The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Multiplication Drills
This link takes you to three multiplication worksheets (only do the first three, left to right): https://www.math-drills.com/multiplication.php

It’s important to give yourself no more than 80 seconds to finish each worksheet, even if the third worksheet recommends five minutes. Time yourself, stop when time goes off.  Do all three.  Then grade all three.  Repeat process until you score 100 percent on all three.

Once you’ve mastered these drills, you can learn advanced multiplication tricks we’ll review tomorrow.

Vocabulary and Writing Drills
You need to know the meaning of the following 10 words if you want to score >700 on the SAT verbal:

• Oblique
• Inchoate
• Ubiquitous
• Nonchalance
• Feckless
• Misanthropic
• Alacrity
• Spiteful
• Cursory
• Acumen

Write a story using the words listed above.  Include the following words: petty, asshole, profanities. Use the words above in any order.  Example:

Cheetah is a feckless, misanthropic asshole. That’s why he took advantage of the covid pandemic to commit all sorts of petty crimes, all carried out with acumen and alacrity. He flashed and groped women, vandalized, shoplifted, whatever he felt like doing to express his inchoate rage against humanity.  The police were usually too busy with covid checkpoints to deal with petty criminals. Once, a police officer tried to arrest Cheetah, who responded with nonchalance and taunts: “arrest me (cough cough) officer, I have (cough cough) coronavirus.” The police officer backed off, and Cheetah walked away screaming spiteful profanities at him.

Cheetah got bolder. He took a cursory glance at the line outside of Costco. He walked up to a woman distracted by her phone and snatched her purse. A few people chased Cheetah but he was too fast for them, disappearing in the woods oblique from the Costco entrance.

Why Drills are Important
They make a lot of work routine and effortless so you can focus on creative problem solving.  Is there an NFL player who doesn’t do drills, from weight training to yoga to sprints?  Do we let someone who is out of shape play an NFL game?

Then why do we let students who’ve rarely been drilled in fundamentals learn geometry and read Chaucer? And then educators complain that most hate geometry and few do their reading. Well, lack of drilling is like sending the football team out to play without helmets, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Drilling also helps students develop patience (aka delay of gratification) and discipline, arguably the two most important traits to have to do well in life.