Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments "Honors students can teach themselves."

If honours students can teach themselves though more advanced students should be able to teach themselves in half the time. Somebody better tell the colleges - imagine the savings they could make!

You should see the kids when I go in her class and she is reading to them. They are completely mesmerized. astonished by this extraordinary train of events-- it's like they NEVER expected her to be so nice, or to actually interact with them in a learning activity like that!"


There. Fixed it for him.

This is almost exactly what my ds was going through in 4th grade last year.
The teacher basically said she hated it but she could only give my son a work sheet and say "here smart kid figure it out yourself". She said this at an EOY meeting that included the likely suspects including the director of curriculum, middle school and high school principals, middle school and high school math teachers and 2 other elementary school principles. you could hear a pin drop.

The bad part is my kid is the one with his hand up every time all the time.

Ugh-ugh-ugh.

"Mom, this wasn't IN the textbook. What do I do now??"

This for the AP statistics course that my child has NO real teacher for.


{sigh} I looked-- she's right, they were NEVER taught this.

Similarly, Precalc (MTH112) she also has NO teacher for. In today's Adventures in Autodidactism, we also have two entries from that class:

A matrix method that they have NEVER been taught appeared in not one, but TWO exam problems in the last unit. Oh-- and a matrix algebra-then-law-of-sines-then-law-of-cosines problem that she needed TWO OTHER textbooks to even UNDERSTAND... which also hasn't been covered in the course materials. Presumably the teacher was supposed to cover this.

DD's contact with the teacher is limited to:

a. Office hours-- "can you work this problem in the class textbook"

b. Can I retake that exam?

The teacher has such poor English communication skills that occasionally item B and item A are confused, an an exam gets "reset" when her question was about something else entirely. (Really-- not kidding. "Did you miss my short answer responses on questions 8 and 9" turned into an exam reset.)



In the second entry, on polar coordinate systems and graphs of functions within the same, one of the answer boxes didn't allow students sufficient number of characters to offer the CORRECT answer. Yes, folks, that's right-- students COULD NOT answer correctly. COULD not.



This is driving me MAD. Seriously, how is anyone expected to learn this way? Nobody who isn't at least HG+ has a CHANCE to do it...

In today's entry, the lesson quiz asked them for something that was not covered in the textbook. Again.

Thank you, Lial and Hornsby, for at least providing authentic coverage of this material. Too bad the example in the actual class-assigned textbook is cut off due to a printing error. (Really, really, REALLY not kidding. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.)

She can't get the online textbook to even load for her, so that isn't a work-around.

Wow, Mom-- I can see why I have the best grade in the class if the online textbook won't even load.

No wonder my daughter doesn't think math is much FUN.


O-kayyyy... her class assessments are doing this BIZARRO thing where they are *not* fully simplifying equations upon conversion from polar to rectangular coordinate systems... so DD now has to remember that FOR THE CLASS, she has to effectively tack on this stupid "complete-the-square" notation step in order to get "the right answers."



Gaaaa.

Lial and Hornsby didn't seem to see any purpose in doing that. LOL. Of course, the examples in L&H were actually *complete*, too, which was helpful.

Good lord. Well, at least it only took an hour for me to figure out the work-around for today's instructional snafu.