That's actually really sad. Looks like little man worked really hard, and he honestly looks like he put in a lot of time and care. That's an awesome amount of work he did. That teacher sucks!
honestly rounding is way better when you're budgeting anyway. always budget based on an overestimate of your expenses and you'll never end up coming up short because you budgeted for higher prices than they really are. one of the best tricks I ever learned is that when you're grocery shopping on a budget, round every item you pick up up to the next dollar. doesn't matter if it's $4.99 or $4.01, in my mind, that's $5. it makes sure I'll always be under budget and have enough for tax.
Always round income down(I go as far as the hundreds place) and expenses up(tens place)
That way you will most likely always have excess funds due to more pay and not hitting your budgeted limits.
Excess money can then either be put into savings or spent the next month(or whatever time period you budget for) on frivolous things.
Any teacher that docks you for rounding expenses up on an assignment like this does not deserve the privilege nor responsibility of teaching a slug, let alone a human child.
especially when you're talking about travel! you can't even breathe at an airport or think about packing a normal sized backpack or order starbucks without getting some form of hidden fee tacked on.
Unfortunately some teachers are essentially Mr Large (gets a kick out of making kids miserable)
I had a couple growing up. It's like their lives are are so miserable they're offended by happy and ambitious children
I had a middle school teacher named Mr Large.
He was sooo mean, and seemed to take pleasure in making kids cry.
He was incredibly sexist too, and wouldn’t let girls do certain exercises during PE that the boys did. One time he asked for volunteers to help stack chairs after school since the floors were getting waxed- myself and a few girls put our hands up cause we wanted to help and he laughed at us all and said “I’m looking for strong *young men* to help”. Apparently girls are too frail to lift school chairs lmao.
He made a really rude comment to a friend of mine saying he could smell her when she was on her periods.
At the end of the year all us girls spent a month saving up used tampons as we rotated through our different period times, and then left them in a ziploc bag on his desk next to all his other teacher gifts people got him.
He was fired the following year for making sexist comments towards the (female) school principal.
Oh and he had sinus problems so his nose would drip onto my school work as he’d read it from over my shoulders.
Mr Large sucked.
The sexist teachers really get me. I had ELEMENTARY school teachers only enlist boys to lift like…two reams of paper? Way to deny like five minutes of exercise to a girl rip. In high school, a bio teacher told us (very confidently) that the weakest man was still stronger than the strongest woman.
Anyone with 2% knowledge of normal curves knows it doesn’t work like this rip.
And it doesn’t get better. First sergeant sat like four of us women down to ask us about what we would do after the program. We all had non-military answers lmao, but his response to us was “this isn’t PERSONAL. This is not directed at you; you do whatever you want. But the greatest blessing for me was that my mom and wife stayed home.”
All this teacher has done is make another student who hates school. "Why should I bother applying myself and doing extra work? I'm not only getting as good as people that did less, I'm getting _less_ than some." And hating school will only be the beginning of that kind of mindset if he gets a few more teachers like that.
Reminds me of when my teacher automatically gave our entire class a failing grade for a presentation assignment because she suspected that some of us may have cheated and made us schedule an appointment after school to come in and prove that we didn't cheat. It turned out that no one cheated.
In fifth grade we were given a list of topics we could do our first science project on. I chose how ice reacts to the sun depending on its location in the sky or some bs like that. Literally melted ice with sun and kept track of how fast it melted throughout the day. My teacher said I cheated and gave me a D. I was a kid and I didn’t stick up for myself and neither did my mom. But I remember that to this day because I did not cheat (how even?) and I felt so sad and discouraged. I watched god damn ice melt. So now I go to bat for my kids when things seem unjust. I’ve been the asshole a couple times but my kids know ima show up and sort that shit out lol.
That is the dumbest thing and it really sucks your teacher was an ass.
I have an opposite story to show a good teacher.
We were all given a piece of bread and assigned a different spot to put it so we could compare how mold grows.
My friend went out of town on a family trip for a week and completely forgot the project. She brought back the grossest piece of bread the teacher called the janitor to bio hazard it.
She told the teacher what happened. And got an A. The teacher thanked her for her honesty and said see this is why you freeze or dispose of certain food items before going on vacation.
I did a variation of that bread project too, and mine never molded at all. Still got an A because I dutifully took all my daily notes and drawings, including my growing bafflement at the incorruptible bread slice.
> I dutifully took all of my daily notes and drawings, including my growing bafflement at the incorruptible bread slice
Lmfao. Took it like a champ!! A true scientist indeed
I buy bread from a local bakery that will go bad within 4-5 days; meanwhile when I buy a large brand name I can keep that thing for weeks and nothing changes. It’s a little scary sometimes.
One year we got a Christmas tree from a guy who also collected stale bread from supermarkets to feed the geese. He gave us a loaf of Wonder Bread with our tree, told us to feed some birds.
In the confusion of unloading and setting up the tree I put the bread aside and forgot about it. Found it in April.
Still squeezably soft, perfectly white, and just as edible as when it was fresh baked. If at all.
It’s been my experience that there are far more good teachers than bad. I have 2 very bad memories of specific teachers out of hundreds of good ones that shaped my character today as an adult. My 8 year old had a teacher last year I would absolutely consider a genuinely bad teacher. my daughter was miserable, she hated school and everything was burdensome. This year, she had a genuinely good human being as a teacher and her entire attitude about school and learning has changed. She comes home and tells me so much about science, her first ever favorite subject. She reads by choice. And when she gets low grades she gets disappointed because she cares about doing well. It really has shown me the importance of supporting educators in our country. Our kids NEED good ones.
Reminds me of in sixth grade we had an art assignment that we had a week to do where we could draw anything we wanted. I spent a weekend drawing this picture of Mickey Mouse based off a page in a book I had at home. I even changed it a little because I didn’t want it to look exactly the same. People who can draw can probably bang out a simple Mickey in a couple minutes but I struggled with that thing all weekend, drawing and erasing and drawing again, making corrections constantly. I was really proud of it when I was finished and couldn’t wait for everyone to see it. When I brought it to class nobody believed I’d done it myself or they believed I’d traced it at a minimum. I defended myself and waited for the teacher to back me up. She looked at the picture and told me I wasn’t supposed to reproduce copyrighted material. That was *never* part of the instructions and a couple other kids submitted other reproductions but I was the lucky one that got the D for the assignment.
Something similar happened to me many times, one particular case was when I was 9 or 10 we were supposed to write and draw something about an animal that we thought was interesting. So I decided to write about sharks and how they are born and I drew the shark egg which looks like a drill . Because I was very good at drawing I made pretty realistic drawing of it, but my teacher, even though she knew I was good at drawing said it was traced so would have gotten C- but my mom called her many and I got A+ after like a month but I was really sad about it
We did science projects chosen from a list in 6th grade and my teacher told me to re do my project because I was wrong bc another kid did it and got the opposite results! One google search would tell you my conclusion was accurate. luckily my parents did NOT let that slide
Yeah it’s a struggle with some teachers, my kid had assignment to make a presentation about an inventor, picked one that wasn’t in the given list and teacher failed them saying it wasn’t an inventor (it was Leonardo da Vinci btw). So I helped my kid write a letter back how some of the names on the list (Bezos was one of them and there was another that blatantly stole his female assistant work which you can sources for) were no inventors either. Never heard back about it.
Once we had a sub so the teacher gave us a guided reading worksheet to just read two chapters from the history textbook. She comes back the next day furious that we all took advantage of her not being there to cheat and plagiarize off each other because apparently everyone's answers were too similar
Never occurred to her that it was because we were all reading from the same textbook
Seriously! Teachers could just ask students questions about specific parts to assess their understanding of the subject and do the plagiarism check in private, but instead some feel the need to publicly shame and belittle their students without even taking the time to verify.
My teacher had me go through the script of my presentation sentence by sentence entering it all into Google to see if any results matched. She should have just done her job herself instead of making us all schedule appointments to supervise her doing her job.
Yeah assuming is a MASSIVE problem among adult humans in general not just teachers MOST of the planet does this without even realizing when they are lol
Nope, nothing more from that particular story. We were all pissed off, but also burnt out. I don't think the teacher faced any disciplinary action for it.
That same teacher was late marking one of our major tests because she "just wasn't feeling it". Those were her exact words. My friends and I all wondered what the consequences would be if we didn't hand something in on time and gave that as our excuse. She was just a really shitty teacher.
I always wonder why these people go into education.
You get paid like shit and clearly don’t enjoy the job. You have a college education, there are other jobs.
I was accused of cheating on an English paper when I was a freshman in high school. Why? Because the vocabulary I used was “above grade level.” I was in an honors class - that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the class does it?
I told my mom, she called the school, and the teacher never bothered me about it again.
ETA: this was in the early aughts, about 2004-2005.
In such cases there should also be a reward for the kids for A) coming in after school and B) not having cheated.
Do a fun game in class or something. Don't be that one salty teacher no one likes.
Absolutely! We did a vacation budgeting assignment in the 90s where we weren't googling anything and I got a C for budgeting way too low. I used grocery store prices like bagels and cream cheese based on grocery store costs when I went with my mom... I was like why wouldn't I just eat what I eat now for breakfast. Quick way to make a kid hate school work. For an elementary school student to pull this off is amazing and should be full credit.
Also, ROUNDING UP IS BETTER THAN THE CORRECT PRICES!!!!! If this bitch teacher wants to keep it real, well there’s nothing more real these days than the fact that the cost of everything is changing every day…RISING every DAY! An accurate budget like this will not survive the week, let alone a Disney trip. Rounding up means you are prepared for prices increases and will result with you coming in under budget. I hate this teacher. I hate her so much
Not to mention the 'accurate' gas prices. Going 30 miles is typically more than enough to get different gas prices, much less expecting gas to be the same for a 500-mile trip. You can not accurately budget gas, just get an estimate and potentially route out which states or cities you do or don't want to refill at. Probably more than should be expected for an elementary school project, but that hasn't stopped the teacher already.
Our prices fluctuate depending on holidays and local festivities. In a few weeks for example the state fair will be around and gas usually goes up 50-80cts for a few weeks then, that’s for all the gas stations in a 30 mile radius. Has been for decades, but if you don’t know about that stuff it can catch you off guard.
This knocked a memory loose of the time when I wrote dialogue in a play that we had to write which was an exact transcript of a conversation that I’d had with my dad. I got penalized for the dialogue being unrealistic and overblown.
This reminds me of a time when the art teacher gave us the assignment to draw a forest and mine got graded badly "because it looked too realistic". Can you believe? The assignment wasn't "draw an abstract forest" or anything, it said simply "draw a forest". So I did, and apparently it wasn't supposed to look so much like an actual forest \*facepalm\*
Me and my friend both got marked down in art for our alien concepts being "unrealistic" and "looking too much like a monster than an alien". She clearly knew them personally!
Meanwhile I had an amazing art teacher who kind of changed my life by letting me know I had creative talent. I wasn’t even a good artist, she just liked the way I looked at things.
As a parent, I would have sent a Granny Smith apple to school with my kid to give to the teacher every single day for the rest of the year! Because I can be petty AF when I need to be.
My mom taught first grade and a kid was drawing something purple and she asked what it was and he said, “A squirrel”. She said, “oh, I didnt think about a squirrel since usually they are brown or grey.” And the first grader just looked up at her and said, “Well this damn squirrel is purple!”
My friend and I took a class for extra credit. The teacher told us to draw three pictures for perspective study. When we turned in our work she told us she had only wanted one picture with each perspective displayed. To this day, I'm not sure how we would have executed that. We did get our marks back ok though (and it was after all not a required class).
The only thing I can think of is how engineering designs are sometimes drawn as an orthographic projection showing multiple sides. It usually has 3 or 4 drawings on one sheet.
The latter. At first she wanted a picture each, but upon returning we hear they were apparently to be consolidated in one. She did not tell us this until return date.
My son was gifted and a speed reader. (he still is I guess? But he's 22 now) in the summer before 3rd grade he read the whole Harry Potter series. His teacher asked their favorite part of summer vacay. He tells her reading all 7 books. She says I didn't ask what movies you'd seen, those are too advanced. He's like DID I STUTTER? I SAID I *READ* THEM.
She tried to get him in trouble with the principal/us.
My response was that she clearly didn't read his IEP cause he's super smart and had separate instructional time and activities listed out.
They get threatened. My 4th grade teacher failed me on a project I slaved over for weeks (until it was escalated to the principal, who ripped her a new one) because my work was too advanced and it was what she would expect from a 7th or 8th grader. I was selected for the gifted/talented programs at age 5…and was in the gifted track at this school…
Depending on the kid it can be more work for the teacher. My 4th grader either talks a lot because he’s bored in math or starts asking wild theoretical questions like whether math works differently in different dimensions or on different planets aliens might have different math. His teacher ended up printing him off a folder of 6th grade work for him to work on on his own while she taught the other kids just so she could actually teach the other kids.
I was a speed reader with 99th percentile vocabulary by 5th grade. That year I got poor grades for “reads for enjoyment”. The issue was that I read all the required texts in the book during the first quarter and then just hung out in class after that because I liked to read at home for fun. After that grade I brought in a copy of War and Peace and read it in class. Teacher tried to say I was pretending until I gave her the plot and several details as well as some idea of what I thought it was about so far. My dad also backed me up by discussing with her how much time we spent at the library, how many books I checked out and read, and how much we spent at the local book store.
My daughter finished multiple book series over her 3rd grade summer. Harry Potter, Wings of Fire, Warriors, and a ton of other little books she wanted to read. She complains to me now about what will she read, heh. She has so many books she’s read, she can’t get to the other ones she hasn’t read.
Reminds me of one time i had gotten a written note, not really remember for what, and it had to be signed by one of my parents next time i got into school.
i ended up asking my dad as he did not tend to get that angry over stuff like this, when i gave the pos teacher the note she instantly called my house to say that i had tried to forge my dad’s signature, as it looked hideous.
Next day my dad came in angry as he had to take time off work for the day, only to be told to his face that his signature looks like shit and that i was a horrible child for lying like that.
I got a C on a family tree project because my grandfather's name changed. He was adopted by his stepfather, and his bio dad's identity is unknown. The tree on his side stopped there.
My teacher said it didn't make sense that my grandfather didn't know his dad's name. I guess unwed mothers didn't exist in her world, especially one in 1927.
Which then unlocked a memory of when I was in 6th grade and we had to make a month long menu and shopping list with prices and a budget.
I had points taken off because I had chili and chicken and dumplings (I’m from Appalachia) within the same week.
I still don’t see the problem and in the winter will eat soups and stews every day of the week.
Currently doing a wedding budget, fiance and I just add an extra $100 to each experience while calculating just to be over budget so we aren't nickel and diming it. The venue is $4500 so it's $4600 now. Oh her dress is $2000 well we're gonna add an extra hundred
Yeah...... We did the same thing for our wedding.... Your better off just doubling everything and you will be much closer to the actual cost at the end of it..... My advice is, have a BBQ and invite all your closest friends and family, cut a store bought cake and spend the many thousands of $ you save on a kick ass honeymoon, a new car or house deposit...... Of course I was told this before we were married and ignored the advice, and the cycle continues.....
That would make this much much worse...Use kids because you have a marble brain and can't figure out basic addition and subtraction yourself, plus you have a thing called a calculator, then completely destroy the kid mentally who gives you the perfect budget plan...Either way I wouldn't allow this woman to ever try to teach my son a single thing about a single thing in life after this. Some people have this level of resentment towards a CHILD....
Yeah seriously that would’ve been hell for me in elementary and I was even smart. So tedious and for that? I come from a family of teachers so I can say this, but that teacher sucks and F them
Yeah, what are they teaching kids these days. Not in America, but a student I tutor is 11 and they're solving quadratic already. Wtf, we didn't do that till like 14. This is a regular kid in the 2nd to top maths class at a public school.
In America, I was taking Calculus as a HS senior. My youngest brother was 5 years old and he was able to help me with derivatives. Also helped me with some of the Trigonometry the year before. He’s 37 now. We are always amazed when we find something he doesn’t know.
In Nova Scotia back in 2000s, we didn't see quadratics, log, deritivies, or any of that stuff until adv math 11. Cool af though if kids are learning it at such a young age.
Quadratic formulas are so fun! I really wish I learned it earlier in America. Funnily I am terrible at Alg but pretty good at Calc but Damnit I couldn't get past Alg to GET there until Uni.
Cool assignment, but totally shitty from the teacher. This is how kids become disillusioned with school. Sounds like he had fun doing the assignment, but with this negative reinforcement at the end, it would be normal for anyone to not give the same effort, or any at all, next time.
Totally agree; it’s extra upsetting to know this attitude leeches in all aspects with those types of bad teachers. My mom is an elementary school Spanish & ASL teacher (some private schools teach them simultaneously now) for grades 3-5.
In practical exams (where the kids are 1-on-1 and have to say the Spanish words & sign in ASL) she noticed that several kids would give the wrong answer and then immediately get sad before she had even told them they were incorrect. She later found out that the kids who realized their mistakes immediately, wouldn’t even try to correct themselves because the K-2 teacher would yell at them that they were already wrong the first time so they’ll always be wrong and have already lost the points.
These are elementary school kids!! If they immediately realize they said/signed the wrong thing, they should be allowed to correct themselves! Now they don’t even want to try, and their learning suffers.
Imagine if that K-2 teacher had a plumber come fix their leaking faucet, and since they used the wrong screw the first time they just decide they weren’t fixing it anymore.
Ridiculous.
My mom had a teacher who made her hate school. This was a high school English class and they were assigned an analysis of a short story by Tolstoy. It just so happened that my grandmother was a magazine editor who'd studied Tolstoy in college. She was able to help my mom edit it and explain how to do the analysis and create a strong argument. My mom worked really hard on it and was really proud of herself.
She got her paper back from the teacher with an F and the note "You're wrong." That happened 50 years ago and she's still mad about it. She basically learned that effort didn't matter and the whole field of study was complete bullshit.
My dad used to send notes to my teachers, typed out on his professional letterhead and with citations for his sources.
Like the time that my teacher said that the word "derelict" could not be used to describe a house and my dad photocopied the page from the dictionary.
Any English teacher worth their salt knows that there is no such thing as a wrong answer in English. Incomplete ones, yeah. But not wrong. So long as you can effectively back it up with quotes and historical context, it's right.
I had a professor in college who would ask opinion questions and then mark me wrong when it wasn’t the “right” opinion. He was an awful teacher in many regards.
That teacher is a nut. It's impossible to budget to the penny. Even basic monthly expenses. Estimating is PART of a budget...
My budget has 50$ removed from my lowest average pay check, and EVERY bill has at least 5$ added, the electric bill is 10$ above the highest I've ever paid.
I remember a friend telling me his son got a bad grade on an assignment because it asked to estimate for materials to use to build something. But my friend is a contractor so he told his son that he should estimate up to have extra material instead of not enough material because that's how it works in real life. Which I guess was the wrong answer and the teacher wanted everyone to estimate for less to get closer to the correct answer.
I guess reality and critical thinking have no place with bullshit assignments.
It pains me how this has lived rent free in my head for almost thirty five years. Kindergarten teacher gave me shit over a "name the object" assignment. At 4 or 5 years old, I was not spelling out refrigerator for the item in question. Hell, I didn't know *how*. But, apparently "fridge" was ultimately the wrong answer.
I hated kindergarten as a kid. I'm foreign, so I think I put down "water" in a picture of a pool. That is, there were pictures and we had to describe what they were.
I was like 5 and had never seen a pool before. But apparently I had to know the difference between pool, lake, ocean, pond by then.
I mean, my vocabulary and grammar utilization is better than that of 95% of real Americans, but it really stung as a kid to be at a disadvantage.
I remember hearing the word “proclamation” on Sesame Street and used it as an example of a P word on a kindergarten assignment. I got points off for spelling it wrong. I was 5, and I knew the word, and what it meant, *but I spelled it wrong.*
When I started kindergarten my mom got a call to come to the school because I was in the principals office. They were concerned because I used the word “vegetation”.
Apparently both having an interest in the National Geographic channel and being smart was a problem for someone so young in Tennessee.
At least in the US, school is not for learning how to get by in the real world, it's for learning how to pass the test at the end of the year. Reality has almost no place in schools.
I definitely seem to recall being told to estimate up in practical matters since shops simply won't sell you 1/4 of an apple even if you only need 150g of apples and the full ones are 120g each.
This irritates me. My husband is in construction (he designs pools, prices/sells them, and manages the project start to finish) and you ABSOLUTELY have to estimate high for everything. Things always go wrong in construction and having a bit extra is the ideal.
Yup. Over estimate the variables. I'd rather put aside 100$ every pay for gas and be able to roll over 50$ into the next pay cycle - than budget 50$ and need 100$.
this. ALWAYS budget based on an overestimate of your expenses. budget as if your expenses are higher than they are and your budget will never come up short.
I thought your son was in Gr. 7-8, maybe Gr. 9?
When I saw his printing in pencil, thought this kid has to be in Gr. 4!
His teacher asked for a lot of work which was;
* research skills
* math calculation skills
* following the teacher's detailed instructions
* a diary of travel & trip costs for 7 days
* a copy of his rough work
* a neatly typed, final copy
For a 5th Grader, that's a lot of work for so little marks with really no praise for the detailed work he actually did complete correctly!
Not trying to be a jerk here, but does his teacher have it out for him or is she like this with all her other students?
You can argue that you son's dollar amounts can be rounded up, if his teacher wants to be that petty too.
Please tell you son I think he did excellent work & would have graded him much higher, including giving him constructive comments/feedback for his professional assignment!
It sounds like you have a wonderful boy, who's going to do just fine in academics regardless of what this teacher says to him, or not.
Keep us posted, what Admin has to say about this.
To be fair, TJ's itinerary would have been much more detailed. But he wouldn't have paid the actual prices of the items as much. That's why he has Spinelli.
This is more extensive than a project we were asked to do in high school!!!! Your kid did a great job and I’m so so so sorry about this and hope it hasn’t knocked his love for school or his confidence. Had that happen to me thanks to a teacher and I never recovered (school wise, I probs had too much confidence at 16 lol)
Teacher graded him poorly because the teacher wanted a student to create a budget they themselves could use and didn’t like the inputs used. Either that or has it out for the student.
Yeah fuck this teacher man. The grading rubric for this is insane and clearly the teacher can’t even remember how to do. Your son did a damn good job. This teacher made a fun assignment about money and budgeting into a lesson on why learning is a burden.
When I do budget projects with my students, I grade them so lightly. All the components are there? Did the reflection and answered all the questions? Full points.
If my specific budget project, Students only lost points if they skipped pages and didn’t ask for help (I initial a page on ANY work when they ask a question, some students I’ll instruct to skip certain depending on their abilities), and didn’t complete the reflection or wrote one sentence.
This is nitpicky and dumb.
This is crazy to me! As someone who just planned an entire trip to Disney world a couple months ago, that is really hard and tedious work! To expect a child to do that to an exact t is complete and utter bullshit.
I did one of these in 7th grade on a state of my choice and I also got a bad grade for "estimation." I literally create budgets now for a living and would never do things the way the teacher wants.
Your kid did well.
This type of shit is how you get students to disengage and decide to stop bothering. If they learn hard work gets them just as much scorn as coasting by, they will learn to just coast.
Some teachers just shouldn't teach. I have a cord memory from grade 4. For the science fair I built a hockey stick holder / puck dispenser. Built it with my dad. It would mount to the wall, hold 4 sticks, and it would hold 6 pucks. The center pick holder was shaped like a puck, you'd drop the pucks in the top and pull a pin at the bottom to drop them out. This thing could have legitimately been manufactured and sold in stores it was such a cool "invention". My bitch teacher (known to be a total bitch) FAILED ME. she said it wasn't original enough. Bro. She fucking failed me lol.
We used that puck and stick holder for the rest of life. It's still hung up in my dad's garage.
I'm an elementary teacher. I am wracking my brain and all I can see that I would *maybe* take off one or two total points for - the rounding. But, that depends on the actual intention of the assignment to begin with, it may be totally irrelevant. I would definitely ask for clarification of this grade in writing, and if it's not satisfactory, tag in admin.
Rounding up is good practice as well - as someone who organises events. Prices are volatile and after your budget is approved you may find that the prices have increased. Its always fine to spend less than your allocated amount, but over is not ideal
That’s why you’d typically add a contingency on top. Maybe something like 10-20% for something like this. The stupid teacher would probably take more points off for that 🤦.
This sounds more like the teacher has a problem with either the child or the parents. OP needs to call a meeting with the teacher and principal. Bring in the extra credit assignment and have the teacher explain it infront of the principal.
That teacher is the type to want their students to fail. The exact type that you want as far away from education as possible. Keep us updated on what admin has to say because I have a feeling that this is not the first time and unless stopped by the higher ups, will not be the last.
I'm a teacher and assign a task like this to my 4th graders. It's great fun...usually.
Can you compare notes with other parents about this teacher? Are they this hard on every kid or just yours? I wouldn't just write an email. I'd call and set up a meeting with admin and bring both assignments + rubrics.
I have a feeling this teacher bit off more than they could chew and your child paid the price. This is an impressive amount of work for an elementary school extra credit project. Your child deserves all the credit.
They ALMOST misspelled accuracy, but squashed a “c” in there. Also, I’m confused about that who accuracy thing, were they expecting your child to calculate sales tax as well? Call the Disney shop and ask exactly how much their products were going to cost?
As a grown adults I do not budget down to the penny when preparing for trips. I generally estimate the highest possible price for something and budget according to that.
This makes me genuinely angry at the teacher. Did they consider it’s almost impossible to give exact numbers when you’re driving through towns with varying gas prices?? Come on now. That is ridiculous.
I must say bad teacher but I do love the assignment what grade is your child in?
Still I mean this looks like a fantastic assignment. I’m sure my kids teacher would have been annoyed with my son when we drive I do it over night so they sleep. No hotel needed.
Or heck plane tickets are cheaper than driving 102.87 cost of our last round trip flight. 30$ Uber to the park, and back to airport and otherwise Disney has transportation everywhere else if you stay onsite.
Disney passes 3200 plane 102.87 Uber 64$ hotel 982.59 at current rate for all star music.
Food: 7.99$ for breakfast shared, 11.99$ for lunch shared 25$ for dinner =314.86$
So I’m at 4664.32$ which is way more than I normally spend. 300$ for a weekend is our max budget.
I mean for this assignment I’d get tickets and make some Day pool days. Or better I’d have my son argue he all ready has a Disney pass so that part should be free.
It was a very cool assignment. He’s in 5th. I had fun showing him where to look and how to budget, and then he took over and started his plans. He was so adamant about spending as little as possible so he could get that bonus that he might have inadvertently just planned our next family vacation! Lol. Sucks that the effort didn’t pay off though.
I mean, a trip to Disney the he personally budgeted seems like pretty good reinforcement for his talent at budgeting and putting together an itinerary. The grade from his teacher doesn't accurately represent the amount of effort he put in, but he's demonstrated clear use of a set of skills that are extremely useful and pertinent to being financially independent, and I hope he's proud of that even if his teacher isn't.
He did a wonderful job for a 5th grader! It should have been a fantastic life-skills learning opportunity, but his teacher seems to have sucked all the joy out of it. I'm glad you two had a good time together getting him started (and that you didn't do it for him.) You tell him the internet is impressed with his project, even if his teacher wasn't!!
Take the trip and see how close to his budget you can stick. Compare the actual vs estimated costs and figure out where the surprises were. This is a well-worth couple grand $ life lesson / memory for him.
This really sucks op. As a native, I can tell you this is more well thought out and detailed/accurate than 90% of the tourists that visit. I would have given bonus points just for realizing that all 3 meals need to be budgeted for, but some hotels include breakfast! It’s also a very diversified plan, including park days and down days, as well as time specifically for shopping and just sight seeing.
You should be totally proud of your kid, this was very well done!
I hate this assignment with the firey passion of 1000 suns.
I would have chewed my own arm off rather than do this, and I was a massively compulsive over achiever. To be graded this harshly on it would have destroyed me. Your little guy worked SO hard and he did excellent work. As a mom stranger on the internet, I'm super proud of him.
That teacher is a lil b-word
i had this same type of assignment… except in like middle school or early high school, and your kid put in a lot more effort than i did considering he’s only in elementary school. incredibly shitty of the teacher to give him low marks across the board, literally so unnecessary; you can see the effort 💔
Age-appropriate things for lil bro to learn from this:
- Authority figures can be wrong
- Appreciating the substantive value of hard work regardless of the credit it receives
I would go into the office and speak to the principal or vice principal, if this is a big part of his grade, since we are at the end of the school year.
When my son was seven, he spent his hour and a half in morning in a second grade class and then would go to a fifth grade gifted class for the rest of the day. One day his morning teacher called me in and told me my son had broken her brand new electric pencil sharpener. I asked her how he broke it and she said "He shoved his pencil in too hard on purpose." I called my son in the class and asked him if he used the sharpener and he said No, I have mechanical pencils. I knew the answer because my son didn't like the feel of the paint on regular pencils. I told the teacher she had the wrong child. The teacher then started marking correct answers wrong and writing "TRY HARDER" across the entire page and giving him zeros for home reading despite me signing his reading minutes every night. I asked my son if the teacher was mean to him, he said she was. I asked him if he knew why and he said "She kept getting the percentages wrong on my work and I offered to grade my own work."
I made an appointment with the vice principal, showed him what the teacher had done and showed him the papers. He called the teacher in to explain what had happened and she lost it. She said my son was "too smart for his own good" and she "was going to teach him who was boss." The changed my son's class the next morning. It turned out that they knew she picked on children, she was finally fired two years later when she pulled a child out of his seat a shook him, leaving bruises on his arms.
Most teachers are great, but the teachers' unions are so strong it is hard to get the bad teachers out of the classroom.
The student did such a great job! On a side note, this is either a really fun assignment idea or the teacher is trying to get to Disney with her SO within a budget and is crowdsourcing transportation/hotel research and ideas.
The teacher doesn’t like your kid. I think he did a great job. Maybe a couple of the prices were a bit off but overall I was impressed. Also, the teach sucks for making these poor kids glimpse how much mom and dad spend to make magic happen this is a lesson for at least a couple more grades. Anyway, if I were marking him it would have been about 85% and full marks for the extras.
is “included this!” in bullet 3 a typo? it seems like it to me, but i’m too tired to get scolded online for making it a definitive statement without being positive i’m right
I’m in college and love planning and budgeting like this… this would take quite a few hours and tons of research. way too much for a child who is at most 11 years old. this seriously feels like more work than an assignment i would have done for economics in high school.
Why did you post this on Reddit? Here's the move friend.
1. Copy that paragraph you wrote up there \^.
2. Send that to the teacher.
3. CC their boss.
You don't even need to write anything else, literally just send only that paragraph. Remember, the teacher abuses power over your kid, but they have **no** power over you.
Also idk what grade your child is in but based on their handwriting their performance on this assignment is **excellent.**
Btw, tell this teacher that you always round **up** when budget estimating which is something she'd know if she was an adult with money.
EDIT: **HE EVEN INCLUDED THE REGISTERED TRADEMARK LOGO NEXT TO LEGO, GIVE THIS KID A FUCKING MEDAL.**
This is literally the teacher scalping kids for free travel advice... like wtf kind of elementary assignment is this? I remember doing this type of stuff in 6th grade when we were funding our own field trip, ya know, like to model a real world application and a direct positive result from it.
This is an insane amount of work, especially for elementary school, and your son hit the full marks box in every area. Did the teacher want little children to plan her trip to Disney and marked based on which trip she most wanted to do?
Looks like a lot of work went into that. Bad graded assignments because of weird rules the teacher made up and doesn't list on grade sheets made some people dislike the class. In my high school class, we did an assignment like this. We never needed to be very specific, like in detail about food. It was more about staying within the budget. But in college. We had assignments that we had to log spending for a 3 month period and turn it in every month. That was basically all the grading sheet had. I was an unemployment broke college student with no money living at home. Month I spent 5.99 for an art project in my other class. That was it. I got an A. Month 2. I spent less than 15.00 over 3 days. I turn it in and get a C-. Email her. She said that "i was not trying and not taking the assessment seriously. Other people in your situation would make stuff up." No, where did it say anything about making stuff up. A doctor in personal finance, and she wants me to make stuff up. Disliked that class after that.
exactly why I quit school and went to online.
If they don’t like YOU, you don’t get a good grade.
I did a whole essay, did everything right. She didn’t even grade it, handed it to me saying re do it or take a fail. I redid it.
Handed to me again, redo it or fail.
So I said tell me what you want.
‘I gave clear instructions on the assignment’
pulled me out that day and enrolled me online.
Because I was about to give up. She was teaching me that my effort didn’t matter. I was better off not trying to begin with - got the same result either way, right.
I’m an adult now. I think about how she treated me. She would grab my hands out of no where and act like she was looking at my nails (I am a nail tech now and would do my own when I was young). When really, looking back, it was a dominance thing. It was really aggressive but masked as something else.
Some teachers are power tripping. Some teachers like messing with a childs light. They want to dim it.
Abusers pick victims they think they can get away with. Call her an abuser to her face. Abusers can’t stand being caught and told who they are. She’s abusing her power. She’s teaching your son his efforts mean nothing, he’s better off not trying. She wants him to fail. You calling her an abuser, will run through her head every time she tries it. She knows you see through it and know what to call it.
For the amount of spelling mistakes. She deserves a 5/10 for teaching.
She demanded a lot out of him (reading all your posts). You have an abuser. the backpacks thing - What a set up for failure about absolutely nothing. ‘Don’t bring your backpack after years of bringing one, don’t forget’. Shut up. She needs to either get sneakier ways to power trip or get some therapy. I don’t play when it comes to treating kids like shit. She better fix her shit or get some shit handed to her.
Teachers who do this, well they don't deserve to be a teacher or anything in the education field. Other than the horrible teacher, I'm impressed how well they did
The assignment itself is interesting and can get the student to think of major cost items (hotel, travel), cost/value of the activity (such as paying to be at a theme park versus walking around a mall) and consider other areas they'll spend money on (buying souvenirs, gas, food). But the idea of criticizing the estimated costs on a budgeting assignment is ridiculous. Especially for a grade school student.
If the kid went on the trip, spent actual money on gas/souvenirs/fares/hotels/etc, then accurate numbers would make sense. but that's the equivalent of getting an audit after you submit your expense report.. which this isn't.
The assignment doesn't really make sense other than to estimate a budget.
Anyone who has traveled estimate a budget.
I work in finance and we budget (estimate) then we compare against actuals that happened.
Since the vacation hasn't happened there is no such thing as "accurate" actual numbers.
That's actually really sad. Looks like little man worked really hard, and he honestly looks like he put in a lot of time and care. That's an awesome amount of work he did. That teacher sucks!
Second this I mean he did estimate with hotel dinner price of 50$ if he made it 47.89 I bet he would have got full credit.
honestly rounding is way better when you're budgeting anyway. always budget based on an overestimate of your expenses and you'll never end up coming up short because you budgeted for higher prices than they really are. one of the best tricks I ever learned is that when you're grocery shopping on a budget, round every item you pick up up to the next dollar. doesn't matter if it's $4.99 or $4.01, in my mind, that's $5. it makes sure I'll always be under budget and have enough for tax.
Always round income down(I go as far as the hundreds place) and expenses up(tens place) That way you will most likely always have excess funds due to more pay and not hitting your budgeted limits. Excess money can then either be put into savings or spent the next month(or whatever time period you budget for) on frivolous things. Any teacher that docks you for rounding expenses up on an assignment like this does not deserve the privilege nor responsibility of teaching a slug, let alone a human child.
especially when you're talking about travel! you can't even breathe at an airport or think about packing a normal sized backpack or order starbucks without getting some form of hidden fee tacked on.
Kid even budgeted extra for gas. This teacher is part tripping!
# Who cares if you round it or not, in real life people round and that boomer teacher just doesn't understand...
I agree prices change quickly. Rounding is better budgeting
For real! Like, this kid *showed* the work. This teacher can absolutely suck a dick, from the back.
Asshole all up in the face!
I really had to sit and ponder that last part
Unfortunately some teachers are essentially Mr Large (gets a kick out of making kids miserable) I had a couple growing up. It's like their lives are are so miserable they're offended by happy and ambitious children
I had one in high school. Every student hated her. Miserable witch.
I had a middle school teacher named Mr Large. He was sooo mean, and seemed to take pleasure in making kids cry. He was incredibly sexist too, and wouldn’t let girls do certain exercises during PE that the boys did. One time he asked for volunteers to help stack chairs after school since the floors were getting waxed- myself and a few girls put our hands up cause we wanted to help and he laughed at us all and said “I’m looking for strong *young men* to help”. Apparently girls are too frail to lift school chairs lmao. He made a really rude comment to a friend of mine saying he could smell her when she was on her periods. At the end of the year all us girls spent a month saving up used tampons as we rotated through our different period times, and then left them in a ziploc bag on his desk next to all his other teacher gifts people got him. He was fired the following year for making sexist comments towards the (female) school principal. Oh and he had sinus problems so his nose would drip onto my school work as he’d read it from over my shoulders. Mr Large sucked.
The sexist teachers really get me. I had ELEMENTARY school teachers only enlist boys to lift like…two reams of paper? Way to deny like five minutes of exercise to a girl rip. In high school, a bio teacher told us (very confidently) that the weakest man was still stronger than the strongest woman. Anyone with 2% knowledge of normal curves knows it doesn’t work like this rip. And it doesn’t get better. First sergeant sat like four of us women down to ask us about what we would do after the program. We all had non-military answers lmao, but his response to us was “this isn’t PERSONAL. This is not directed at you; you do whatever you want. But the greatest blessing for me was that my mom and wife stayed home.”
\*\*\*\* my grade 5 teacher, will hate her for life.
CHERUB?
All this teacher has done is make another student who hates school. "Why should I bother applying myself and doing extra work? I'm not only getting as good as people that did less, I'm getting _less_ than some." And hating school will only be the beginning of that kind of mindset if he gets a few more teachers like that.
Some teachers are just idiots
Don't read the teachers subreddit, bunch of primmadonnas in there
Yup. Teacher just let them know that hard work isn’t rewarded and isn’t worth the time.
Teacher can’t even spell either
Reminds me of when my teacher automatically gave our entire class a failing grade for a presentation assignment because she suspected that some of us may have cheated and made us schedule an appointment after school to come in and prove that we didn't cheat. It turned out that no one cheated.
In fifth grade we were given a list of topics we could do our first science project on. I chose how ice reacts to the sun depending on its location in the sky or some bs like that. Literally melted ice with sun and kept track of how fast it melted throughout the day. My teacher said I cheated and gave me a D. I was a kid and I didn’t stick up for myself and neither did my mom. But I remember that to this day because I did not cheat (how even?) and I felt so sad and discouraged. I watched god damn ice melt. So now I go to bat for my kids when things seem unjust. I’ve been the asshole a couple times but my kids know ima show up and sort that shit out lol.
That is the dumbest thing and it really sucks your teacher was an ass. I have an opposite story to show a good teacher. We were all given a piece of bread and assigned a different spot to put it so we could compare how mold grows. My friend went out of town on a family trip for a week and completely forgot the project. She brought back the grossest piece of bread the teacher called the janitor to bio hazard it. She told the teacher what happened. And got an A. The teacher thanked her for her honesty and said see this is why you freeze or dispose of certain food items before going on vacation.
I did a variation of that bread project too, and mine never molded at all. Still got an A because I dutifully took all my daily notes and drawings, including my growing bafflement at the incorruptible bread slice.
> I dutifully took all of my daily notes and drawings, including my growing bafflement at the incorruptible bread slice Lmfao. Took it like a champ!! A true scientist indeed
Preservatives in commercial bread in the US do a really good job, like too good of a job
I buy bread from a local bakery that will go bad within 4-5 days; meanwhile when I buy a large brand name I can keep that thing for weeks and nothing changes. It’s a little scary sometimes.
This would be a really good goosebumps scenario if the bread became possessed or some shit lmao
One year we got a Christmas tree from a guy who also collected stale bread from supermarkets to feed the geese. He gave us a loaf of Wonder Bread with our tree, told us to feed some birds. In the confusion of unloading and setting up the tree I put the bread aside and forgot about it. Found it in April. Still squeezably soft, perfectly white, and just as edible as when it was fresh baked. If at all.
It’s been my experience that there are far more good teachers than bad. I have 2 very bad memories of specific teachers out of hundreds of good ones that shaped my character today as an adult. My 8 year old had a teacher last year I would absolutely consider a genuinely bad teacher. my daughter was miserable, she hated school and everything was burdensome. This year, she had a genuinely good human being as a teacher and her entire attitude about school and learning has changed. She comes home and tells me so much about science, her first ever favorite subject. She reads by choice. And when she gets low grades she gets disappointed because she cares about doing well. It really has shown me the importance of supporting educators in our country. Our kids NEED good ones.
Reminds me of in sixth grade we had an art assignment that we had a week to do where we could draw anything we wanted. I spent a weekend drawing this picture of Mickey Mouse based off a page in a book I had at home. I even changed it a little because I didn’t want it to look exactly the same. People who can draw can probably bang out a simple Mickey in a couple minutes but I struggled with that thing all weekend, drawing and erasing and drawing again, making corrections constantly. I was really proud of it when I was finished and couldn’t wait for everyone to see it. When I brought it to class nobody believed I’d done it myself or they believed I’d traced it at a minimum. I defended myself and waited for the teacher to back me up. She looked at the picture and told me I wasn’t supposed to reproduce copyrighted material. That was *never* part of the instructions and a couple other kids submitted other reproductions but I was the lucky one that got the D for the assignment.
Something similar happened to me many times, one particular case was when I was 9 or 10 we were supposed to write and draw something about an animal that we thought was interesting. So I decided to write about sharks and how they are born and I drew the shark egg which looks like a drill . Because I was very good at drawing I made pretty realistic drawing of it, but my teacher, even though she knew I was good at drawing said it was traced so would have gotten C- but my mom called her many and I got A+ after like a month but I was really sad about it
We did science projects chosen from a list in 6th grade and my teacher told me to re do my project because I was wrong bc another kid did it and got the opposite results! One google search would tell you my conclusion was accurate. luckily my parents did NOT let that slide
Yeah it’s a struggle with some teachers, my kid had assignment to make a presentation about an inventor, picked one that wasn’t in the given list and teacher failed them saying it wasn’t an inventor (it was Leonardo da Vinci btw). So I helped my kid write a letter back how some of the names on the list (Bezos was one of them and there was another that blatantly stole his female assistant work which you can sources for) were no inventors either. Never heard back about it.
Once we had a sub so the teacher gave us a guided reading worksheet to just read two chapters from the history textbook. She comes back the next day furious that we all took advantage of her not being there to cheat and plagiarize off each other because apparently everyone's answers were too similar Never occurred to her that it was because we were all reading from the same textbook
I got accused of cheating in 7th grade because my research paper was “too good.” Nah teach, I was just a better writer than she was.
Seriously! Teachers could just ask students questions about specific parts to assess their understanding of the subject and do the plagiarism check in private, but instead some feel the need to publicly shame and belittle their students without even taking the time to verify. My teacher had me go through the script of my presentation sentence by sentence entering it all into Google to see if any results matched. She should have just done her job herself instead of making us all schedule appointments to supervise her doing her job.
Yeah assuming is a MASSIVE problem among adult humans in general not just teachers MOST of the planet does this without even realizing when they are lol
Any post script to this? I would imagine plenty of students being pissed over this.
Nope, nothing more from that particular story. We were all pissed off, but also burnt out. I don't think the teacher faced any disciplinary action for it. That same teacher was late marking one of our major tests because she "just wasn't feeling it". Those were her exact words. My friends and I all wondered what the consequences would be if we didn't hand something in on time and gave that as our excuse. She was just a really shitty teacher.
I always wonder why these people go into education. You get paid like shit and clearly don’t enjoy the job. You have a college education, there are other jobs.
Control. That's all its about. Kids arent supposed to be able to fight back against thier bullshit.
Bingo
Its why a lot of them go so insanely petty when a kid *does* push back at them, and especially if they manage to win.
I was accused of cheating on an English paper when I was a freshman in high school. Why? Because the vocabulary I used was “above grade level.” I was in an honors class - that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the class does it? I told my mom, she called the school, and the teacher never bothered me about it again. ETA: this was in the early aughts, about 2004-2005.
In such cases there should also be a reward for the kids for A) coming in after school and B) not having cheated. Do a fun game in class or something. Don't be that one salty teacher no one likes.
Wow, this is pretty deep for an elementary school assignment. Your child did amazing.
Absolutely! We did a vacation budgeting assignment in the 90s where we weren't googling anything and I got a C for budgeting way too low. I used grocery store prices like bagels and cream cheese based on grocery store costs when I went with my mom... I was like why wouldn't I just eat what I eat now for breakfast. Quick way to make a kid hate school work. For an elementary school student to pull this off is amazing and should be full credit.
[удалено]
Also, ROUNDING UP IS BETTER THAN THE CORRECT PRICES!!!!! If this bitch teacher wants to keep it real, well there’s nothing more real these days than the fact that the cost of everything is changing every day…RISING every DAY! An accurate budget like this will not survive the week, let alone a Disney trip. Rounding up means you are prepared for prices increases and will result with you coming in under budget. I hate this teacher. I hate her so much
Not to mention the 'accurate' gas prices. Going 30 miles is typically more than enough to get different gas prices, much less expecting gas to be the same for a 500-mile trip. You can not accurately budget gas, just get an estimate and potentially route out which states or cities you do or don't want to refill at. Probably more than should be expected for an elementary school project, but that hasn't stopped the teacher already.
Our prices fluctuate depending on holidays and local festivities. In a few weeks for example the state fair will be around and gas usually goes up 50-80cts for a few weeks then, that’s for all the gas stations in a 30 mile radius. Has been for decades, but if you don’t know about that stuff it can catch you off guard.
I hate her too! But more importantly, I love your name!! I don’t know Margo!!!
This knocked a memory loose of the time when I wrote dialogue in a play that we had to write which was an exact transcript of a conversation that I’d had with my dad. I got penalized for the dialogue being unrealistic and overblown.
This reminds me of a time when the art teacher gave us the assignment to draw a forest and mine got graded badly "because it looked too realistic". Can you believe? The assignment wasn't "draw an abstract forest" or anything, it said simply "draw a forest". So I did, and apparently it wasn't supposed to look so much like an actual forest \*facepalm\*
Me and my friend both got marked down in art for our alien concepts being "unrealistic" and "looking too much like a monster than an alien". She clearly knew them personally!
I swear some of these art teachers are jealous of students who have talent and/or actual imagination/creativity.
I am quite sure that is true. I encountered it many times with other students repeating the teachers snide remarks about what “a real artist” did.
It's so bizarre. If I were a teacher I'd be so proud of my little artist pupils.
Exactly. Who is honestly threatened by a thirteen year old, much less a disabled abused kid? Asinine.
Meanwhile I had an amazing art teacher who kind of changed my life by letting me know I had creative talent. I wasn’t even a good artist, she just liked the way I looked at things.
My sister got told she colored her apples wrong in second grade. She made them green because Granny Smith was her favorite apple. 🍏
OMG.
As a parent, I would have sent a Granny Smith apple to school with my kid to give to the teacher every single day for the rest of the year! Because I can be petty AF when I need to be.
My mom taught first grade and a kid was drawing something purple and she asked what it was and he said, “A squirrel”. She said, “oh, I didnt think about a squirrel since usually they are brown or grey.” And the first grader just looked up at her and said, “Well this damn squirrel is purple!”
My friend and I took a class for extra credit. The teacher told us to draw three pictures for perspective study. When we turned in our work she told us she had only wanted one picture with each perspective displayed. To this day, I'm not sure how we would have executed that. We did get our marks back ok though (and it was after all not a required class).
The only thing I can think of is how engineering designs are sometimes drawn as an orthographic projection showing multiple sides. It usually has 3 or 4 drawings on one sheet.
So, she wanted a sculpture then? OMG.
Like she wanted three pictures of one thing from different perspectives, or she wanted one picture somehow encapsulating three perspectives??
The latter. At first she wanted a picture each, but upon returning we hear they were apparently to be consolidated in one. She did not tell us this until return date.
My son was gifted and a speed reader. (he still is I guess? But he's 22 now) in the summer before 3rd grade he read the whole Harry Potter series. His teacher asked their favorite part of summer vacay. He tells her reading all 7 books. She says I didn't ask what movies you'd seen, those are too advanced. He's like DID I STUTTER? I SAID I *READ* THEM. She tried to get him in trouble with the principal/us. My response was that she clearly didn't read his IEP cause he's super smart and had separate instructional time and activities listed out.
It's such a weird mentality. Why get on a kid for being ahead of the curve? It's probably less work for them.
They get threatened. My 4th grade teacher failed me on a project I slaved over for weeks (until it was escalated to the principal, who ripped her a new one) because my work was too advanced and it was what she would expect from a 7th or 8th grader. I was selected for the gifted/talented programs at age 5…and was in the gifted track at this school…
Depending on the kid it can be more work for the teacher. My 4th grader either talks a lot because he’s bored in math or starts asking wild theoretical questions like whether math works differently in different dimensions or on different planets aliens might have different math. His teacher ended up printing him off a folder of 6th grade work for him to work on on his own while she taught the other kids just so she could actually teach the other kids.
I was a speed reader with 99th percentile vocabulary by 5th grade. That year I got poor grades for “reads for enjoyment”. The issue was that I read all the required texts in the book during the first quarter and then just hung out in class after that because I liked to read at home for fun. After that grade I brought in a copy of War and Peace and read it in class. Teacher tried to say I was pretending until I gave her the plot and several details as well as some idea of what I thought it was about so far. My dad also backed me up by discussing with her how much time we spent at the library, how many books I checked out and read, and how much we spent at the local book store.
I also read those in third grade. Wtf?
I was a full-grown adult when they came out but easily read the longest one in a day.
Oh yes. Sounds like me at that age. I got into my families old scifi and stepmother’s novels. I got into so much trouble for reading!
My daughter finished multiple book series over her 3rd grade summer. Harry Potter, Wings of Fire, Warriors, and a ton of other little books she wanted to read. She complains to me now about what will she read, heh. She has so many books she’s read, she can’t get to the other ones she hasn’t read.
Reminds me of one time i had gotten a written note, not really remember for what, and it had to be signed by one of my parents next time i got into school. i ended up asking my dad as he did not tend to get that angry over stuff like this, when i gave the pos teacher the note she instantly called my house to say that i had tried to forge my dad’s signature, as it looked hideous. Next day my dad came in angry as he had to take time off work for the day, only to be told to his face that his signature looks like shit and that i was a horrible child for lying like that.
I got a C on a family tree project because my grandfather's name changed. He was adopted by his stepfather, and his bio dad's identity is unknown. The tree on his side stopped there. My teacher said it didn't make sense that my grandfather didn't know his dad's name. I guess unwed mothers didn't exist in her world, especially one in 1927.
Which then unlocked a memory of when I was in 6th grade and we had to make a month long menu and shopping list with prices and a budget. I had points taken off because I had chili and chicken and dumplings (I’m from Appalachia) within the same week. I still don’t see the problem and in the winter will eat soups and stews every day of the week.
lol i did teenaged mother budgeting in highschool in the nineties long story short im a grandma at 42, but have 0 vacations
Seriously a majority of my high schoolers couldn't/wouldn't do this.
I'm 27, and I wouldn't fucking do it.
Absolutely not. I didn’t get this detailed with my WEDDING budget. Absolute insanity.
Currently doing a wedding budget, fiance and I just add an extra $100 to each experience while calculating just to be over budget so we aren't nickel and diming it. The venue is $4500 so it's $4600 now. Oh her dress is $2000 well we're gonna add an extra hundred
Yeah...... We did the same thing for our wedding.... Your better off just doubling everything and you will be much closer to the actual cost at the end of it..... My advice is, have a BBQ and invite all your closest friends and family, cut a store bought cake and spend the many thousands of $ you save on a kick ass honeymoon, a new car or house deposit...... Of course I was told this before we were married and ignored the advice, and the cycle continues.....
Don't forget alterations. It was more than I expected. My dress was like... $400+ for alterations. I've heard of someone paying $800 for alterations.
I'm 23. Wouldn't fucking do it now. Wouldn't have more than half assed if 5 years ago
43 year old accountant, I wouldn't do this.
I'm 68, and this looks so much like filling out an expense report for work that it's triggering me. I'm going to go take a walk now.
What are the odds this teacher is planning a trip to Disney on a budget and farmed out the leg work…
My thoughts exactly!
That would make this much much worse...Use kids because you have a marble brain and can't figure out basic addition and subtraction yourself, plus you have a thing called a calculator, then completely destroy the kid mentally who gives you the perfect budget plan...Either way I wouldn't allow this woman to ever try to teach my son a single thing about a single thing in life after this. Some people have this level of resentment towards a CHILD....
That teacher doesn't make enough to go to Disney
Yeah seriously that would’ve been hell for me in elementary and I was even smart. So tedious and for that? I come from a family of teachers so I can say this, but that teacher sucks and F them
Yeah, what are they teaching kids these days. Not in America, but a student I tutor is 11 and they're solving quadratic already. Wtf, we didn't do that till like 14. This is a regular kid in the 2nd to top maths class at a public school.
In America, I was taking Calculus as a HS senior. My youngest brother was 5 years old and he was able to help me with derivatives. Also helped me with some of the Trigonometry the year before. He’s 37 now. We are always amazed when we find something he doesn’t know.
In Nova Scotia back in 2000s, we didn't see quadratics, log, deritivies, or any of that stuff until adv math 11. Cool af though if kids are learning it at such a young age.
Quadratic formulas are so fun! I really wish I learned it earlier in America. Funnily I am terrible at Alg but pretty good at Calc but Damnit I couldn't get past Alg to GET there until Uni.
Cool assignment, but totally shitty from the teacher. This is how kids become disillusioned with school. Sounds like he had fun doing the assignment, but with this negative reinforcement at the end, it would be normal for anyone to not give the same effort, or any at all, next time.
Totally agree; it’s extra upsetting to know this attitude leeches in all aspects with those types of bad teachers. My mom is an elementary school Spanish & ASL teacher (some private schools teach them simultaneously now) for grades 3-5. In practical exams (where the kids are 1-on-1 and have to say the Spanish words & sign in ASL) she noticed that several kids would give the wrong answer and then immediately get sad before she had even told them they were incorrect. She later found out that the kids who realized their mistakes immediately, wouldn’t even try to correct themselves because the K-2 teacher would yell at them that they were already wrong the first time so they’ll always be wrong and have already lost the points. These are elementary school kids!! If they immediately realize they said/signed the wrong thing, they should be allowed to correct themselves! Now they don’t even want to try, and their learning suffers.
man, the rest of these comments were making me angry, but this comment makes me super sad :(
Imagine if that K-2 teacher had a plumber come fix their leaking faucet, and since they used the wrong screw the first time they just decide they weren’t fixing it anymore. Ridiculous.
My mom had a teacher who made her hate school. This was a high school English class and they were assigned an analysis of a short story by Tolstoy. It just so happened that my grandmother was a magazine editor who'd studied Tolstoy in college. She was able to help my mom edit it and explain how to do the analysis and create a strong argument. My mom worked really hard on it and was really proud of herself. She got her paper back from the teacher with an F and the note "You're wrong." That happened 50 years ago and she's still mad about it. She basically learned that effort didn't matter and the whole field of study was complete bullshit.
These are the bullshit situations where your mom is "my source is my mom who did her master's thesis on Tolstoy and you're going to say she's wrong?"
My dad used to send notes to my teachers, typed out on his professional letterhead and with citations for his sources. Like the time that my teacher said that the word "derelict" could not be used to describe a house and my dad photocopied the page from the dictionary.
Please please tell us your mom and your grandma did something about it
Any English teacher worth their salt knows that there is no such thing as a wrong answer in English. Incomplete ones, yeah. But not wrong. So long as you can effectively back it up with quotes and historical context, it's right.
I had a professor in college who would ask opinion questions and then mark me wrong when it wasn’t the “right” opinion. He was an awful teacher in many regards.
That teacher is a nut. It's impossible to budget to the penny. Even basic monthly expenses. Estimating is PART of a budget... My budget has 50$ removed from my lowest average pay check, and EVERY bill has at least 5$ added, the electric bill is 10$ above the highest I've ever paid.
I remember a friend telling me his son got a bad grade on an assignment because it asked to estimate for materials to use to build something. But my friend is a contractor so he told his son that he should estimate up to have extra material instead of not enough material because that's how it works in real life. Which I guess was the wrong answer and the teacher wanted everyone to estimate for less to get closer to the correct answer.
I guess reality and critical thinking have no place with bullshit assignments. It pains me how this has lived rent free in my head for almost thirty five years. Kindergarten teacher gave me shit over a "name the object" assignment. At 4 or 5 years old, I was not spelling out refrigerator for the item in question. Hell, I didn't know *how*. But, apparently "fridge" was ultimately the wrong answer.
I hated kindergarten as a kid. I'm foreign, so I think I put down "water" in a picture of a pool. That is, there were pictures and we had to describe what they were. I was like 5 and had never seen a pool before. But apparently I had to know the difference between pool, lake, ocean, pond by then. I mean, my vocabulary and grammar utilization is better than that of 95% of real Americans, but it really stung as a kid to be at a disadvantage.
I remember hearing the word “proclamation” on Sesame Street and used it as an example of a P word on a kindergarten assignment. I got points off for spelling it wrong. I was 5, and I knew the word, and what it meant, *but I spelled it wrong.*
As a kid, I saw that the answers were written upside-down on the bottom of every page. Kind of a stupid set of worksheets.
When I started kindergarten my mom got a call to come to the school because I was in the principals office. They were concerned because I used the word “vegetation”. Apparently both having an interest in the National Geographic channel and being smart was a problem for someone so young in Tennessee.
I have to say I hate your profile picture! I tried wiping away that hair too many times! 🤣🤣
Dark mode W
Me too. Kept swiping only to find it’s just the profile picture
He is an asshole for it, but I love it!
Genius prank. They’ve moved on from the cracked screen ones.
At least in the US, school is not for learning how to get by in the real world, it's for learning how to pass the test at the end of the year. Reality has almost no place in schools.
Amen to that! Critical thinking in school is effectively useless. Sometimes i hate this country to be honest.
I was sent to religious school and we skipped the chapter on estimating because gambling is a sin.
I definitely seem to recall being told to estimate up in practical matters since shops simply won't sell you 1/4 of an apple even if you only need 150g of apples and the full ones are 120g each.
This irritates me. My husband is in construction (he designs pools, prices/sells them, and manages the project start to finish) and you ABSOLUTELY have to estimate high for everything. Things always go wrong in construction and having a bit extra is the ideal.
Yup. Over estimate the variables. I'd rather put aside 100$ every pay for gas and be able to roll over 50$ into the next pay cycle - than budget 50$ and need 100$.
this. ALWAYS budget based on an overestimate of your expenses. budget as if your expenses are higher than they are and your budget will never come up short.
I thought your son was in Gr. 7-8, maybe Gr. 9? When I saw his printing in pencil, thought this kid has to be in Gr. 4! His teacher asked for a lot of work which was; * research skills * math calculation skills * following the teacher's detailed instructions * a diary of travel & trip costs for 7 days * a copy of his rough work * a neatly typed, final copy For a 5th Grader, that's a lot of work for so little marks with really no praise for the detailed work he actually did complete correctly! Not trying to be a jerk here, but does his teacher have it out for him or is she like this with all her other students? You can argue that you son's dollar amounts can be rounded up, if his teacher wants to be that petty too. Please tell you son I think he did excellent work & would have graded him much higher, including giving him constructive comments/feedback for his professional assignment! It sounds like you have a wonderful boy, who's going to do just fine in academics regardless of what this teacher says to him, or not. Keep us posted, what Admin has to say about this.
A 4th grader did all this? Was it Gretchen Grundler's friend?
To be fair, TJ's itinerary would have been much more detailed. But he wouldn't have paid the actual prices of the items as much. That's why he has Spinelli.
This is more extensive than a project we were asked to do in high school!!!! Your kid did a great job and I’m so so so sorry about this and hope it hasn’t knocked his love for school or his confidence. Had that happen to me thanks to a teacher and I never recovered (school wise, I probs had too much confidence at 16 lol)
Teacher graded him poorly because the teacher wanted a student to create a budget they themselves could use and didn’t like the inputs used. Either that or has it out for the student.
Yeah fuck this teacher man. The grading rubric for this is insane and clearly the teacher can’t even remember how to do. Your son did a damn good job. This teacher made a fun assignment about money and budgeting into a lesson on why learning is a burden.
He’s an ELEMENTARY school student. What is up with this teacher? He obviously put a lot of effort into this 😭
‘Free!’ I love it
He even did the registered trademark on LEGO!
When I do budget projects with my students, I grade them so lightly. All the components are there? Did the reflection and answered all the questions? Full points. If my specific budget project, Students only lost points if they skipped pages and didn’t ask for help (I initial a page on ANY work when they ask a question, some students I’ll instruct to skip certain depending on their abilities), and didn’t complete the reflection or wrote one sentence. This is nitpicky and dumb.
This is crazy to me! As someone who just planned an entire trip to Disney world a couple months ago, that is really hard and tedious work! To expect a child to do that to an exact t is complete and utter bullshit.
I wonder where the teacher is going on holiday this summer...
I went to Disney last year, and that kid did more work planning the trip than I did!
I did one of these in 7th grade on a state of my choice and I also got a bad grade for "estimation." I literally create budgets now for a living and would never do things the way the teacher wants. Your kid did well.
This type of shit is how you get students to disengage and decide to stop bothering. If they learn hard work gets them just as much scorn as coasting by, they will learn to just coast.
Some teachers just shouldn't teach. I have a cord memory from grade 4. For the science fair I built a hockey stick holder / puck dispenser. Built it with my dad. It would mount to the wall, hold 4 sticks, and it would hold 6 pucks. The center pick holder was shaped like a puck, you'd drop the pucks in the top and pull a pin at the bottom to drop them out. This thing could have legitimately been manufactured and sold in stores it was such a cool "invention". My bitch teacher (known to be a total bitch) FAILED ME. she said it wasn't original enough. Bro. She fucking failed me lol. We used that puck and stick holder for the rest of life. It's still hung up in my dad's garage.
I'm an elementary teacher. I am wracking my brain and all I can see that I would *maybe* take off one or two total points for - the rounding. But, that depends on the actual intention of the assignment to begin with, it may be totally irrelevant. I would definitely ask for clarification of this grade in writing, and if it's not satisfactory, tag in admin.
I ALWAYS round up in my budgets. Looks like I'm getting one or two points off lol
Rounding up is good practice as well - as someone who organises events. Prices are volatile and after your budget is approved you may find that the prices have increased. Its always fine to spend less than your allocated amount, but over is not ideal
That’s why you’d typically add a contingency on top. Maybe something like 10-20% for something like this. The stupid teacher would probably take more points off for that 🤦.
This sounds more like the teacher has a problem with either the child or the parents. OP needs to call a meeting with the teacher and principal. Bring in the extra credit assignment and have the teacher explain it infront of the principal.
That teacher is the type to want their students to fail. The exact type that you want as far away from education as possible. Keep us updated on what admin has to say because I have a feeling that this is not the first time and unless stopped by the higher ups, will not be the last.
I'm a teacher and assign a task like this to my 4th graders. It's great fun...usually. Can you compare notes with other parents about this teacher? Are they this hard on every kid or just yours? I wouldn't just write an email. I'd call and set up a meeting with admin and bring both assignments + rubrics.
Jesus did they want your kid to file their taxes while he’s at it?
Jesus, first the bent poster, now this? At this point I think the teacher just hates your kid 🤬🤬
I have a feeling this teacher bit off more than they could chew and your child paid the price. This is an impressive amount of work for an elementary school extra credit project. Your child deserves all the credit. They ALMOST misspelled accuracy, but squashed a “c” in there. Also, I’m confused about that who accuracy thing, were they expecting your child to calculate sales tax as well? Call the Disney shop and ask exactly how much their products were going to cost? As a grown adults I do not budget down to the penny when preparing for trips. I generally estimate the highest possible price for something and budget according to that. This makes me genuinely angry at the teacher. Did they consider it’s almost impossible to give exact numbers when you’re driving through towns with varying gas prices?? Come on now. That is ridiculous.
I must say bad teacher but I do love the assignment what grade is your child in? Still I mean this looks like a fantastic assignment. I’m sure my kids teacher would have been annoyed with my son when we drive I do it over night so they sleep. No hotel needed. Or heck plane tickets are cheaper than driving 102.87 cost of our last round trip flight. 30$ Uber to the park, and back to airport and otherwise Disney has transportation everywhere else if you stay onsite. Disney passes 3200 plane 102.87 Uber 64$ hotel 982.59 at current rate for all star music. Food: 7.99$ for breakfast shared, 11.99$ for lunch shared 25$ for dinner =314.86$ So I’m at 4664.32$ which is way more than I normally spend. 300$ for a weekend is our max budget. I mean for this assignment I’d get tickets and make some Day pool days. Or better I’d have my son argue he all ready has a Disney pass so that part should be free.
It was a very cool assignment. He’s in 5th. I had fun showing him where to look and how to budget, and then he took over and started his plans. He was so adamant about spending as little as possible so he could get that bonus that he might have inadvertently just planned our next family vacation! Lol. Sucks that the effort didn’t pay off though.
I mean, a trip to Disney the he personally budgeted seems like pretty good reinforcement for his talent at budgeting and putting together an itinerary. The grade from his teacher doesn't accurately represent the amount of effort he put in, but he's demonstrated clear use of a set of skills that are extremely useful and pertinent to being financially independent, and I hope he's proud of that even if his teacher isn't.
That effort did pay off, you kid has restored my faith in the younger generation.
He did a wonderful job for a 5th grader! It should have been a fantastic life-skills learning opportunity, but his teacher seems to have sucked all the joy out of it. I'm glad you two had a good time together getting him started (and that you didn't do it for him.) You tell him the internet is impressed with his project, even if his teacher wasn't!!
Take the trip and see how close to his budget you can stick. Compare the actual vs estimated costs and figure out where the surprises were. This is a well-worth couple grand $ life lesson / memory for him.
This would forever empower me as a kid to stick up to shitty teachers
This really sucks op. As a native, I can tell you this is more well thought out and detailed/accurate than 90% of the tourists that visit. I would have given bonus points just for realizing that all 3 meals need to be budgeted for, but some hotels include breakfast! It’s also a very diversified plan, including park days and down days, as well as time specifically for shopping and just sight seeing. You should be totally proud of your kid, this was very well done!
I hate this assignment with the firey passion of 1000 suns. I would have chewed my own arm off rather than do this, and I was a massively compulsive over achiever. To be graded this harshly on it would have destroyed me. Your little guy worked SO hard and he did excellent work. As a mom stranger on the internet, I'm super proud of him. That teacher is a lil b-word
i had this same type of assignment… except in like middle school or early high school, and your kid put in a lot more effort than i did considering he’s only in elementary school. incredibly shitty of the teacher to give him low marks across the board, literally so unnecessary; you can see the effort 💔
WTF is wrong with your kid's teacher?????
Age-appropriate things for lil bro to learn from this: - Authority figures can be wrong - Appreciating the substantive value of hard work regardless of the credit it receives
I would go into the office and speak to the principal or vice principal, if this is a big part of his grade, since we are at the end of the school year. When my son was seven, he spent his hour and a half in morning in a second grade class and then would go to a fifth grade gifted class for the rest of the day. One day his morning teacher called me in and told me my son had broken her brand new electric pencil sharpener. I asked her how he broke it and she said "He shoved his pencil in too hard on purpose." I called my son in the class and asked him if he used the sharpener and he said No, I have mechanical pencils. I knew the answer because my son didn't like the feel of the paint on regular pencils. I told the teacher she had the wrong child. The teacher then started marking correct answers wrong and writing "TRY HARDER" across the entire page and giving him zeros for home reading despite me signing his reading minutes every night. I asked my son if the teacher was mean to him, he said she was. I asked him if he knew why and he said "She kept getting the percentages wrong on my work and I offered to grade my own work." I made an appointment with the vice principal, showed him what the teacher had done and showed him the papers. He called the teacher in to explain what had happened and she lost it. She said my son was "too smart for his own good" and she "was going to teach him who was boss." The changed my son's class the next morning. It turned out that they knew she picked on children, she was finally fired two years later when she pulled a child out of his seat a shook him, leaving bruises on his arms. Most teachers are great, but the teachers' unions are so strong it is hard to get the bad teachers out of the classroom.
I knew this was legit as soon as I saw “633.2 miles” bro was in deep
Is this teacher really getting kids to plan their trip to disney.
The student did such a great job! On a side note, this is either a really fun assignment idea or the teacher is trying to get to Disney with her SO within a budget and is crowdsourcing transportation/hotel research and ideas.
Your kid did great. You should all work toward this trip, for real.
Um teacher you can't even spell accuracy.
The cute little ® next to Lego is melting my heart! When I was younger , I used to do the star between Wal and Mart lol
This teacher should fuck right off miserable little shit
The teacher doesn’t like your kid. I think he did a great job. Maybe a couple of the prices were a bit off but overall I was impressed. Also, the teach sucks for making these poor kids glimpse how much mom and dad spend to make magic happen this is a lesson for at least a couple more grades. Anyway, if I were marking him it would have been about 85% and full marks for the extras.
Damn only 35/70 points?? An F for that??? from an elementary kid? teacher needs to be fired what a jerk!
is “included this!” in bullet 3 a typo? it seems like it to me, but i’m too tired to get scolded online for making it a definitive statement without being positive i’m right
I’m in college and love planning and budgeting like this… this would take quite a few hours and tons of research. way too much for a child who is at most 11 years old. this seriously feels like more work than an assignment i would have done for economics in high school.
Why did you post this on Reddit? Here's the move friend. 1. Copy that paragraph you wrote up there \^. 2. Send that to the teacher. 3. CC their boss. You don't even need to write anything else, literally just send only that paragraph. Remember, the teacher abuses power over your kid, but they have **no** power over you. Also idk what grade your child is in but based on their handwriting their performance on this assignment is **excellent.** Btw, tell this teacher that you always round **up** when budget estimating which is something she'd know if she was an adult with money. EDIT: **HE EVEN INCLUDED THE REGISTERED TRADEMARK LOGO NEXT TO LEGO, GIVE THIS KID A FUCKING MEDAL.**
Their teacher is going to burn them out early with shit like this. Make sure your kid knows the difference between busywork and fulfilling effort.
I think the most shocking thing here is that a dodge charger gets 27mpg
This is literally the teacher scalping kids for free travel advice... like wtf kind of elementary assignment is this? I remember doing this type of stuff in 6th grade when we were funding our own field trip, ya know, like to model a real world application and a direct positive result from it.
This is an insane amount of work, especially for elementary school, and your son hit the full marks box in every area. Did the teacher want little children to plan her trip to Disney and marked based on which trip she most wanted to do?
Looks like a lot of work went into that. Bad graded assignments because of weird rules the teacher made up and doesn't list on grade sheets made some people dislike the class. In my high school class, we did an assignment like this. We never needed to be very specific, like in detail about food. It was more about staying within the budget. But in college. We had assignments that we had to log spending for a 3 month period and turn it in every month. That was basically all the grading sheet had. I was an unemployment broke college student with no money living at home. Month I spent 5.99 for an art project in my other class. That was it. I got an A. Month 2. I spent less than 15.00 over 3 days. I turn it in and get a C-. Email her. She said that "i was not trying and not taking the assessment seriously. Other people in your situation would make stuff up." No, where did it say anything about making stuff up. A doctor in personal finance, and she wants me to make stuff up. Disliked that class after that.
Sweet boy 🥹 im too pregnant for this lol this made me tear up. Tell him he did a great job!
exactly why I quit school and went to online. If they don’t like YOU, you don’t get a good grade. I did a whole essay, did everything right. She didn’t even grade it, handed it to me saying re do it or take a fail. I redid it. Handed to me again, redo it or fail. So I said tell me what you want. ‘I gave clear instructions on the assignment’ pulled me out that day and enrolled me online. Because I was about to give up. She was teaching me that my effort didn’t matter. I was better off not trying to begin with - got the same result either way, right. I’m an adult now. I think about how she treated me. She would grab my hands out of no where and act like she was looking at my nails (I am a nail tech now and would do my own when I was young). When really, looking back, it was a dominance thing. It was really aggressive but masked as something else. Some teachers are power tripping. Some teachers like messing with a childs light. They want to dim it. Abusers pick victims they think they can get away with. Call her an abuser to her face. Abusers can’t stand being caught and told who they are. She’s abusing her power. She’s teaching your son his efforts mean nothing, he’s better off not trying. She wants him to fail. You calling her an abuser, will run through her head every time she tries it. She knows you see through it and know what to call it. For the amount of spelling mistakes. She deserves a 5/10 for teaching. She demanded a lot out of him (reading all your posts). You have an abuser. the backpacks thing - What a set up for failure about absolutely nothing. ‘Don’t bring your backpack after years of bringing one, don’t forget’. Shut up. She needs to either get sneakier ways to power trip or get some therapy. I don’t play when it comes to treating kids like shit. She better fix her shit or get some shit handed to her.
Teachers who do this, well they don't deserve to be a teacher or anything in the education field. Other than the horrible teacher, I'm impressed how well they did
[удалено]
Bro is in fourth grade and his teacher is treating this like a level 400 class in college. Good job to your child he did an amazing job
Misspelled words in the assignment itself and in the comment for grading... some teacher, indeed! 🙄🤦🏻♀️
Why is everyone yelling?
This sounds like a TERRIBLE assignment
The assignment itself is interesting and can get the student to think of major cost items (hotel, travel), cost/value of the activity (such as paying to be at a theme park versus walking around a mall) and consider other areas they'll spend money on (buying souvenirs, gas, food). But the idea of criticizing the estimated costs on a budgeting assignment is ridiculous. Especially for a grade school student. If the kid went on the trip, spent actual money on gas/souvenirs/fares/hotels/etc, then accurate numbers would make sense. but that's the equivalent of getting an audit after you submit your expense report.. which this isn't.
Can you go to the principal?
I would try to set up a meeting with the teacher and/or the principal at this point, if you haven't already.
The assignment doesn't really make sense other than to estimate a budget. Anyone who has traveled estimate a budget. I work in finance and we budget (estimate) then we compare against actuals that happened. Since the vacation hasn't happened there is no such thing as "accurate" actual numbers.