"Teachers often misinterpret the student's difficulties with the instructional strategies as inability to learn the concepts and assume that the student needs more drill to grasp the material. Rote memorization and drill are actually damaging for visual-spatial learners, since they emphasize the students' weaknesses instead of their strengths. When this happens, the student gets caught up in a spiraling web of failure, assumes he is stupid, loses all motivation, and hates school. Teachers then assume that the student doesn't care or is being lazy, and behavior problems come to the fore. Meanwhile, the whole cycle creates a very deep chasm in the student's self-esteem.
Before my son started kindergarten he was doing two-digit subtraction using negative numbers, a method he came up with and preferred because it was easier for him to do mentally. Since he has dysgraphia I understood why he wanted to do as much mentally as possible. For something like 25-7 he would have said 5-7 is a negative two and negative two and twenty is 18. My husband and I told the two kindergarten teachers at the school about his different way of doing math and I got the feeling it was a problem. They seemed to think their job was to make sure my son did things the way they were taught at their school and only that way was allowed. I am glad my husband was with me because he saw for himself that this school was not going to work for our son but we let him try kindergarten anyway since it was just half day. This was before the teacher suggested holding him back in a transitional first grade so he could learn to color in the lines better and that it was okay because he didn't really need to learn anything else the next year.
My son can't stand to watch math videos. He says they are too slow. He wants to quickly read how something is done, see a few good examples, do it and get it over with so he can read something or do something more interesting to him.
For example,he had to learn scientific notation which is on IXL. IXL is for practice only and he had to learn it first. I tried to get him to watch math videos and he just couldn't do it because they were so slow. I ended up getting an old college introductory algebra book from my hoarder closet and he quickly read about it, looked at the examples and went to work. He could do the problems on IXL faster than I could.
Another thing he can't stand is doing a lot of the same kind of problem which is why we like IXL because he can work on one thing and switch to something else when he gets tired of it. He usually gets tired after 5 or 6 of the same kind of problem and he has to switch because he sometimes starts making mistakes after that. Switching to something else usually solves this problem.
