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.)
