I have a meeting with the teacher this week to discuss how math is going for dd. I'm looking for advice on how to diplomatically address this issue so that the teacher doesn't immediately get defensive or take it as a personal attack... as I've experienced in the past with teachers. In my opinion this teacher has a very confident, strong personality and I suspect that could be a challenge for me.
My ideas were to bring in some examples of what dd is doing at home in math to prove she is far beyond what she is doing in school. Ideally I think the teacher needs to provide differentiation in the classroom, the strongest math students aren't comparable to the weakest in the class. The students who know these skills shouldn't be forced to sit through the others learning them. I certainly don't want to go in there and basically tell her how I think she should run her class.
In the past, when I took in work samples for math, there was skepticism from the teachers. To them, it looked like I was a tiger mom locking my DS away after school and drilling tons of math and hence the advanced work samples. Because, in their experience, why would anyone ask the child to do more math when they the expert educators were taking care of it in school? In reality, DS was bored out of his mind with math and I bought some interesting math books and let him loose on them.
What worked for us was outside validation - finishing online math courses with accredited institutions with transcripts, enrolling DS in math contests like Math Kangaroo, Trimathlon etc., and taking above grade level Talent Search exams (SCAT, Explore etc.) - and using actual numbers from the score sheets as the basis of requests for acceleration, compacting and differentiation. In our case, seeing the numbers from all the outside evaluation as well as the results of standardized testing helped change the opinions of administrators and "department heads". Good luck.
