Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Hitting a brick wall with algebra

You get a tutor if you can't keep up in your class - before you drop down a level. "Grade level" is a completely arbitrary determination after all. And even if you need a tutor to help you understand the work, you are still making the leap of understanding and eventually doing the work yourself. Your DD is stuck with the curriculumwhich apparently mixes topics oddly and inappropriately just like the teacher is.

People really get tutor's for their non LD kids. Sometimes just to keep grades up in required classes for their normal kids. Particularly if the kid seems to have missed something.

I do agree with you it is a bit 'Hothouse-y' to get one to keep up in a advanced class. Particularly if you feel your daughter would need to always need a math tutor to keep up to the advanced level. At one talk by my school district they warned parents that if kids always needed a tutor for the advanced classes they weren't in the right placement.

But your daughter is already IN this class. She gets some of it but is having a particular problem in specific parts of it. I would consider a tutor now, but

I mean, right now she doesn't need one at all, because they've backed off algebra and might not even touch it again for the rest of the year, perhaps? Next year is Honors Algebra 1, though, and unless it's 1) taught better or with a better book and/or 2) DD's brain makes some more connections (not impossible--she's a plateau/leap kind of kid), I predict trouble...

Think of a tutor (a good one, at least) as making up the shortfall in adequate instruction from a woefully disjunct curriculum/string of pitiful teachers.

Were I in your shoes, there wouldn't be any stigma in my mind over this - I would just be pragmatic - there is something that needs to be fixed and the tutor will fix it...

It would be reasonable to ask the teacher what the curriculum for the rest of the year will cover if that helps you make a more informed decision.

A brief update on this: FWIW, DD (6th grade) took the 7th grade state standardized math test per her acceleration and knocked it out of the park (from raw score, looks like she got all questions correct but one). So whatever is going on with algebra, she had no issues with 7th grade curriculum, at least as tested by the state. I still have a rather high degree of confusion regarding "8th grade math" and DD.