Timothy Neumann

Education

1987 Arroyo High School, El Monte, CA. California Scholarship Federation. 1986 Academic Decathlete.

1991 Concordia University, Irvine, CA. Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude with a course load dense in Biblical languages (Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew) and psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

1996 Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, MO. Master of Divinity with a course load that equipped me for first professional status in the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod.

The state of California has a Common Core of standards for each grade the child approaches in Math and English. The English standard incorporates the academic material the child is to be exposed to in geography, social studies, and literature as well. If your child is judged deficient, it is a judgment concerning intellectual and academic attainment, not a judgment of value or intrinsic worth. Please understand this.

Tutoring is necessary at times to help your child get back to the same level as the rest of the fish in the school and in the same swim of classroom activities and attainments.

I have on the way a set of Dolch flash cards that include the 220 English words that are among the most important work words of the English language. All the rest of the words of the English language are hung in various ways around these words. It is a matter of communicating and making yourself understood so that one person with an idea is able to share the same idea with one or more others so that all involved in the communication will have the same idea. I don't need to tell you that individual psychological and cultural factors can invest the idea with extra freight that will strike different people in different ways, but at the core is the central idea. Its effect on you as an individual varies based upon your cluster of personal past experiences. I dare not homogenize your personal experiences with a cluster bomb approach. Each person has had irreproducible and unrepeatable past experiences that are irreplaceable pieces of who a person is.

I value history and the plain grammatical sense of language. I don't appreciate double talk that fails to communicate what you mean to say if I don't understand some code that replaces your words with something else I don't perceive with the plain words. Simple, direct, and uncomplicated conversation is what we all like to have when we deal with each other. When we read, we can dress it up a bit, but clear communication of real ideas even in works of fiction is the goal. The hearer or the reader is to understand. When you understand what you hear and read, you can also learn to speak and write in ways you have been exposed to. You move to the other side of a line, from ignorance to knowledge. You join a community of people who understand.

With math, we will work on what the blockage to learning was. What kinds of ways will help you understand the concept? We will explore the world of fixed relationships among the numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, ...), among the digits (1 in the ones place, 1X in the tens place, 1XX in the hundreds place, ...), and how these numerals may be used to indicate totals of things to be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided (grouped and regrouped this way and that). That's the basics of number theory or arithmetic in a nutshell. Numbers are useful in the kitchen, in the store, in referring to the time of day, week, month, year, and throughout the whole life.

The goal is to avoid complication and get to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band of knowledge that will help you understand the music that will help you appreciate the rhyme with the rest of humanity. You will cross the line from ignorance to intelligence with respect to the Common Core.

With respect to adults learning English, it is not too much different. The problem with a foreign language is that there is a different word for everything and the words are strung together in ways that you need help understanding. Familiarity breeds a bit of distaste. You will prefer the language you grew up with. I can't stop that and don't really want to. My German-speaking ancestors had the same kind of communication problems and same preferences you did, just at a different time. Your feelings of artistry will always be more deeply felt in your own language. It isn't my goal to convert you into an English-only ditto head. We live in a world in which English is known by people you want to tolerate and be with. You want to reach out to them and achieve a level of common understanding.

Let's get to work!