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I had a meeting with my DD8's teacher on Friday (4th grade). I had sent an email asking for some acceleration, in part because the teacher had placed her in the middle group of three, yet my daughter is very strong in mathematics. She did most of 4th grade math with me over the summer and a lot of fifth-grade level math as well. Lately she's been coming home with worksheets with 25+ problems of this type: 63*4; 84*7. There were four like this last week. The week before, we learned about how rows of blocks can describe multiplication. By the end of the week, she was crying about it and telling me she "dreads math group" because it goes so slowly.

At the conference, I was told that her computational skills are "fantastic," but that her word problem skills are only average. I asked, "Then why is she coming home with 30 computational problems and two word problems?" and was told that "We have to keep those skills up."

Her teacher was absolute about DD's not-great word problem skills, and was equally certain that she "is where a fourth grader should be in math." She was confident. She kept saying that my daughter "needs that foundation with problem solving." She even had me going a bit. I convinced her to cut computational problems to 5 per day max and to send word problems home instead.

Fast forward to later that day. DD had asked to do Beast Academy every day over the long weekend. When we sat down, I decided to throw some word problems at her. These were long division problems and were mid-grade rather than basic in that they required some application of knowledge. She didn't even have to think. She just did them. Likewise for multiplication problems. I pulled some of these problems from her math book and some from a Kumon book of word problems.

It's so frustrating for me when teachers are CERTAIN about a child's skill level when they are, in fact, completely wrong and (apparently) not particularly interested in exploring other possibilities. Anything I provide is dismissed out of hand. My best guess is that they think I just stood over her and told her what to write back in July or that their curriculum is somehow special and you don't truly know 4th grade math until you've been through every inch of it. Whatever, it's as though there's a conceptual barrier there blocking out new information from outside the age-grade zone, and nothing seems to get past it.

We're going to let this go until the next conference next month. In the meantime, DD wants to do math with me and is progressing very well.

Advice welcome on how to deal with this situation!! My goal is for her to learn at school as well as at home.

Start by asking for more specifics about the relative weakness in solving word problems. Assume that there is something they see, and ask for the basis for the assessment.

"DD does a lot of word problems independently at home without a struggle. I'm wondering if we're seeing something differently? Can you be more specific about what it is that DD struggles with in solving word problems?" "What specific skills does she need to develop to improve in this area?"

It seems to me that the teacher's perceptions are likely warped by sample size, because if your DD gets only two word problems, and gets one of them wrong, that's a failing average.

Or, it could be that the teacher is just making excuses to justify holding your child back, because differentiating is extra work on her part.

Geofizz-- yes, that's great. I'll send an email to her on Thursday or Friday.


She was getting 100% on the worksheets (okay, I made her check her work and there were always a few mistakes, but she could still find and fix them, and they weren't in the word problems.).

I'm actually a loss to understand this. The reports I get from the kid are different from the reports I get from the school. I expect that the truth is somewhere in between, but it's hard to ignore DD when she says, "AND THEN THE OTHER KIDS DON'T GET IT and the teacher goes back to the beginning and we have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN!!!!" She's even had to teach the other kids; when I brought this up at the meeting, I was told that "many kids do this."

And I'll bet the teacher never made her check her work, and never looked past the few mistakes.

It's really easy to make a bad read on a kid if you're not paying much attention.

no insights or advice,
but a sympathetic angry face.

persistance overcomes resistance.

I've been talking to my hubby about this, about what I'm thinking about gifted children. I said there's no way the teachers would understand this, but I think it's better for a kid to be put wherever they're a C student and they have to work hard for A's and B's. That's what all the other kids get. That's what everybody sets up as a normal childhood for a normal kid. Why is it hard to understand a gifted kid whose parents think they should go to school to learn?

Of course I've told him that I've read, "If your kid is ever by far the best student in the class you should find them another class (where they can go to learn)." But, if you accelerate you still have to be by far the best student in the class by graduation. Whatever age you are doesn't matter when applying to college or for scholarships; you still have to be by far the best of your class.

I've told him that you never post about troubles and now you have one. I said it was ridiculous because you're always saying how it's only important for kids to learn well and right. If it takes holding them back a year so they actually learn then they deserve the chance at a good solid education. You or I would hold our kid back in a heartbeat if they needed the extra focus to learn properly. It should really be about what's best for the child. It's a shame when it's not.

Grinnity would say go and talk to them about how this makes your child feel. Tell them what she's telling you. Tell them what it's doing to her self esteem. This gets through better than talking about research or excellent abilities because it's no longer about theories or about what you or I think but about what it's clearly doing right now to the emotional development of your child. Try to hold the silent opinion that, "you may want to wait and see it something breaks before you fix it, but I see the damage it's doing to my child right now".

This is exactly what I did. I told them (the vice principal was there; this was the teacher's idea) she was very unhappy and was crying about math class. Looking back on it, they didn't really react to that at all. DD herself asked for harder work, but again, nothing.

In the teacher's eyes, DD isn't the best student in the class. She ignored everything I showed her at the beginning of the year and was talking about "mastery," and that DD doesn't get 100% on every test she takes. She never gets less than 80% (often 90%+). I told her that a) >80% consistently says she knows the stuff. I also tried to explain that her mind works very quickly and that she needs harder work that will force her to slow down. She's used to being able to race through most things, and isn't learning how to slow down and think or how to confront a challenging problem. The teacher backed away from the word mastery but nothing else I said seemed to take hold. Everything went back to this stuff about word problems that I just haven't observed, and there seems to be no concept that an 8-year-old could be doing 5th or higher grade math. As I mentioned, it's as though you don't know 4th grade math unless you've done the entire course in their book.

I'm afterschooling her and it's helping, but I'm not happy about wasting her time in math class. This is just wrong. Teaching her is the school's job, after all. I've never understood why this stuff has to be so hard.

You could have her sit the EXPLORE, which presumes 8th-grade-level content, and see what that tells you, opting to share it with the school if the result is good.

DeeDee

Seems like DeeDee's idea is good.

How is the math text's quality? If it's anything like the 4th grade math book my DD is using, the word problems are often really terrible. My DD has zero problems with anything computational, but she gets some word problems wrong. When I look at them, I know why. I don't know what the hell they mean, either. Her text is also heavily reliant on a lot of artificial vocabulary and rules that are slow and frustrating for an inherently mathy kid who can look at the problem and see the answer without doing any of that.