, age 6 or 7. There's also a cognitive maturity level we expect at high school for which many students aren't ready. Sending these kids home for a year or two, or putting them in school half-time would allow them to perform better on the tasks they can handle, and give them time to do homework and let learning soak in.  There's also the possibility of getting a job.  That is also an education, for which the student is rewarded for their good work.  Where the student has to be on Saturday morning can greatly affect his/her choices of activities on Friday night.  Work is not evil, contrary to the opinion of many child advocates.

Second, with more students actually completing high school at a pace they can manage, we'll be sending more students on to college. I hear from about half of my students at the community college where I teach that they weren't ready to do college straight out of high school. (Many of them weren't ready to do high school in high school.) At 25 or 30, they are great students.  Rocket science opens up to them.

Third, schools would be able to maintain a high level of educational performance. We could actually define what a student entering 1st grade or a student entering high school should be able to do.  Students who need to get caught up could either wait or find a tutor.  It might be better to wait.  For a young student, it WOULD be better to wait!  This noise about a common-core curriculum would change shape.  Currently it is trying to define what a 6th grader, EVERY 6th grader should know.  Instead we should be able to say to students of any age "You are at level 6.  Would you like us to take you to level 7?"

Fourth, the state will be spending less on education, but getting more students 'finished'. When students come ready to study we don't have to spend money on people whose job it is to chase down disruptive or truant students.  We also wouldn't spend so much money on equipment purchases.  Manipulatives and lab equipment get destroyed by students unhappy about being forced to be in their particular educational setting. There are many educational activities that are not done in public schools because unhappy students don't respect property.

What to do with a student who needs time to cognitively mature?  Parents could pay for another educational setting, not at the expense of the taxpayer.  Parents could homeschool.  Smart schools could offer assistance with this, at the price of meeting with the family one or two times per month.  Where possible, parents could/should involve the child in the family business. There are ALWAYS a myriad of tasks to be done in a family business that could be done by a 2nd grader.

Now, here's my next educational reform.

We'll give you only eight years of education, take it when you're ready.

Why only eight years?  Because if we start later, it will not take twelve years to get someone ready for college.  At the community college where I work we get adults who show up for school for the first time because they need a diploma or a GED for a job they want.  They've never been educated, perhaps not even home schooled.  We have Adult Basic Education classes that start at 1-2-3, ABC.  How long does it take us to get them an 8th grade education?  About two years.  How long does it take for them to complete a GED or adult high school diploma?  About two more years.  If we didn't start educating until age 12 or later that it would take us much less time to get people an education.

I premise that one of the outcomes of our industrial manufacturing conveyor belt society is the view that the job of children is to be in school.  We THINK that all kids need to be in school.  This job of school is to prepare them for a job later.  No doubt, we do school as a society to prepare kids to get a job.  Ask any high school student why they are in school.  But do we really think that what is learned at age 6 will seriously affect job opportunities later in life?  Only if you believe that if a child doesn't learn to read at that age that s/he will be of no value at age 10.  This is a reflection of our industrial-manufacturing-conveyor-belt thinking.  The car that fails manufacturing performance tests can be fixed or junked.  We have to stop thinking of people as we do cars.  Kids end up with their self-worth defined by the expectations of their age-peers.  This can be a false positive as well as a false negative.

Decreasing the number of years of state-paid education would cause parents to seriously get involved with educational decisions involving their children.  They might decide that it could be cheaper to pay for K-4 education, or to homeschool the child during those years.  On the other hand, parents may want to pay for a private high school of their choice as better preparation for the child's future.  Either way, parents would be paying much more attention to school expectations and performance.

Here's the ice cream of the 'eight years' reform.  Let's say a student has not used a dime of public funds for education before college.  Perhaps s/he has been privately schooled or home schooled.  If that student can pass entrance and placement exams to show s/he is at the college level, we should give that student eight years of college, perhaps all the way to a PhD.  If a student began formal schooling at age 16 and was able to complete pre-college work in four years, then that student would still have 4 years left to work on college. An educated populace is a wealth-generating and tax-paying populace.

Why does 'wait until they're ready' or 'delay education' horrify some people?  Outside of that industrial-manufacturing-the-kids-need-to-be-in-school model that defines the self-worth of the child, I understand that as a society we treasure education, but what we're doing inside those buildings we call schools is not so much education as it is baby sitting while parents work.  One of the reasons parents work is to generate taxes that pay for the costs of state-funded education.  If we want to decrease the amount of money we spend on education then let's wait until the student is ready to be educated.  If we treasure education, then let's wait until the student is ready to learn. Let's learn to treasure families.  If they didn't have to work so hard to support state education, then they might actually have time to be parents.  That can only be good for society.

Are you still horrified at this idea?  Do you think it is also the school's job to socialize children from a young age?  Do you think that will not happen if a child is left to the skills of the (presumed incompetent) parents?  *sigh*  Most parents simply don't choose to be cooped up with their kids all day long.  Moms quite naturally gravitate towards other moms of kids the same age.  Kids quite naturally gravitate towards other kids.  Family interactions often involve grandparents and cousins and their parents.  Humankind survived thousands of years without compulsory education.  People learned what is necessary to know, and sometimes paid others to teach them skills.  Teens and young adults were apprenticed to learn skills, and sometimes communities gathered up the kids to teach reading, speaking, writing, and accounting skills.  It worked then.  Compulsory public education isn't going to propel humankind to a higher plane of existence.  It could have quite the opposite effect.

Pre-Algebra Math Curriculum

Yes, I occasionally get to exchange some email with Harold Jacobs, my all-time favorite math text author.  Publisher WH Freeman forwards email to him from their website from people with questions about his texts.  He received an inquiry from Michelle, who asked about a good homeschool curriculum leading up to the algebra book by Harold Jacobs, and since Mr. Jacobs hasn't taught math at that level and doesn't have experience homeschooling, he forwarded the question to me.  Michelle was wondering about Math-U-See and Saxon.  She was also asking about some fun things to do in math.  Here is my reply:

I have not used Math-U-See.  I'm aware that the author has worked hard to develop a good course.  Folks generally stay with it through algebra and geometry.  I don't get many kids with a Math-U-See background.

Saxon is fine for kids who like hard work for the sake of hard work.  It's ok up through the Algebra 1/2 book, but the algebra book takes the idea of cycling back to review one step too far.  It strikes me as somewhat helter-skelter, and I refuse to teach from it or to tutor kids from it.  The subsequent high school books are just as frustrating.  Still, I know some kids who had a good guide (parent who was good with math) to get them through algebra with Saxon, and were fine.

Here's what I DO use for pre-algebra:

1.  The homeschool group I administrate uses the reproducible worksheets from Steve and Janis Marcy, http://www.marcymathworks.com.  These include everything that might be taught in general math and pre-algebra, but don't include instructions. They are thorough and complete, however, covering all of the needed topics.  A savvy parent will enjoy these. If they need directions I have kids write directions on the back of a sheet.

2.  The Mental Math series on Amazon:

Mental Math in Junior High

Mental Math in the Primary Grades

Mental Math in the Middle Grades

These are also reproducible.  They are a nice balance to developing proficiency with a calculator.  Kids DO need to develop proficiency with a calculator!

3.  There are a lot of $6 workbooks that can be found at Barnes and Noble, sometimes Toys R Us for keeping things fresh over the summer, and these are JUST FINE for regular use.  Each book focuses on a topic, like fractions, decimals, graphing, etc.  Use them up, throw them away, buy them again for the next kid.  There also are some very good supplemental books by the Critical Thinking publishers.  Here's one:

Building Thinking Skills

4.  I have recommended ALEKS.com as an online website for use by adults needing to refresh and re-learn concepts from pre-algebra forward.  The ALEKS folks have been diligent at filling in the gaps and developing coursework, and the system is VERY good at diagnosing gaps in learning and understanding and drilling to fill those in.  At $20 per month, it is the cheapest math tutoring I know.  I've sent some folks out to ALEKS to polish some skills before they enter classes at the community college, and I've learned that if ALEKS says they know the material, then they know the material.  The ALEKS folks have developed their online materials for kids as soon as they can read.  I haven't reviewed that level, but I wouldn't park a kid in front of a computer for a long period of time, anyway.  Some will eat it up, however.

The most important part of pre-algebra is showing where it is used all of the time.  That's where homeschooling is excellent, if parents aren't stuck in the classroom paradigm, thinking that math education has to be done at a table with a book.  Going to the grocery store, shopping online for a good deal, measuring and weighing and cutting in the kitchen and Dad's shop, comparing cellular contracts, talking about the good deal vs. the right fit, on and on.  If parents know how to use the math in everyday life, the kids will be just fine.

When to start Algebra?  Whenever the student is ready.  The big rush is to put it into the 8th grade for everyone.  Huge mistake.  It just means I'll be teaching at the community college until I die, if I like, cleaning up the mess made by pushing it too soon.  I would say that if a young student has competence in all of the topics in anyone's pre-algebra text and is hungry for more, then let him or her begin, but without the necessity of finishing in a year.  I've had students as young as 6th grade in the Jacobs book (I have one now that age), but I find that as bright as they may be, they need more time to digest and complete homework.  For that reason, I have designed a Decompressed Algebra series, which takes two years to complete the book, and provides lots of opportunities for data gathering and analysis, along the lines suggested by exercises in the book.  

Good, solid, math fun?  Play games!  The card game War is how my kids learned to sequence and count.  I've developed matching cards for fractions-decimals-percents, and my pre-algebra class has been playing Go Fish with these for two weeks.  Yahtzee, Sequence, Rack-O, Flinch.  Checkers, Chess, Go, Oware.  These are every bit as important as drill and practice.

But you knew all this!