Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Learning math computations

That's a good point about documentation. I'm guessing that's the thought behind it. I know he can see whether the kids took the quiz online and how long it took them to complete, but not sure if he can tell if the videos were watched. I suppose just because a kid hits "play" that doesn't mean they are watching. anyway, I'm glad that flipped math can work out well, because it seems like a good idea in theory. It probably depends on how much time the teacher has to help each kid, and whether the child is actually watching the videos and comprehending them.

Ohhh, multiple choice. That's not good, if so. I have a good guesser here also. I would think a lot of our kids are good guessers!

I would assess her yourself, for your own peace of mind. It wouldn't be too hard. I just did a bit of this the other day with my DD because I suspected she didn't really understand a concept but just applied the "take the numbers in this problem and do something with them" approach, and it happened to work. (I was right, too.)

I talked to him (teacher). It sounds like so far it's Algebra and she's not writing out the steps, she's figuring out X in her head. So she's not showing how she is getting X. I had suggested using some kind of app for writing, like modmath but I don't even know if that's possible with Algebra. I think she might have dysgraphia. He says most of these chapter tests are NOT multiple choice, which is good.
He also said that she scored over 50 percent on the test for the grade before this one (7th grade math? Whatever comes before pre-algebra) so he thought it would be a waste of time to have her do that course if she knew most of it already. This made me laugh considering that the district requires kids to score 98 percent percent on tests to skip/accelerate otherwise. Does anyone know if this would be mostly a repeat? Because obviously she's gotta get that 50 percent that she missed from somewhere.

It is impossible to know, because only your teacher knows what material he is going to cover, and sometimes even he might be surprised. Once in the middle of pre-algebra course our district decided that everybody should immediately learn something about geometry. Teachers had to put aside all the previous materials, and use some printouts sent by the district.

Funny, almost everything pure math before algebra is intuitively derivable from other math (and much of algebra is in many ways; and yes (you know who you are) all of math is derivable.) Whether any individual student will make those leaps and connections is guesswork and experimentation for everyone involved. Whether their leaps will be compatible with random entity X's philosophy of math execution is another question.

Personally, I think having a teacher believe in a kid and their capability is well worth letting it ride.

I sat down with her and said "look, if you subtract something you have to actually write it on both sides of the equation, if you multiply, here's how you "show it", etc. I have a feeling this was covered in the previous course and she just had no idea. It certainly wasn't in any of the videos. Combine that with the fact that she hates writing, and everything was worksheets up to this point (as opposed to copying out of a textbook into a notebook) and I can see why she was finding X in her head. I'm a bit concerned about the amount of material that she is missing from previous courses, but one of the teachers made a comment that this is largely a repeat because of the "spiraling". So probably random things like this will come up again--like not knowing how to write things the proper way, because it's assumed the child has been exposed to it before. So far she says everything is easy. If she was getting agitated I'd be more concerned. I'm open to move her down a level though...we'll see how she's doing on the tests.