Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Woe is DD

I need some WWYD.

DD10 had a full grade skip past 2nd, and will be going into 6th (first year of middle school) in 3.5 weeks.

In 3rd, she was fine. In 4th, she was bored, and tested the next summer for an additional math acceleration. She took the test with no prep, said it was really hard and she had to guess a lot, and missed the cutoff by a single question (88% vs 90%). Elementary principal would have been supportive of doing the acceleration anyhow, but said they'd accommodate her in the regular 5th grade classroom as an alternative. (The acceleration would have meant taking math at a different school site.) So we left her in 5th, and the accommodations were essentially nonexistent, because when the teacher honestly believes they are doing their best to give your child what she needs but isn't actually succeeding at giving your child what she needs, that's a hard situation to fix.

So DD wanted to test this summer to get 7th grade math, and spent 3 weeks (due to pre-scheduled vacation and a testing policy change, that was all the time available) intensively studying the 6th grade material, using a combination of ALEKS, the 6th grade text previously used by the district, and the released test items published by the district. She took the test, and said it was really easy, and that they asked her nothing that was anywhere near as hard as what she'd been studying. Same 90% cutoff applies.

Results came in today - she got an 84%.

School default is to leave her in 6th grade math. I *believe* we can request a placement into 7th grade math, but the principal and counselors who could make that easier or harder are complete unknowns to us. My understanding is that you keep appealing up the chain of command until someone says yes or the school board says no. In my experience dealing with the district, the local school site people are the most flexible, and the higher you go, the more bureaucratic it gets. The state board of education has indicated that our district is not in compliance with state law regarding the test administration, so requesting a re-test is something we may be able to get outside pressure for. I'd like to see her test document to know what the issues were, but have no idea whether that's a possibility.

DD is not a particularly fast worker - she picks up the concepts quickly, but when faced with a sheet of 30+ problems, even if they are trivial, will take forever to get them done and have nothing left for more engaging work. She does not have the mental energy for academic afterschooling because of that.

So, if you were in our situation, WWYD?

Frustrating that she somehow lost 16% while finding it easy - I have to wonder about marking error, and would certainly want to see the paper. In the UK this would be my right; no idea about there.

I'd push, personally. It would not be good for her to have another year of boring maths. I think I'd push on the basis of first trying to get them to accelerate her anyway, and only offering to have her retest if it seemed to be necessary to get agreement.

This is more of a what-we-have-done instead of what-would-you-do. We had a situation where DD's score on a test was completely out of whack with expectations, and in discussing it at home, it was clear that we were just guessing, and the only way to find the right course for advocating was to get that test.

In our case, we found a section of the test that really didn't belong (wrong grade level), and some simple questions our DD had rushed through (opposite test-taking personality of yours), which could be cleared up through some coaching on test-taking strategies.

I'll have to remember that - I have one of those!

I agree that you should try to get the test and find out what the issue was -- it's probably something perfectly simple and ridiculous.

Since you don't know the people involved, your best strategy is to "act as if" -- just go in like you assume what you want is perfectly doable and there's no reason they shouldn't allow it. Assume they are reasonable people who will be quite happy to help. It may already be true, or your attitude may help it to come true, and if it's not, you'll find out soon enough either way.

I agree with mon, and would also contact the new school to request the acceleration. First, I'd try to get a copy of the test if at all possible, plus I'd put together a few other things:

1) Is her past work in math (in school) stellar? As on report cards and tests? If so, this is good evidence to have with you when you talk to the school.

2) Do you think last year's teacher would give her a recommendation for the acceleration? If so, I don't think you need to actually *get* anything from the teacher (which you most likely can't now anyway since it's summer), but I'd mention that when talking to the new school.

3) Did you keep any records from the work she did this summer in Aleks? If she completed the full (whichever) course in 3 weeks, that's good evidence that she learns math quickly without repetition. Do you still have the Aleks subscription? If you do, you could make custom quizzes for her to take to show mastery, as well as printing off the report that shows course module mastery vs your state's curriculum standards. Also keep any types of other work she did this summer that show what she knows.

What type of math course is she actually enrolled in this coming year? I only ask that question because middle school is where our school district starts tracking kids - so that there are actually two different levels of "6th grade math", one of which leads to Calculus during high school. If your dd is on that track already, it's possible middle school math might be much less boring than what she had in elementary school - particularly if she's finally being taught by an actual math teacher as opposed to a general ed teacher.

Last thought - is there a way to get your dd's voice into this? Have her write up a request with the reasons she wants to accelerate etc? I'm not sure how I'd do it but fwiw, once we hit middle school here, the teachers et al wanted to hear from the students more than the parents re what the students wanted.

Good luck advocating for your dd!

polarbear

I caught more flies with honey!

I put on my fancy dress-up clothes this morning (not the grubby shorts and T-shirt I'd normally have been wearing), went down to the administrative offices, and made nice. "Could you possibly do me a favor?" "Oh, anything you can do to help would be great!"

I did not get to see the test. What I did get was how many problems she missed in each category, and a retest date for Thursday the 8th.

Half of the problems she missed were story problems / word problems. Bing, the light goes on over both parents' heads - yes, we have both seen that DD has enormous difficulty translating English to Math. She missed two in measurement (she also has enormous difficulty coming up with "which of these measurements is reasonable," both in English and metric measurements). The other two were one-offs - no amount of prepping will eliminate one-offs for her.

So the issue is not that she can't do the computation - it's that she can't determine what computation to do. (Judging by the released sample tests, it's possible she missed *all* the word problems.) Had she gotten 3 of the 4 word problems right, she'd have had a passing score.

That's either amenable to remediation - and we have time to remediate - or it's a brain development thing - in which case, she needs the extra year in which she'll learn no new concepts so that her brain can develop. If it can be remediated (and DD wants to unlearn and relearn), she should be able to pass the retest. If it can't, she won't. But in either case, the retest results are likely to be a reliable indicator of whether she ought to be accelerated, so no school battle involved.

Whew!

(We knew going in that word problems were an issue, and gave her a method to check her problem setup for reasonableness, by substituting numbers where the answer would be obvious, then applying the same operations and seeing if she got the right answer. By the unusual-for-her speed she dashed through the actual test, she said, "oh, this is all easy" and made no effort to check for reasonableness. She is not a kid who likes to check her work.)

Excellent! Do you have suitable materials for remediation? ALEKS is not good for word problems, because it has so few (with "substitute different numbers" being how it then generates questions - and it doesn't help that some of the number sets then end up being pretty weird, which doesn't encourage reasonableness checking).

I do always twitch, of course, when people's children have trouble with word problems, because I find it hard to imagine how someone can "really" understand the maths and yet not be able to do them: trouble with word problems does seem to me like a big red flag. But there are problems that can come from the artificiality of the situation, I know. Do you know what the core issue is for her? E.g., does she expect (from previous experience) the answers to be nice numbers, and so do the operation that makes the answer come out as a nice number, regardless of whether it's the right one? Or does she have problems with understanding the situation (i.e. even before you get to the maths) or what? Different kinds of remediation might be necessary, depending what the issue is.

Incidentally two of the things that have struck me about the AOPS geometry course (which, btw, is completely devoid of "word problems" - all pure geometry) relate to nice numbers. On the one hand, it doesn't have them - it's quite happy for an answer to come out as 29/60 and I have to check my urge to think "surely there's a mistake and it must really be 1/2". On the other hand, it does - I was tripped up on two early problems, in each of which the problem was soluble just because of particular properties of the numbers in it (e.g., they "happened" to lead to an isosceles triangle appearing somewhere); I had assumed the problem would be parametric in the numbers, i.e., that I should look for a general method into which to plug the given numbers, which wasn't the right strategy at all.

She is not a kid who likes to check her work.

Pretty sure that the hypothetical children who DO like to do so probably ought to be watched closely for development of future OCD. Other children all seem to share a similar aversion to this activity, from what I've seen.


One possible 'cure' in children who are fairly amenable to remediation (some are more stubborn than others... not that I know anything about stubborn children or anything... HA); make the sample problems hard enough that they get MOST of them wrong if they skip that step.

Then keep feeding them problems until they get frustrated by the lack of success... and gently offer to 'help' and demonstrate CHECKING your own work.

Another strategy is to get the answer wrong yourself, and offer to let your child "find" your mistakes. DD really got good at checking her own work once I implemented that strategy.

I don't find it surprising at all. Math is basically a whole other language, which expresses relationships. Learning the language comes naturally to some. Translating it back and forth into English, not so much.

I expect the same mental roadblock is what causes so many to struggle with algebra.

I like HK's comments, and will also add:

- you're already phrasing it as "reasonableness check" (rather than just as "check your work") which I think is a win; it's usually more effective to do something *different* from just rerunning the process which is what often seems to be meant by "check". Easy numbers to rerun the process on is one idea. Another might be: by adjusting the numbers, come up with something that's definitely too big and something definitely too small to be the right answer. (e.g. if the problem is to find 17.5% of 420, well, that's got to be bigger than 10% of 420 which is 42, and smaller than 20% of it which is 84). Check that the actual answer you get is between the two.

- If you think she'd be up for it, how about some dimensional analysis? (One of those things I think should be introduced, ooh, about 10 years earlier in the educational process than it typically is.) E.g., if you're asked to find out how long something takes in s from data that includes a distance in km and a speed in km/h, multiplying the distance by the time is not reasonable because the resulting units would be km^2/h which is not a measure of time, while dividing the distance by the speed is reasonable because the resulting unit is km/ (km/h) = h which is a unit of time.

(One of DS's commonest problems, btw, would be to write down the answer in hours instead of the requested seconds - back to point 1!)

I really like HK's advice here - I think I'm going to use it on my own kiddos

I also wonder - what's your best guesstimate re where your dd's ultimate passions in life fall - do you think she's destined for math/sciences, or is she more into other things? If she's not really that into math/science, and is having a tougher time with the word problems than with the calculations, I'd be tempted to leave her in the level of math she's at and not push it. I'd wonder just a tiny bit if part of the "boring" things she's encountering in her math classes are having to deal with the challenge of translating word problems. I'm probably a bit biased in this respect as a mathematician/scientist, but I'd take the difficulty with word problems as a caution that she's perhaps not fully ready for an acceleration and wouldn't see it as something to be quickly remediated in two weeks.

I'm really happy that the school was willing to listen to you! Good luck to your dd

polarbear

I seriously :heart: dimensional analysis. Most kids don't see the point in it when it is first introduced... because by that time, they already (mostly) have some facility in dealing with "word" (applied) problems successfully, and secondly because the problems quite simply aren't sufficiently complex as to require that particular tool.

On the other hand, I'm a big believer in training them early. Which is where Henrietta the Dinner-Party Diva (a sort of Avian Martha Stewart, if you will) and her cockroach appetizers came into things for my (then)8yo DD.

We also worked problems on the basis of determining the "proper" number of Sousaphones in a a band that intended a faithful rendition of "76 Trombones," assuming that there is such a thing.

Silly helps a lot when it comes to initially working "word" problems. They don't have to be boring. Or simple.

Another simple activity that uses fractions and conversion ratios (ultimately the basis of dimensional analysis) is cooking. Scale a recipe with a kid, and they learn an awful lot about working a word problem, and with a lot less angst than usual, particularly if the end products is... er... cookies.

"Uh oh. I don't think we HAVE that much oatmeal. That's probably a good thing, though, since I think we'd be pretty sick if we eat ate two dozen cookies. Do you think we could figure out a way to only make half that many?"

Yes, indeed! That would be me.

I, also, have a twitch about not understanding word problems -- they were like icing on the cake to me. The part you save for last because it's the most fun.

But then DS came along, and I discovered that a basic understanding of the world really helps. Or, more accurately, a lack of understanding of the world really hurts. He was having a dreadful time with one, a couple of years ago, about a relay race, and we went over and over it until finally the lightbulb came on and I realized that he didn't know how a relay race worked. Once I drew him a picture, explained that this person runs around, and their lap takes this much time, then the next person runs around, and their lap takes this much time but we also add that to the first person's time for the total, and so on, there was no problem!

I find it hard to believe that most people's trouble with word problems comes from a lack of world understanding, but for some of our quirky ones, it could, indeed!

I'm going off now to find out what dimensional analysis is....

It's really nothing fancy enough to deserve the fancy name... If you happen to know what type checking is, it's almost exactly that. (Not quite, but that would be OT!)

Right-- it's basically just conversion factors which are composed of equivalencies like "1 in = 2.54 cm" only written as convenient FRACTIONS in order to convert units and quantities all at once.

Basically,

.25 in X (2.54 cm/ 1 in) = ____ in (because a quantity which appears in both numerator and denominator is able to be canceled as it is always equal to "one" or some similar logic)

the same factor would be flipped the other side up (that is 1in/2.54 cm) if one were using it to convert centimeters to inches.

The real magic, of course, is when you use a long string of them-- which is what I did with the Henrietta-the-Chicken problem for my DD.

I am trying to get my son to work through Primary Math Challenge and Math Challenge by Edward Zaccaro but he is busy reading books this summer.

Out of town, so replying by tablet, so no quotes.

Yes, "can't do word problems" is an enormous red flag to us, too - to the extent that we'd rather she not accelerate without a real improvement. A year of time will fix it if it's a developmental issue, but I'm not sure it's developmental. (You might remember she had an issue with "can't organize her writing, or summarize written material," where I was pretty sure she was behind agemates, not just grademates.)

My concern is that school isn't going to fix it if it's not developmental. She thinks she understands, so ignores the teacher's explanations. She follows patterns and compensates well enough to get good grades without using much effort or attention. And then when the task is complex enough (or lacking in context, like this testing, but no other school stuff), she has no idea where to begin, so takes a random guess.

I think what she needs is:
- to acknowledge that she has a deficit needing remediation (which she's previously been totally closed to)
- basic decoding skills: is means equals, of means times, into means divide, that kind of thing
- willingness to check for reasonableness until she's consistently setting the problems up right
- willingness to slow down and read carefully, rather than skimming and guessing

We don't have good resources for practice problems, so are open to suggestions. I do not think that her future career path is in math (I'd guess humanities, but the quantitative end of the humanities) - but she's currently interested in math-heavy careers. She's better at math than I was at the same age/grade, and most people think of me as being pretty good at math, but I'm the person good at using formulas without any particular grasp of what's behind the formula.

We're open to math acceleration because it has some hope of challenging her in school with her as a cooperative participant - her life experience is insufficient to speed ahead in literature, history isn't amenable to acceleration (and she's uninterested in heavier workload beyond reading interesting books), and she's disliked science as taught in elementary. We hope that orchestra will keep her challenged, to, but that will be new this coming year. (Basically, we're accelerating a relative weakness for lack of a way to meaningfully accelerate a relative strength. That's true for both math and music - she looks strong because she's smart, not because she's talented. And she's happy, because she gets to work, not just coast.)

People speak well of the Singapore Challenging Word Problems, but I guess online is more useful at this stage. Googling
word problems 6th grade
gives enough to keep you going, probably, but I might just make them up.

Actually, getting *her* to try making some up might be as helpful as anything. Let her see it from the other side... I bet that'd be more useful than mechanical decoding, actually. Get her writing some (eg, give her a list of sums and have her wrap each one up in a wp) and then discuss what words turn up corresponding to the operations in her versions.

ETA Even better, have her write some for you, then you do them in front of her. Discuss any ambiguities, edit the wording to remove them...

Oh, wow, that's an awesome idea. Thanks!

I like Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zaccaro and then the next one is Challenge Math.

This one looks good too...Becoming a Problem Solving Genius: A Handbook of Math Strategies by Edward Zaccaro

While I was out of town, I left DD a division problem to convert to words, and she was not successful - every word problem she wrote was a multiplication problem.

When I got back, I gave her a sheet of paper with "Write the equation you need to solve the problem. A full set of blocks has 100 pieces. How many blocks does Alex have if she has" across the top, and a list in the form "x sets" down the side. She filled it in in no time at all. When x was a whole number or decimal, she correctly wrote a multiplication problem. When x was a fraction or percent, she wrote a division problem. Oh, dear, not good. And completely consistent with our observation that she was almost always fine with whole numbers and almost always wrong with fractions.

So I talked at her for a long time, while she sat with her fingers in her ears. "I'm bored!" "Nope, you're frustrated. Bored is when you already know the answer, not when you don't know it and really wish you did."

Finally, I said, "If this were a multiplication problem, do you have the two factors, or one factor and the product?" And she could answer that question for every problem I threw at her. And knowing the answer to that question, she could correctly identify whether the word problem called for multiplication or division, and could set the division problem up in the right order. Every single time, without hesitation.

OMG. That is not a gap that would have been remediated in the classroom. Time might have resolved it, but I don't think time alone would have been sufficient. I had a similar mental block years ago in my professional life, where I always arrived at the right answer in my workpapers, but wrote up the entry that changed the official records backwards. And I did that for years (like 10 years - long past the time my work was being reviewed routinely), making the change, checking the results, and reversing everything because it was backwards. Then one day I suddenly realized how the workpapers related to the change entries, and I never made that mistake again.

Kid-who-learns-by-epiphany is hard to teach. (And as an adult who learns by epiphany, I can attest that it is a frustrating way to learn, too, when the epiphany does not come quickly.)

Alexsmom, you have just described both dd and myself exactly. I took me until my 30s to understand this because I just thought (and I think teachers did too) that when this happened I was reaching the limits of my capabilities. It was extremely limiting. Once I realised it opened up a whole new world.

I see the same in dd. She has a FSIQ of >145 and if sit with her while she's stuck I can usually figure out the block eventually. But it's very time intensive and I only get there in the time I do because I know her well. It makes it extremely difficult in advocacy - she's skipped and in all the top groups in class, but because she gets blocked her teachers think she's reached her limit and seem to have the approach "skipped, top of the class - this is her limit and it's very much good enough". But once she's passed the block she can understand an entire concept without further instruction and it's there, locked in - but of course it'll be repeated at increasing levels of difficulty for years (elementary school). And her teachers only see that she was blocked so therefore she might know it now, but she didn't and so needs the repetition It's happened again and again. Sorry - OT - just excited to hear the 'learns by epiphany thing described by someone else!!

Yep, and then you look like the pushy parent of the kid who's very smart - but not quite as smart as mom thinks.

DD's other parent is a much better teacher of math than I am, and generally a better teacher of DD (because DD and I are similar enough we butt heads). But when it comes to a block, I'm the one who needs to identify and resolve it, because DD goes wrong in such unusual ways that the similarity between us becomes a help, rather than a hindrance.

I've heard of classrooms with "fraction means divide!" as a mantra - wonder whether that might be the root of this mistake? Glad it's sorted, anyway!

Learning by epiphany, blocks - does this indicate too great a tolerance for not understanding the first time a mistake is made?

I have too low a tolerance for not understanding, which (used to) get(s) me into trouble in situations where a lot of information is dumped on me at once too fast to understand it. I had trouble with my first hard university maths lectures, because I'd get stuck at the first line I didn't understand and get nothing from the rest of the lecture. These days, I have a special mode I go into in seminars after the point of nonunderstanding, that lets me still get something, but it was hard to develop. But on the plus side, it means I rarely make the same mistake twice in technical matters, so your workpapers/change entries example is strange to me: I can't quite imagine having let the first instance go before having understood what was going on enough to never make that mistake again.

There must be a happy medium somewhere. Maybe a chat about a mistake being a sign of a learning opportunity, which should be taken full advantage of, is in order?

Related, come to think of it: DS was getting frustrated early in the AoPS geometry course with repeatedly not being able to see immediately what to do. I encouraged him to make a list of useful techniques (assign variables to things of interest; angle chase; find similar triangles; drop a perpendicular, etc.). Now he (mentally or actually) consults the list as needed, and after each problem that he finds hard I encourage him to consider why it was hard; does something need to be added to the list, or were the right techniques there but hard to pick out?

Oh, this is SO my DD and I... and sometimes, my DH.

Unfortunately (or is it fortunate?); she is a blend of both parents, but has my "learn by epiphany" thing in spades.

It's so aggravating. You reach a point where you aren't even sure that instruction and instructional materials ARE effective. At all.

It's frequently nothing-nothing-nothing-nothing- BANG... mastery.

It's been a real challenge to teach her things like "the writing process" and note-taking skills. They just aren't in her native lexicon as a learner, if that makes sense.

(I mention this in case you were wanting a preview into middle school and beyond.)

I suspect it did arise either in "fraction means divide" or in "to divide by a fraction, you multiply by the reciprocal." I originally thought the entire issue was that she was doing too much of the setup in her head, and confusing the original fraction with the reciprocal.

I think it's not a tolerance for not understanding. Erroneous belief that you are understanding, maybe, followed by a complete lack of insight into why that understanding was not producing the desired results.

DD as a preschooler was desperate to read, and begged me to use the "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" book. She got stuck on blending (an early step that the authors saw as so easy that they had no suggestions for what to do when your kid could not do it, which suggestions they did have for common sticking points), and no amount of effort on either of our parts would unstick her. So we gave up, and a few months later, with no effort at all, she could suddenly read anything.

She was the same way with walking - there was no incremental improvement, just bang, one day she stood up and walked without ever falling. Same with talking - she talked so little that she looked way behind, then suddenly she was way ahead.

From my own perspective, I completely thought I understood. I could have repeated back verbatim the usual explanation given in school for how to set the entries up. I'd carefully review it before I created an entry, look at each aspect and compare it to the rules, set up the entry, double-check against the rules. Everything looked right to me. And it was wrong every single time. I even thought about just reversing the entries I thought were right up front, rather than confirming they were wrong first, but I was reluctant to do that because I was sure I was right this time! (In my case, I think I was thrown off by the classroom mantra that "credit doesn't mean negative." As it happens, in my workpapers negatives are always credits, which makes setting up the entries trivial.)

OMG, "the writing process." We had that last year, with the fifth grade writing test. DD was staring at a blank piece of paper while everyone else happily wrote, during practice sessions in school. When I was studying for licensing exams, I tried doing practice essays, and not only did I spend most of my time starting blankly, but the auto-grader was giving me falling scores on the ones I was able to write. And I had no issues on the actual test, and got a high score. DD represented that she had no trouble writing on the actual test, but we won't have her scores until September or so.

I'm holding out hope that she won't have AP classes where notes are turned in for a grade. I've still never mastered the at of taking lecture notes. I tried for a while in college, because that was what you were supposed to do, but never managed to capture anything that was worth reviewing. If I could write something meaningful down, I already understood it, and if I didn't understand it, whatever I wrote down was worthless. As an adult, my notes from continuing education lectures are limited to "affects Client X," "this is incorrect," and "look this up." I'll take notes on reading if the concepts are too complex, or too fragmented, for me to understand by slow and diligent reading. But for straightforward material, it's already all right there - why waste time producing a less-useful version of it?

Alexsmom you have exactly described my relationship to note taking. Except that I now have a health problem that effects my memory, so it's no longer necessarily true that I will remember what I understand - but I still can't take notes....

How did it go, do you think?

The retest uses exactly the same test as the original - apparently, the school possesses exactly one official test for each subject / grade combination.

Having been overconfident following the first administration, DD was understandably underconfident following the retest. They again scored her test (but did not tell her or us the results!) before she left, and she said she saw a -2 at the bottom of one of the pages, which she interpreted as two wrong on that page but I think may just as likely have been one wrong for two points off.

Assuming that she again missed the non-word-problem stuff she didn't know the first time around, and made the same number of careless errors, and made no more than one careless error on the 4 word problems she'd misunderstood originally, she passed. That's a smaller assumption than if they'd had a second version of the test, but still an uncomfortably large assumption.

On the plus side, schedule pickup is next Thursday, so we have to know the results before then.

OMFG. 88.

Schedule pickup is tomorrow, so I may be able to talk to the counselors at the school and see if we can work something out, but I hate being at the mercy of strangers. And being That Mom.

Oh dear - that could hardly be more awkward, could it? Good luck tomorrow.

Yes, indeedy.

Tomorrow I anticipate picking up the schedule, then having to ask:
1) DD would like her school records to be changed to Last Name 2. Why? Because her full name is so long that her teachers for the last two years have wrongly called her by Last Name 1, and she would rather be Last Name 2 than fight that fight with six different adults. Plus she self-identifies with the ethnicity associated with 2, rather than with 1.

2) DD would like to be placed in second year Orchestra, not first year Orchestra. We know the teacher had to hear her and determine the placement, and we're fine with that (fingers crossed that the teacher is a "let them rise to the challenge"person, not a "make sure they have a solid foundation" person). Is that process likely to happen before school starts, or is her whole schedule going to be redone in the first week of school so she'll end up with entirely different classes / teachers and coming in today was a total waste of time?

3) My kid who has not made the cut for a subject acceleration two years and three tests in a row really needs a subject acceleration. Any chance we could get one?


Man, I am going to need to do my best impersonation of a competent adult. I ought to put on grown-up clothes and everything.

Ouch.

Well, you can let your inner tantrumming child come to my house for a play date.

Good luck!

So how did it go today?

I can HEAR the eyes rolling as you walk out the door.

Seriously! I can hear the eyes rolling and I haven't even walked in the door.

Haven't gone yet, because I'm sitting at the imaging center, waiting for my wife to be MRI'd as a follow-up to Tuesday's CT as a follow-up to Saturday's office visit. No one has told us anything, but from the paperwork, we think the CT was triggered by something unrelated to the main point of the office visit, and the MRI was triggered by something unrelated to what they were doing the CT for, and the upshot is likely to be "you paid $1,500 to clear up an asymptomatic UTI and to learn that if you take enough pictures of a healthy body, you're going to see normal variation."

OOOo. Yeah, been there once with my spouse. Led to several neurology consults and a very scary visit to a brain surgeon in a neighboring large city before we finally got told "Look, I can't say FOR SURE that this isn't going to kill you, but here's what I think about this..."

Of course, it's a great way to take one's mind off of school advocacy struggle for a bit. Just not as much fun as pina coladas on a beach somewhere.

0 for 3. Alas. And yes, plenty of eye roll.

1.) "We'd need a court ordered change of birth certificate to do that." On the plus side, the very nice counseling secretary copied DD's schedule, wrote the preferred name at the top, and said she'd email all her teachers to let them know. So that one was a win for practical purposes.

2.) "We actually have a lot of kids with prior experience in into Orchestra." They also have a well-defined process for working ahead, and changing would require a total rework of the schedule. Plus some horror story of kid with years of experience who could not play as part of an ensemble. I'm actually okay with this one, because DD needs ensemble experience. Would have asked for the change if we needed to rework for #3. Time will tell whether this is a win, but I'm not going to assume it was a total loss.

3.) An extremely polite and not-quite-sufficiently veiled "I'm sorry your kid isn't as smart as you'd like her to be." This from the principal, after the counselor said it was above her pay grade.

4.) I had a chance to ask the bus people (not the same as the school people) why DD's bus schedule appears to involve nearly 2.5 hours on the bus each day. "Oh, no, that would be against the law." Further investigation reveals that she actually has a 46 minute ride in the morning, and gets to school 25 minutes before school starts. She has a 50 minute ride in the afternoon, preceded by a 35 minute wait in the hallway.

On the plus side, DD's BFF was just leaving as we arrived, and we snagged her from her parents and made her hang with us. The girls roamed the school independently while I went around with my hat in hand.

I think I'd have been rolling my eyes about point four, as well.

I'm pretty sure that it wasn't you rolling your eyes, and that it was at points one, two, and most particularly three, but I'm glad that it wasn't a total loss, even if you didn't get what you went for. At least you didn't get the dubious pleasure of doing it all with your DD looking on.

Sigh, most especially re 3. Here's hoping it works better than last year, anyway. It may - so much depends on the teacher.