I realize that I must face the fact that I need to get my son re-tested to get the true answer to this question (and others!)…but I was hoping I could get some feedback from teachers and parents on this board about something that I see with my son rather often in math.
My son (in 4th grade) seems to take an “I can’t” attitude (and rather boisterously, I might add) when faced with a type of math problem that he hasn’t experienced before. It appears to me that he looks at it superficiously (sp?) and doesn’t even really think about it at all when he comes to that conclusion (before he even tries, in my opinion). Then, if I give him the same problem, but put it in a real life situtation he can usually figure it out with no problem at all, and often very rapidly.
For example, last night his homework included a partially finished worksheet from school. He just started Everyday Math yesterday and this worksheet had just a couple of problems in several areas of math (a couple of addition, subtraction, time, division, number patterns, etc.). The first section he didn’t get to was division in this format:
How many hours and minutes are there in 138 minutes?
____hours ____ minutes
How many days and hours are there in 79 hours?
____days ____ hours
After his little outburst, I said to him (regarding the first one) that he has done this many times when he checks out how long a movie is. Within 3 seconds he told me that the answer was 2 hours and 18 minutes.
The same thing happens with addition or other things…it seems to me that he can focus on the answer much better when it’s real…not just something on a piece of paper that he has no interest in!
I am always on red alert about a potential serious math disability because of his IQ results back when he was in late K. I haven’t had him re-tested at this point but am considering it now. He had a gifted verbal and an average performance. We brought him back for additional testing to see if we could zero in a little better (this was at the advise of a school we were checking out). His achievement scores were all very high. Executive function was at only 25%tile. Visual motor was his lowest by far at 7%tile; visual-spatial was at 85%tile. I can provide other scores if you think it’s relevant, but these are old scores at this point, so I’m not sure they matter.
He was the kind of kid who figured out rather advanced math concepts on his own, like multiplication in K and negative numbers in 1st. It would just kind of come up in conversation…he would never sit and do a worksheet or anything. But he did struggle with the memorization of his basic addition and subtraction facts. It was always so weird…the same kid who could tell you that 99 minus 103 was -4 in 1st grade would also tell you 5 + 2 was 8! His fine and motor skills were poor and have improved but are probably still below average.
Sorry for being so verbose about this question and the background for it. Just wondering if you’ve seen this kind of thing before and what you have felt is behind it! Do you think that an attention deficit can be the primary cause or do you think that it has to be something else in addition. He doesn’t have a diagnosis of anything but he does exhibit quite a few attention symptoms.
Thanks!
Lori
Math anxiety
Victoria,
DS definitely has more anxiety about math than other subjects - the things you said make sense and maybe also because he had difficulty early on on 2 fronts: the writing aspect and the math facts aspect. Although the writing aspect effected language arts also, he read very well and was at the top of his class in that important skill.
He didn’t have any difficulty learning his times tables last year, which I thought odd because he still didn’t have all his addition and subtraction facts automated. He still used his fingers alot. Maybe times tables for some reason are more straight memory and addition facts require more visual skills???
We did audiblox as often as possible (not near as much as I wanted to) and then I gave him some worksheets to do the week before school started. He completed the sheets with much greater ease and no fingers! I can’t judge yet how he’s doing in school with the addition of distractions, etc. We haven’t gotten any work home yet.
We have tried to remediate DS’s weaknesses with various therapy and have put off retesting him. He has had OT, vision therapy, neuronet and some IM. We had to stop IM early this year due to his allergies and plan to get back to it. We’re going to go back to neuronet first to help with integration issues and then resume IM hopefully by next Spring.
Like so many others, I just wonder how many of his problems stem from attention weaknesses. You hear so often how even motor performance improves when children finally receive medication for attention deficit. I don’t know, I’m wondering now more than ever if I should just “try” the pill. If we eventually have to go that route, am I going to kick myself that we didn’t cave in and do it sooner? Not just for academic purposes, but to help with impulsiveness, organization, etc. Helping all those things would bring more peace and happiness to our lives. Sorry, don’t mean to digress….
That’s why I asked the question about whether this seems typical to you for attention kids. I do know he has had some difficulty with math, even though he also has some stregnths. He’s just so hard to figure out……so many issues.
Lori
This is a typical elementary math attitude problem, extremely common, and seems to be a strongly American cultural thing — see the Third International Math and Science Study, Sheila Tobias Overcoming Math Anxiety, and other resources on math anxiety and math attitudes especially cross-culturally.
This negative and distasteful attitude is pervasive in schools and is often taught directly by the teacher — school math consists of filling in worksheets that have absolutely nothing to do with real life and you are *expected* to hate it, so the teacher alternately threatens and bribes you to do it — miss recess for not doing math, get chocolate bars for doing it — and many other teaching approachs reinforce this, like having you write out all your other homework neatly on good paper but doing math on garbage fished out of the trash can, writing all other homework in pen but doing math in pencil so that you can (plan to deliberately) do it wrong and erase and erase, throwing all your math work immediately in the trash as “scrap”, and so on; all this places math in a totally separate context from everything else we do in life, and a very negative garbage-in garbage-out context.
The funny thing about your question is that one of the major goals in developing Everyday Math was *supposed to* be to break out of this mold and to make the math truly “everyday” and real life applied. This is why EM has no textbooks and no daily drills and all that stuff — they were trying to get teachers to teach real life math and actually use math in lessons and the classroom, rather than assign more and more “seatwork” and fill-in-the-blanks drills. Apparently the cultural pressure has steamrollered right over the parts of EM that actually had a point to them.
Yes, you should be concerned about this, but no, it isn’t your son’s problem, it’s actually a sign that he is socially integrated into the larger school culture. Your approach of re-interpreting the problem in real life terms is the best thing you can do — and is what EM is supposed to do.