Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments New issue with careless math errors

I agree with Val and think this is Normal.

My ds12 is in Honors Algebra I. He has struggled a bit with silly mistakes but is getting much better. It seemed half of his mistakes was an absent or misplaced negatives. Other mistake were very simple calculations also. He gets plenty/a lot of homework but struggles sometimes with doing only what is assigned and not reviewing on his own. Again, recently he is doing much better and out of the blue his hand writing is much better and organized which is probably helping.

I would like to add that for some people, this kind of thing seems VERY much to be an executive issue-- which means that those people simply need to learn to write MORE of their work out, and check it more meticulously, than those whose executive function develops earlier.

I was not one of those people, incidentally, but DH and DD both are.

DH made far, far fewer of these mistakes when a graduate student (he was older), and DD makes a ton of them and always has. It's greatly exacerbated by her acceleration, which places those executive demands under significantly higher load than "age appropriate" if that makes sense.

This is one of those quirky results, IMO.

This topic came up last night when I was talking to my daughter. She told me that when she has do a problem that's new and different, "everything just gets muddled up," and "it's like there's an oak tree and a redwood tree and a maple tree and apple tree, but all I can see is TREES." I think she was trying to say that she can't see the individual trees for the forest.

One particular one that I see which seems so...fixable is that her tiny handwriting is not "straight" and numbers end up drifting around such that she adds carried digits to the wrong columns or whatever. This is in addition to your classic 7/1/4 mix-ups due to messy/tiny numbers. This math teacher had them using graph paper for scratch work at the beginning of the year, for just this reason. Wonder if I should see if she wants to use it for tests....

When given the choice, DS also tends to solve a lot of problems, even many difficult AMC ones in his head. I have suggested to him that he at least jot down some basics to save time if he intends to go back and check. That logic has persuaded him to at least try to jot down some stuff more often that he otherwise would. Regarding illegible writing, DS is notorious in that regard, but has improved a bit;it has helped when I pushed him to not "conserve" paper - instead of using tiny patches of white space on the test page or scrap paper, I encouraged him to grab a new sheet of scrap paper.

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Yes!! She wants to save paper!! I told her that though we do encourage that ethos, it is really ALL RIGHT to use an extra sheet of scrap paper on her math test!

I should note that I do not see DD as a highly math-talented child. She is surely honors math, but not an AMC type of kid. What I want is for her to attain the kind of math skill and competence she needs to reach other goals, which could certainly include a science career (she is passionate about science). IOW, I do not plan to force her into BC calculus at 14 or whatever (I am exaggerating a bit, but our district offers many advanced math tracks), BUT I would really hate for her to get off course or to start thinking she is incompetent. Right now, she is kind of frustrated, and next year she will ramp up into a truly advanced program.

Actually, I think every GT level math kid by 6th grade should try AMC type problems although not necessarily in the stressful rush of a competition setting. DD, who is not mathy, has been doing the AMC 8 competition since 4th grade. She scores above average, just not enough for any award levels, but that is not the point. I push her to do it for the reasons you stated and because I find the level of math practice in her classrooms insufficient. While there are plenty of word problems and the occasional non-routine problem in her curriculum, I don't think that she is getting enough exposure to develop real problem-solving skills.

Funny you mention the issue with saving paper. My son is terrible about it and tries to fill in every small space before he is finished with it. I am a big reduce, reuse, recycler but I push him to use as much paper as he needs for his math problems...