"When does my DD get to learn something?"
And do they frankly answer: "When she is performing at the bottom of the class."
This is precisely what happened recently with two of my kids and the math teacher I described on another thread. Short summary: she's not a good teacher. At all.
My DD9 is globally HG+. My second son is verbally gifted (he's been IQ tested as part of LD screening), but math doesn't come as easily to him as it does to his sibs. I'd say he's above-average-ish at it.
The school places all its sixth graders in pre-algebra. The book is a disaster; it bundles concepts like single-variable equations and inequalities into a single chapter (chapter 2, no less!). Decent algebra I books need three chapters to cover the content in that single chapter. Etc. The book and teacher are so bad, my DS13 who's very talented mathematically would have probably ended up hating math with a C in this class. You can imagine how my other son has been doing.
No one thought that his very poor grades were a problem except for DH and me. Teacher was blaming DS for not trying hard (2 hours a day was apparently not enough). We complained, mentioned his IEP and LD, and they let us pick our own math book for him (Singapore math for grade 6). The teacher, who's so spiral happy, she assigns work from 2-3 different chapters and 1-2 outside worksheets at once (!) agreed to go through the new book in order and follow its methods. In short, they're bending over backwards to help him. Fine. Thank you.
Not so with DD9. If she was capable of doing harder math, she'd be getting A+++s with garlands on her tests instead of mere As, and she would understand that "The sum of m and 9" is
m + 9 and not
9 + m and that writing a sentence explaining how you did each step in a long subtraction problem is a
really good idea. In fact, her resistance to "correcting" "wrong" answers like 0.25 = 1/4 is evidence of her lack of understanding (1/4 = 1/4).
Rant off.
