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.
So, she's well placed (or at least, not placed where she's having to do work she can't deal with, but she makes slips.
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.
But equally, what would be the point of making the teacher do the extra work? The educational motivation for allowing a repeat test, and the justification for the teacher to put the effort into writing and administering it, is surely to give everyone the assurance that the student now understands the material. The "vanity" aspect of allowing the student a higher mark is a different matter entirely, and far harder to use as a justification for using up the teacher's very limited time. I agree that it'd be pointless for your DD to have to restudy the material, but I also think it's unreasonable to expect the teacher to make up another test because of this. Your DD should just accept that she got a low mark because she didn't attend to detail, but she does understand the concepts. The next test on new material will do just as well as a repeat of this one for trying to attend to detail better.
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.
So, the teacher's got a difficult job at the moment. It sounds as though she isn't handling it too well, but we're all human... Can you meet her where she is by presenting her with the problem and a solution at the same time, and maybe doing it in writing rather than by a meeting so she can just say "Great!". My - bossy, feel free to take anything useful and leave the rest! - suggestion would be:
- DD accepts that she'll lose marks for lack of attention to detail
- and doesn't expect the teacher to do extra work to get round that
- but would appreciate clear feedback on why she's losing marks so that she can tell the difference between her ongoing attention issues and conceptual misunderstandings (I'm not clear on whether she's getting clear feedback at the moment, obviously you word this differently, depending).
- You tell the teacher that you're aware that your DD is having trouble avoiding slips, that you're not sure what's behind it, but that you're confident it isn't simple lack of willingness on your DD's part.
- She commits to working on it at home and you commit to helping her. For example, you could set her simple tests at home - a few questions requiring a bit of addition, with answers given in different units that need to be written in, or whatever - the idea being to incorporate practice at noticing whatever she hasn't been noticing, but in a context where that attention to detail is the only hard thing.
- Anything else you can think of. For example, would it help your DD to have a business-card-sized checklist of her common mistakes, e.g. "Have I answered all the questions? Does every question that needs units have the right units?" etc. My DS has one of these to remind him what to do when he gets stuck, and it really seems to help. Maybe the teacher would be agreeable to allowing your DD (or, anyone who wanted one) to have one in front of her when she does tests? You could offer to provide a stack...
I'm also not meaning in any way to dissuade you from anything you're doing to seek a diagnosis if one is applicable.
