Quick update on nieceling's academics

[conuly]

Parent teacher night was, like, a month ago, but it took me this long to post about it! (Jenn did it, being their mom, so really, I should make her post. Whatever.)

Evangeline's teacher said she gets distracted easily in class, and of course she needs to work on her reading. As it happens, Evangeline's been working on her reading, and now can pretty much retell any story she likes with aplomb, although she still has a little trouble using pronouns without first using the noun that tells us who the pronoun is. Also, she hates and loathes having to retell stories. For any reason. Her retellings are peppered with "Can I just skip ahead?" I'm not entirely sure this is the goal, and I'd still love to see how it all goes in class, which is kinda where it counts.

Ana's teacher said she basically could ace the 3rd grade reading test right now, and she's doing fine in math although she needs some help on word problems. We've been working on problems, and I've identified the problems:

1. She's been taught to look for words that indicate what sort of problem it is. However, either she's been taught badly or she didn't understand, because this trips her up when, say, she sees the word "more" and assumes addition but actually the question is "how much more is the doll than the book?" I'm working on retraining her to look for the sense of the question first instead of going for shortcuts. This is something that's so obvious to me, I'm not sure how to help her out.

2. In multi-step problems, even when she identifies all the steps in advance (because she's expected to explain her thinking afterwards, I'm having her do so before even starting the problem) she often gets confused or bored halfway through and either leaves the problem unfinished or melds all the steps into one.

3. When she's done with a problem, she doesn't check her work. At all. She doesn't even do a glance back to see if her answer makes sense. Cookies that cost $100? Children who are 10 inches tall? It says A is the tallest, but when I did the math I got an answer that made him the shortest? Whatever, I did the math, right? Wrong.

In the extra math we're doing at home (which, ha, comes with its own book of word problems to work from!) she has trouble doing mental math. We get her old math textbook every year in June, and I don't think they emphasize or even teach mental math at all, so this isn't a surprise. But it's something we're working on.

However, there are plusses. Remember how Evangeline was working through her book much faster than Ana was working through hers? Well, now they're about even. Why? Not because Evangeline slowed down, but because we hit the section on money in Ana's book about two weeks after they covered money in her class. Which means I've just gone ahead and skipped most of the section, only doing the word problems and mental math parts of it :) And now Ana's class is doing time to the minute, but this book is doing time to the five minutes, so we'll skip most of that as well. Woo-hoo! (Also, Ana finally seems to have her basic addition facts memorized. She hasn't mentioned it, but it goes much faster now that she's not counting.)

Comparing Evangeline's school math to her afterschool math, in school they're doing single-digit addition... and Evangeline is working on double digit subtraction at home. But I don't mind this at all, it's good for her to get more review and grounding in this.

In other news, I want to get them doing some history at home soon to inoculate them against the history that's taught in schools. (I went to these schools. Truly, the history classes are teh suck.) I've found a few online curricula that seem to focus largely on primary documents, but they're all American history, nothing for world history at all. Seriously, do I have to make this all up myself? I'm too lazy for that.

Comments

[siderea]

Remind me: how old are these kids?

WRT Ana's math difficulties: they all point to a common underlying issue which has me very concerned, one which is a product of a very common sort of bad teaching.

Ana doesn't have any sense that numbers and operations on numbers describe reality. She's trying to learn math procedurally, because she thinks that's what math is, a set of procedures.

Ever seen "The Miracle Worker"? She's like Helen Keller as a little child, who learned that if she contorted her hands in a certain way, people would give her cake. The idea that those contortions meant "cake", that there were such things as words, was precisely what she learned from Anne Sullivan.

The idea that numbers refer to quantities and mathematical operations mean something about how quantities are relating is, from what you describe, what Ana isn't getting.

Kids who learn math that way in grade school generally hit the wall when they encounter pre-algebra (typically 7th grade), and most never bounce back. This is not going to sort itself out on it's own, and you really are going to need to intervene.

(Oh, and it kills me to see a kid this smart so betrayed by her instructors. Mathematics is a pleasure and a joy, and she is being deprived of it!)

I have some more information and directions to suggest, but we come to an awkward point. I worked in school reform for a decade, and I agreed to never mention my employer by name online in public under this pseudonym[*]. And I kinda feel I oughta tell you about some of their resources. So over to PM?

Also, have you read any John Holt? If not, I think you'd love it, and I'd like to suggest you read his How Children Learn.

[* And seeing I wrote that policy personally, it would be really gauche to violate it. ;)]

[chaos_by_design]

When I was a kid, I think I basically thought math was a form of torture. Didn't know why I was learning, and numbers meant nothing to me.

[siderea]

July 27, 1958

It has become clear over the year that these children see school almost entirely in terms of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that we [teachers] impose on them. This is not at all the way the teacher thinks of it. The conscientious teacher thinks of himself as taking his students (at least part way) on a journey to some glorious destination, well worth the pains of the trip. [...]

So the valiant and resolute band of travelers [I was teaching 5th grade math to] I thought I was leading toward a much-hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts in a chain gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place there they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you don't do them or don't do them right.

For children, the central business of school is not learning, whatever this vague word means; it is getting these daily tasks done, or at least out of the way, with a minimum of effort and unpleasantness....

John Holt, How Children Fail. Once a great classic of education, now largely forgotten.

[conuly]

Sure, over to PM.

I'm sorry for largely not replying to your comment the other day, btw. You're probably right, but I hate being wrong, so I went off and sulked for a while and then felt silly replying because I was sulking like a child.

[conuly]

Also, Ana's in the 3rd grade. Evangeline's in the 1st, but working at home through a workbook intended for the second half of first grade. And largely enjoying it, except at naptime.