Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Please share your perspective on SET

Note: If you are not familiar with SET, please see:
www.cty.jhu.edu/set

Val mentioned in another forum that SET is for children who are lightning fast. I guess this is why I picked up on SET, because my dc are lightning fast (unlike me), so much so that it is difficult to have a conversation with them about academics. They CAN'T seem to break things down into simple steps and have been getting a lot of flack from various teachers for that. I think it's that their mind makes such huge jumps that they literally can't figure out why the rest of us don't get it. I'm looking for a resource that can help us deal with the issues such as this, that arise when you are lightning fast.

Maybe it doesn't seem that this would be a serious issue, but it really is because it leads teachers to the wrong conclusions, and makes my dc feel like there is something so wrong with them because no one else (not even mom or dad) can understand them (sometimes).

For example, my dd was lucky to be in a school where they offer a challenge HW/test level in every classroom. She has to listen to the same lectures as the rest of the class, but then skip the usual homework assignment and quickly go off to the side to work on challenging problems (which are still not that difficult for her) with other students like her. However, the teacher continuously says she is not showing enough of her work and so he will not sign her off as having mastered the goals. If it continues, the teacher is supposed to make her go back to doing the usual homework assignments.

So, she is too far advanced for the teacher to even recognize, so he doesn't know how to coach her to write down more of her steps. IMO, it is not a good idea to make her write down more steps. She could grow up to write a graduate math textbook. Flip through one of those--there are hardly any explanations there because they assume by that stage the reader can fill in on their own.

I am hoping qualifying for SET will give us a resource to help dd navigate an educational system that just doesn't "get" her. I think she'll be ready to make her first attempt on the SAT to get the required minimum score of 700 in a couple of months. But I'd rather not do it if I don't have to.

What do you think? Am I on the right track? Should I be looking elsewhere?

You might want to be careful about how long you avoid requiring your daughter to show her work.

Our son used computer-based independent study (EPGY & ALEKS) for math from 4th through 7th (pre-algebra), and so other than fruitless prodding from me, he was never asked to show his work. As many parents here undoubtedly experience, he didn't *need* to show his work to get correct answers. And for those rare instances when he did add some scribbling, he was usually incorporating multiple steps into one line.

His first formal classroom instruction was when he took Algebra I as an 8th grader. And guess who demanded that students show all the steps! Although he could still do *most* of the work in his head, his reliance on brute force for the multi-step problems just wasn't cutting it. Unfortunately, he did not have the necessary discipline and so was plagued with careless errors.

Like your daughter, my son is lightning fast (99.8% Processing Speed on WISC). Anything that requires him to slow down (e.g. showing all that stinking work) really frustrates him. After a lower-than-expected score on the CTY SCAT and later the SAT, he clearly needed to force himself to slow down and neatly show his work so that he could reduce the careless errors. (I received some great suggestions and support back in February:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/148869/1.html)

I am totally on board with his teacher's demand that he show all the steps. More than once, he's missed out on partial credit when he provided a wrong answer and failed to show the steps he used (which were usually correct).

Additionally, just five minutes thumbing through a college calculus book let my son see how ridiculously easy his "hardest" problems are now compared to the typical stuff he'll face in calculus.

Dandy

Hmm. IMO, this is a serious weakness in mathematics textbooks (and is a reason for why there's a huge market for books with "For Dummies" or "Idiot's Guide" in the titles). A lot of textbooks fail to teach because they don't explain stuff properly.

I agree with Dandy. It's very important to be able to prove how you arrived at a conclusion. This is an important way to convince other people that you're right, after all. It's a skill like any other and it helps to develop ordered thinking for those times when you can't just intuit the answer.

I also understand the frustration of feeling like the world moves in slow motion at times. Yet I also know that I'm the one who's different. I need to be aware of that fact and operate so that others can understand me.

Also, I am my son's math teacher. I cajole him about showing his work. It's a long-term lesson. Say he has a moderately complex problem and he does it in his head. If he gets the answer wrong and didn't write out any steps to his solution, I have no way of knowing where he made his mistake(s). Was it a computational error? An error with a fraction? Or did he really not understand what he was supposed to do? When all he wrote was "42," I can't help him understand where he went wrong. Your DD's teacher may feel the same way.

The approach of showing your work carries forward. I'm a scientist. When I do benchwork, I'm obsessive about writing down details in my lab book, including calculations, etc. This way, when something goes wrong, I have lots of information in the lab book to help me understand what happened. As in, "Oh crap; I was supposed to dilute that stuff by a factor of ten and I diluted it by 1000 instead. That explains why I didn't get a reaction."

ETA: your DD may have at least two different challenges here: development of a particular skill and a need to interact with people who also think at warp speed. If she qualifies for the DYS program, it might help with the second need.

Sorry, but I literally LOLed at this. The people who write graduate maths textbooks are (typically) academics, who spend a fair proportion of their time teaching undergraduates. Believe me, they have to be capable of giving very full explanations when occasion demands, too!

I agree with Val; it sounds as though your DD may have two problems - if she's underchallenged, learning to show her work isn't going to help that - but learning to give detailed explanations is important. One thing that has helped my DS with this is a very simple re-presentation: not as "show your work", which seems pointless if his work is securely in his head, but as "explain how you did it", i.e. given enough information that someone who'd looked at the question and didn't understand how to do it could learn from your explanation. This is also useful because it opens conversation about what to assume about your reader; he has to explain at different levels in different circumstances. In a few circumstances he's expected to, for example, show every line of algebraic working as he rearranges a formula ("explain this so that any of your classmates could follow the explanation") while in others that would be completely inappropriate and only key insights need to be explained ("explain so that if you'd read the explanation before you'd really thought about the question, you'd have understood it straight away").

My son joined the SET. They send us Imagine magazine, geared to high school students. Non-SET members can subscribe to it. They also send a newsletter listing new SET members with their pictures and a list of their interests and activities and news about older SET members. When SET started, there was no Internet, and such a newsletter could inform parents and students of new opportunities. Now there are many other places to get information, including this site. So SET is fine as far as it goes, but it has made little difference for my son. A school that knows a 4th-grader (my son) scored 700+ on the math SAT ought to think about how to challenge him. Our school has not. Yesterday evening his homework was simple story problems using fractions. He finishes it in 10 minutes and does not complain (good boy).

Thanks, everyone! Each of you have brought up new ways of looking at things that we've been struggling with for a long time. This has been most helpful!

I am not sure that SET will solve your DC's issues. SET is a recognized honor and can show that your DC is at a certain level of math development. DS' pre-algebra teacher brought up SET at the beginning of the year as something that he can try. DS will probably take the SAT at some point in the next year or two simply because $50 and one morning is not that big of an investment.

You may consider Davidson's DYS program. Davidson provides free consulting services and will even communicate with the school to share the research to assist your advocacy efforts. I do find that ultimately you have to do your own advocacy.

SAT math are mostly algebra and geometry. Pre-algebra might not be enough to get the near-perfect score.