My child has Asperger’s Syndrome and is highly gifted. She is in regular honors classes in 8th grade with no aide, and no pull out instruction. She reads at the 12th grade level, but has great difficulty in writing anything of length and anything that is not of her opinion. She had lots of one on one tutoring in Lindamood-Bell style writing instruction last summer and made progress. she scores 17-25% on the TOWL-3—on the essay part. She writes at the 3-4th grade level. Her summer tutor stated that she needs one on one support for writing and is not independently writing essays.
The school administrator seems to think that my daughter needs no other help to write other than a grading “rubric”. We agreed after a contentious iep meeting that my daughter’s writing goal —to be completed by early Dec—is to write 2 2-3 page essays using her “learned” six step process (what they used this summer). I promised to remind her about her work but nothing more. I can’t teach my child writing. I believe my daughter will fail to meet this goal. Last year, she completed no essays and almost no homework.
The big question to me is when we went to develop a way to grade her in each class, the english teacher wants to incorporate the writing goal into her grade.
So, if my daughter completes 2 essays with all 6 steps it will be an A, if she uses 5 steps, a B, etc. This is in addition to keeping a reading log and writing short responses everyday in class to questions. The teacher also has tests.
My daughter can and does learn everything they talk about in class. She participates and is highly verbal. She also scores in the 80-90’s on standarized tests.
I worry, because I just see that my daughter is not going to be able to write an essay without one on one support and she is not going to be able to get an A, no matter how much she strives to or wants to—she won’t be able to leap that high platform. I also worry about the fact that the iep goal gets a grade as well as a progress report towards the goals. I believe that it is not ok for my daughter not to make progress on writing, but the district has no plan on how to help my daughter make progress towards writing at her grade level.
The math teacher is sort of the same problem. My daughter has a goal of turning in 90% of homework by the end of the year. Last year, she turned in 50% of homework. The teacher wants to give her an A, if it is 90% in the next 6 weeks, a B if 80% turned in, etc. Unfortunately, the teacher is using group based algebra instruction and my daughter has big problems in peer groups—he doesn’t seem to give many tests. Too much of the math homework is writing, not doing problems or learning formulas.
So what suggestions do you all have for me???
Re: How to grade?
it was written into last years iep, never followed; i had an iep last wed, the 18th and have yet to see the written iep—so I can only assume it will be in there. the district did agree in mediation to do this.
Re: How to grade?
That the teachers are willing to try to grade your daughter as an individual in commendable. Your concern seems to be that as they have written the goals they’ve made it virtually impossible for her to get an A.
I sympathize with your position. My own son with severe dysgraphia can not write. He can dictate his thoughts to willing typists but medical science as we know it tells us he can not write and that there is no method of instruction that will enable him to.
His teachers were ever unable to believe or accept that and so continued to expect him to write. Their ‘methods’ of instruction were to try to teach him to write in the way any child is taught to write - which hardly addressed his dysgraphia- and to give him bad grades
Schools can be ignorant.
If your IEP meeting was contentious, it sadly doesn’t feel likely to me that further discussion with them will produce much. Can your daughter type and does that assist her with writing? Perhaps they would allow accomodations. Does she have an Alphasmart? She might find that helpful.
Good luck.
Re: How to grade?-do you want her to learn writing and math
Why does she have to get an A if she doesn’t meet the class standards in writing and Math? I’d think your(and her) time would be better spent working on whtever she’s capable of learning and producing, and forgetting about the grade. What about assistive tech. for writing, like wordprocessing, or speech to text software? Even dictating to a scribe? What are you looking for in math, for her to learn algebra or to get an A for doing less work than the other students? Much of high school work is group based, perhaps learning to work in a group could be an IEP goal.
Has an “alternative grading procedure” or something to that effect been actually written into your daughters IEP?