Someone suggested I start this tread and I finally got to it.
Let’s see, I’ve been a teacher since 1996 and my first year was 6th and 8th grade science in a non-public school. After that it has been math in one capacity or another - middle school, high school, college. I have master’s degrees in math and special education and am credentialed in both including national certification in secondary math and I am finishing up my Ed.D in math education.
What else? I taught two years in special ed math and one semester as the gen ed teacher in an inclusion class. I have been a high school math coach in two different districts and have taught in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Colorado Springs and now North Denver.
precalc is the highest I’ve taught. I realized early on that I didn’t like honors and had a preference for intervention math. My favorite class to teach is geometry.
My little girl (she’ll be eight in a few weeks) is so good at math when it comes to calculating but because she has autism and a language delay she has major trouble with ‘word problems’. Her biggest issue with language is comprehending who, what, where, when questions. She never, ever understands these application problems. It brings her grade down a bit I’m sure, but her teacher doesn’t think she should be allowed to skip them so I need to find a way to help her understand. Her speech therapist thinks she should be given extra consideration but the counseling Sp’Ed teacher (she’s in reg. ed) disagrees. What can I do as a parent to help her excel? She’s eager to learn but has little patience when it comes to anything language related.
I’m starting research on a paper that will explore relevance in main problems. My thought is that relevance is actually not about interest and motivation but putting the problem in a context the student can understand. For example, if a student is interested in baseball and I give them a fraction to decimal problem as calculating batting average, the student should do well not because they are motivated to solve a baseball problem but rather they already have general idea of how to calculate batting average. If my hypothesis is correct (and I won’t know for a few months) then in regards to your daughter the question would be what sort of context does she understand? What is she interested in and try to reword a problem using that context.
Nope.
The reality is that rubrics do not really work for a lot of math constructed response. They are more of a holdover from large projects or essays. Administrators are starting to see that it is more of some variation of:
0 - Did no work
1 - Some mathematical thought
2 - On the right track but not correct/complete
3 - Almost there but some gaps in reasoning OR slight calculation error leading to an incorrect solution
4 - Correct and complete
I did because I had an unusual position. I taught Special Day Class which should be m teaching all of the content subjects and the students leave only for PE and elective. Being high school, the principal decided that the students would not be successful having one teacher teach everything so he used 4 SDC positions to hire a math, a language arts, a social studies and a science SDC teacher. It worked out really well and should be a model for high school SpEd.
This is what I want to talk about: I’m homeschooling my 9-y-o daughter. I am a certified teacher too but with limited experience. My daughter is great at calculating answers to adding from 1 to 20 and also at multiplying, by using skip counting. But she cannot memorize or instantly recall these facts for anything. We have done pages and pages of drills, have used manipulatives…I know she understands the process, but how can I get her to instantly recall and memorize? How important is this going to be? She is now multiplying 1 digit numbers by 3 digit numbers and using regrouping so she is doing fairly complex things.
As background, I did have her evaluated for ADD and was found that she has “low working memory” and “low processing speed”. So if you have any strategies that you used as a special education or math teacher, I would really appreciate them! Thanks!
Saint Cad, I missed your initial thread and hope you see that it’s still going.
I am severely dyscalculaic (this apparently runs in my family.) I literally cannot do basic second-grade arithmetic if it’s on paper, my brain just clangs shut when presented with something like:
1,987 minus 942 = (huh?)
written down.
However, I can add and subtract whole numbers in my head extremely quickly; much faster than most people.
Anyhow, I have twice taken remedial adult arithmetic courses as an adult - once in the early 1980s, once in the mid 1990s. One was with a private tutor, the other an Arithmetic For Dummies adult class. I failed miserably both times and was literally reduced to tears of frustration because I just. couldn’t. fucking. get. it. I couldn’t grasp what an average seven-year old learns as a matter of course, and if I did happen to have an “aha!” moment, the next day it was completely gone; as if I’d never learned it.
Has anything changed in the teaching of arithmetic and remedial math in the last 15-20 years? Are there any programs worth my trying again?
