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!)