As we are continuing to work through this, dd's school situation seems to be getting worse. We do like the GT teacher and she has really tried to make school work for dd, but she is also very frustrated and dd is really stressing about the being part of the source of the teacher's frustration.
Dd had gotten As on all quizes and work thus far this quarter until the unit test came along. She would have had an A- on the test had she not made some attention to detail errors. For instance, forgetting to put "cm" or "cm2" on some units of measure and just putting the numbers without the units dropped her grade down a full 12%. She also misadded one column of numbers coming out with 371 instead of 372. When she then divided that by 4 to get a mean, she did the division correctly (decimals and all) but got the wrong mean b/c the # she was working off of (371) was one off. She really did understand the material and did well aside from these detail errors.
From what dd said, the teacher was angry with her and another child for not getting at least an 85% and told them that she really didn't want to make another test (she usually lets them try a make-up test if they didn't do great) and that they would have to come in during lunch and study a lot to show that they were committed to learning the material if they were going to make her do more work. Dd does know this material. She didn't miss much of anything that related to understanding the material. She made errors that related to attention to detail. Staying in at lunch to study the material isn't going to help with that.
Dd is terribly stressed b/c she feels like the teacher is angry with her and regrets letting her into the GT class. This grade is a very hard group of kids and about 20 of the 90 kids in the grade are in the GT class for reading and/or math. The older, high achievers dominate the needs of this class which makes it hard to not resent the gifted kids who require more work on the teacher's behalf.
I know that I have eaten up a bunch of this teacher's time earlier in the year as well and am afraid that bugging her yet again to discuss dd's anxiety about the situation will only irritate her and make her want dd not to be in her class more.
