Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy requesting help with math advocacy

LOL! It's a great analogy, and dead on, I think. I wrestled with this same issue last year, and ultimately I decided that you definitely try going deep first, mainly since it tends to be more convenient for the teacher. (Realism there...) If enrichment works for the kid and it's enough, then great. But for a lot of HG+ kids in elementary school, deeper simply won't be enough! There's only so deep you can go with basic calculation! As you say, logic and story problems are great, but even those get old if you're just working on 3-digit addition or the like...There's just very little depth to plumb there! Until you get to somewhat higher math--though I'm not sure how high you have to get--it's just plain hard to go deep.

You can do things not included in the curriculum. Maybe that's "going wide?" LOL! I do like that approach and have used this a bit myself. The history of math is not in the normal curriculum, and that's something we're attacking this year. Tesselations, Escher's stuff and fractals are popular with the homeschool crowd even with pretty young kids but aren't the norm in schools, I don't think. (I could be wrong...) I do think you can slow things down in that way without boring the pants off a kid.

My strategy is go deep and go wide until I see that I'm starting to lose him, then I'll go on to the next thing. With these kids, I think that means you're going to go a little fast at least, if not really fast...But I don't see a way around it.

What's more, I don't see any compelling reason not to!

My son had to do these types of problems last year, in spite of being way past that level.

I did them for him (I mimicked his writing). I'd teach him something he was ready for during the time that would have been devoted to math homework (so, two sessions per week with me). I did NOT want him to waste his time and squander his love for maths on these worksheets.

This approach helped in a lot of ways, not the least of was mental health-wise. It was a covert act of rebellion, and we were getting away with it. Plus, we were in it together, so it was a bonding thing.

Val

Great post, CFK! I agree wholeheartedly.

Sometimes I think the "deep vs. fast" debate is really people with older kids vs. people with elementary-aged kids. And both are right, given where they are in the process.

I think the school could do the same sort of thing if they're going to resist acceleration. I won't pretend to know how to suggest it and get it to happen, but I think it could be done by excellent advocates.

Hi there,

You're right, it's totally inappropriate.

The school took an absolutist position with our son. They told us that he MUST do the work, end of discussion. Their rationale was that "everyone has to do things they don't want to do and he has to learn this lesson." I countered that this approach is effective for cleaning your room and washing the dishes, but it doesn't work at school. I explained that his mind wasn't being challenged by 6+6 and that he was at risk for not developing problem-solving skills and study skills. No response.

No one disagreed that he'd mastered the work, but it took nearly the whole school year for them to even begin to realize how far below his level 6+6 was. Even after they offered a grade skip, he still had to finish 2nd grade work before he could do the 3rd grade books they gave him (which were all easy for him).

By October, we stopped caring and went into hyperdrive to find a new school for the next academic year.

If you're stuck with this school, maybe at least knowing what they said to us will help you respond if/when they say it to you.

Val

I have to disagree with some responses to doing the mindless drudgery of math computations that are below a childs' level. I'm a computer programmer/analyst, and sometimes my work is exciting and challenging, and sometimes it's mind numbing drudgery. I don't know anyone who doesn't have some drudgery mixed in an otherwise exciting, challenging job. I think you are doing your kids a disservice by not teaching them coping skills to get through the mind-numbing times. One way to get through it is to time it, and make it a race against his/her own best time. Then share some cookies when it's done.

That said, you are still right to advocate for more challenging work. One reason I've heard for a lack of acceleration is "but what will the child do in 7th grade if they complete 8th grade work in 5th grade?" The answer I got from GS's gifted teacher is, "But we spiral around and get more in depth each year". She never got it that GS was already going deeper on his own!

I started there, OHG. We all have to do things that aren't fun and life's not a party. Agreed.

But killing a young child's love of math seems like a dumb way to teach that lesson, and I'm not really sure it's a lesson that a child needs to learn about education. I think work and education are two different things, and the rules are different. Often people treat school as a child's job, but I think learning is a child's job, and real learning just isn't mindless drudgery for any child, especially not for GT kids. If you turn school into mindless drudgery, you're doing it wrong, and it means the kids aren't learning. Then why are they there?

I prefer for my child to learn that life isn't always a party when cleaning his room, washing the dishes, and all those other mindless chores that really are work, and not education.

My $.02...

Hi Everyone,

I'm watching this discussion with great interest. DS8 (4th grade) came home with two very long pages of math homework (double sided) that were simplistic in math level, but required a great deal of handwriting and time. I just had to shake my head and wonder. How many times has he seen line segments, geometric shapes (parallelograms vs quadrangles), and simple addition and subtraction? And why does he need to write paragraphs about how he answered the questions?

He raced through them only because I dangled a carrot in front of his nose. If he completed the meaningless worksheets quickly, then there would be time before dinner for him to watch a video called "Fractals The Colors of Infinity". It was an amazing video which described the discovery of the Mandelbrot set by a mathematician at IBM in 1980(?). The pictures are stunning, it does an amazing job of explaining fractals, and it is hosted by Arthur C. Clarke. It even has Stephan Hawking in it!

Here is a link that I found for watching the movie on your computer:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8570098277666323857

So our dinnertime conversation tonight included imaginary number and what would happen if you changed the equation from Z=z^2 + c to Z=z^3 + C. (they go through the first equation in the movie.) After dinner we also downloaded a computer program that allowed DS to play with his own parameters in graphing the Mandelbrot set:
(for a mac)
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Math-Scientific/Mandelbrot-on-Cocoa.shtml
(for a pc)
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Best/mandelbrot-pc.html

I haven't tried the pc version, but the mac version was great. And free.

Just remember... If you can't join them, then beat them.