Want to be my friend?

It's been a few years since I took 6th grade math (lol), but I don't remember sequence questions of this complexity. Mostly, they were simple arithmetic or geometric series. It seems that if you're home schooling, you can write it off as an inappropriate question and go on to something more interesting.

The thing about series questions is "any rule will do." One could say this one is ...
- odd terms are alternating single digit or ratio of two consecutive (down-counting) digits: 6 5/4 3 2/1 0 -1/-2 -3 -4/-5 ...
- even terms are representations of 1/8 or 8 that such that each term is (2/2)/[previous term]: 1/8 16/2 4/32 64/8 16/128 ...
This would make the composite series ...
6 1/8 5/4 16/2 3 4/32 2/1 64/8 0 16/128 -1/-2 ...

It might be a little more satisfying than the cubic approach, especially for a 6th grader, but just barely. Sometimes, I think the really creative students are penalized for seeing relationships that others don't see when answering questions of this kind.

It's good to hear the whole family is involved in the schooling. Thanks for the shout.