student knows the process just makes impulsive inattentive e

I have a question. You said she has dyslexia as well as ADHD Inattentive—are you sure her transpositions are due to carelessness? So many dyslexics do the same thing, with numbers AND with letters.

Kathy G.

Agree with Kathy G. What is being described may be a known neurological condition - somewhat like ADHD or ADHD itself (some types of) or epilepsy (some types of like edges of petit mal, absence) or dyslexia and so on.

There are a few cases regarding ADHD where the right ADHD medicine allows some persons (not all) to temporarily do math a little better.

In some cases of ADHD, the med is only partially effective; with dyslexia meds may not work at all.

What you are describing may be the symptoms of a neurological challenge affecting the ability to pay attention well to do math well. The challenge may involve the gift of short term memory.

If the student writes everything down on paper, the student may be able to track the calculations easier; at the same time, the question which is being posed is almost like: even though a child may have a neurological challenge paying attention easily, surely there must be an idea which can ~ teach it out of the child/idea it out of the child whatever.

The most revealing insights into the difficulty you describe which I have seen are the occasional reports that the right ADHD medicine can temporarily improves aspects of doing math; however, the ADHD meds do not work for everyone.

It’s a good question. Which idea may work the best? The right medicine? All parts of the math answer written down on paper? Redoing the math problem two, three, four, five or more times?

When a student has a neurological challenge being attentive or with short term memory which involves the human brain, what’s the best way to handle it?

Can some problems be worked around by working on a child’s strengths which may lie in other areas?

She has excellent short term memory. She can memorize lists of information and maps as long as she uses mnemonics and a little story to make the memory hooks for retrieval. She remembered her math facts only with the use of pictures and stories not through kill and drill. She is very creative and spatial and has language delays in regards to vocabulary and usage. She has trouble with spelling as it is very phonetic. She is more successful with mnemonics for difficult spelling words. Considering how good her short term memory is her problems with spelling have been perplexing to me.

Meds have helped her quite a bit, she can focus does fairly well on her homework when there is no pressure. However, when she takes tests she rushes through. She gets distracted when she is taking longer than the other kids and loses her focus. The RSP teacher is now giving her tests in a quiet, distraction free room. If distraction is the issue this should help her.

Patti-
Has she been taught a procedure for checking work to make sure that she has gone all the way through correctly? Is she allowed to have a cue card/visual model thing with her for multi step stuff? Lots of my students- when they were your daughter’s age anyway- used a resource notebook that had some form of a cueing system for multistep processes. It was always okay with their teachers and many of the teachers also had one posted on thewall as a poster- kind of an “accommodation decoration”…

Robin

I was thinking the same thing, having a check off card to make sure that she followed through on the steps. I have taught her several strategies to double check her answers but she feels that they are bothersome and just wants to get things done without the hassle of making sure it is correct. Some of it is her attitude of just rushing through one time just to get it over with…I am hopeful as she matures that she will desire to be more careful with her calculations.

Hi pattim,

Are you sure that’s not my dd you’re working with?! She has the same profile ADD-inattentive, dyslexic (but also APD, VPD & LD in math & written expression). The biggest difference would be that my dd does NOT have good short-term memory and mnemonics do not work for her. Her memory is noticably improving with NeuroNet, though. But like your child, she makes many inattentive-type errors in math: adds when she should subtract, solves for perimeter when she should solve for area, forgets to reduce fractions, simple calculation errors 3-1=1, etc. Like your child, she doesn’t want to be bothered with checking her answers and usually makes the same inattentive error when she does recheck her work. Only when she knows FOR SURE that her answer is incorrect is she able to go back and easily find and correct the mistake. I too am developing a cueing system for multi-step operations - if she would actually use it.

How does one determine if this is “a neurological challenge affecting the ability to pay attention well to do math well”??

Blessings, momo

Gee, add when you should subtract, find perimeter (often incorrectly anyhow) when area was asked, miss steps, not check, do fractions upside down, refuse to follow systems even when in front of them — exactly the problem the majority of my college students were showing. Of course, most of them were *not* LD; rather, pedagogically disabled, ie the results of a bad school system. You are far from alone in this!

I find myself on both sides of the argument. On the parent/teacher side, of course you want to be accurate in all your work, and of course math is important in so much of daily life (area of the kitchen to buy floor tiles, fractions in the recipe and the plywood thickness, and so on). On the student side of the argument, I look at the books and say yes, why *should* anyone care about this kind of garbage?

There is a systemic problem in North American schools (in all subjects but most notably in math) that the curriculum has been divided up into bite-sized bits and pre-digested and run around and around a spiral so you do the same bits over and over again with no sign of any progress or any connection or any big picture. All the parts of math that make it interesting and challenging and creative, like making up your own solutions, proving things, and investigating topics on your own, have been judged to be “difficult” (particularly for badly-prepared elementary school teachers who barely scraped through Grade 10 non-science program math and then vowed to never learn anything in math again) so the books avoid challenging kids with anything that goes beyond memorizable procedures. And really, speaking as a person who *likes* math and has an Honours degree in it, I look at these programs and say “Let’s drop this and do Chinese poetry”.

No easy solution. Somehow you need to get across to your students that math is NOT and never was merely a set of memorized procedures to tsake one meaningless batch of numbers and turn out another batch. Somehow they need to get the message that math is both useful and creative and that we do the drudgery in order to get to the good stuff. Unfortunately they’ve had ten years or more of the shaggy dog story minus the punchline, so they have a reasonable doubt that the punchline even exists.

Well, I used to make a lot of inattentive errors too- in 4th through 6th grades I got D’s every year on the tests that reviewed basic procedures, then turned around and got A’s on the stuff that was supposed to be hard. When the problems were uninteresting, I was inattentive, but I really did know the math.

If she is showing her work on the test, I think she should be getting at least partial credit for setting problems up correctly, even if she doesn’t remember to reduce the fraction to simplest terms in her answer.

I have pointed out to my kids that getting the correct answers to a page of math problems is not especially important, but that developing the habit of doing work accurately the first time IS important. Good work habits will serve you well your entire life, even if you never do another math problem. Since my older son is very self-disciplined, this kind of reasoning works well for him, and might appeal to your daughter. OTOH, maybe you could try some sort of reward system - if she earns points toward a special outing or activity for each homework problem she completes without an error, maybe she’ll get in the habit of checking her work and paying attention to details, and hopefully that will carry over to tests.

Jean