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.
