Need help from elementary teachers

Ex-teacher, parent, tutor here.

Yes, kids do give up. Bright kids — and I understand that AS kids are very bright in general — may give up even faster than others, because they see ahead to conclusions more than many other kids. In fact it often amazes me the amount of pure trash that most kids will do for school — I and the rest of my pig-headed family sure didn’t do it.

I have tutored kids like this. It is possible to turn around, but you are going to have to take some definitive action.

Try to find out what it is that has her frustrated and angry. Some strong possibilities:
Is the teacher giving out punishments for errors? She does a page of fifty problems with forty-five right and instead of getting something positive for all the good work, she gets heavy criticism, extra work, etc. for the five wrong? Any reasonably logical person in this situation says “The heck with this.” And AS kids are said to be very good at logic.
Is the teacher criticizing for other reasons, handwriting, time, neatness, etc? Same point as above.
Is the teacher rewarding success by loading on more and more until the camel’s back breaks? Many teachers do this, mistakenly thinking they are “motivating”. If the child is already working at full speed, getting rewarded for worksheet 10 by having to do #’s 11 through 15 can be just too much.
has the math curriculum spiralled into some heavily verbal and confusing section that she is having trouble following? She may be upset with both the teacher and herself ov er this.
Has there been some change in the class environment that makes it hard for her to concentrate? A change in seating to put people with their “partners” can put a child into a very distracting environment. A new preschool class pounding like little cattle upstairs can drive you nuts.
Has the schedule been changed, so that she goes out for special ed during part od the math class, or does math after she is already tired?
Is the pressure in other subjects, in particular reading, so heavy that she is just exhausted? This can happen, especially if people are teasing her or criticizing her. It is hard to follow two solid hours of stress and failure with your best math work.
Is there increasing speed pressure, that the sheet has to be done and handed in by a certain time? It often happens that so much stress gets laid on finishing quickly that the idea of learning something goes by the boards — *many* students fill up sheets with nonsense. In this case, try to convince the teacher to accept the sheet with however many problems get done, no rush to finish; or if she insists on finishing, more time to work on it later.
You say the teacher is upset with her. Is she reacting to the teacher’s negative feelings by withdrawing? Not easy — I’ve been a frustrated teacher myself — but you can try to convince the teacher to take a more positive approach.

Once you’ve found out everything you can — talk to her at length, over a few days; talk to the teacher; talk to the special ed teacher — let her know that you are firmly on her side. You want her to succeed of course, and you know she can succeed, but she doesn’t have to be run through a wringer to do so, and you will fix whatever can be fixed.

You might consider keeping her at home for a few days for a short break, a “mental health flu” call. Just say to her that she doesn’t look well to you and you think she should stay home, and call the school and say she looks like she’s coming down with something (true, the something is stress). Treat her as you do when she has a little cold, rest and quiet activities and nice foods. This can give her a chance to get things back in order, especially as you have a little time to talk to her and find out what she is thinking and feeling..
While you’re at it, it’s often a good idea to stop in at the doctor and have him take a good look at her ears etc. My daughter ran to frequent respiratory/ear infections, and often behaved in a very difficult manner when she really was coming down with something.

Meet with the school, informally first, and then a formal IEP meeting if necessary. Try to get things set up so that she has the best environment possible to do her work. It may be as simple as more light from the window or a change in partner to one who doesn’t encourage rushing or switching reading tutoring with another student.

Work on tutoring her at home in the material she has missed, starting back from the ground up where she started to have trouble. NO rush, NO pressure. Mastery first, then speed. It is often a matter of perspective, seeing that the horizontal question is the same as the vertical for example — help her rewrite it — and then a light flashes on in the head and the frustration lifts. Again, let her know that you are on her side with this, and you are going to stick with her until she gets it; she doesn’t have to”keep up” with somebody else.

OK, I’m not a teacher but an aunt to a brilliant AS nephew (he doesn’t have LD’s). He aces standardized testing and is “gifted”. But his AS surely keeps the teachers guessing.

In 3rd grade he failed reading dismally. That classroom teacher emphasized reading aloud to the class. Nephew didn’t think anything of it - simply refused to read aloud. Didn’t understand why the teacher wanted him to do this nor did he want to. Period, end of story, nothing more or less to him. No big deal and never mentioned it to his mother, nor did the teacher call my sis.

Teacher perceived this as willful defiance. That’s the school year my sis realized due to his AS she had to be on top of his school environment. Another example is expressive writing - he now has that down but it took him and the 4th grade teacher a lot to get there - he preferred literal non-fiction type stuff instead and just didn’t ‘get’ the other type of writing.

Unless the teacher has a lot of experience w/ AS, there can be a helluva lot of misinterpretation of situations. He is a delightful ‘funny little bird’ and extraordinary - but not everyone perceives him that way nor does he notice/care.

GL

Thanks for your replies d and Victoria!

My daughter didn’t mention these problems of the last few weeks to me either until I got a note from her teacher and asked her about it. If she doesn’t see the point in something…she won’t do it! I guess many people would take that personally, but if you know AS, you realize that the kids won’t be playing “mind games” with you…if it makes sense to them, they will do it…if not, you have a battle on your hands! Thankfully we have only 2 more full weeks of school left this grade level, but now that I’ve seen my daughter completely “shut down” for the teacher, I am afraid for next year.

As for the why, you can give her the instructions my mother gave me in school: “The teacher may sometimes be wrong, but she still is the teacher.”
Explain to her that the teacher has to do many activities for many reasons that the child doesn’t know about — things that the principal tells her to do, things that she has to do for other children who aren’t as quick as she is, things that other people like doing even if she doesn’t — and as a member of a group, she has to follow the rules and systems of the group. Even if she doesn’t get particular activities, she should be interested enough in learning to be able to cooperate with the group when it is explained to her clearly that cooperation is necessary so they can do the things she likes to do.

Typically, children with Aspergers have a problem with visualization both with language as well as numbers. If you can’t visualize, learning is very frustrating. “Visualizing and Verbalizing” and “On Cloud Nine” by Lindamood Bell are the programs of couse for autistic children. Before you expect her to be able to comprehend and become proficient in math, I would suggest that you try these programs. You can teach her yourself just by buying the manuals. You can get them through Gander Publishing. I have used them for years and they are great!

Thanks for the reply and info, Shay. My daughter does have trouble visualizing so these manuals may be very helpful for her. Everything has to be explained and shown to her so specifically…takes a lot of work. The scary thing is that she comes off as fairly “normal” but stubborn so she doesn’t always bring out a lot of “nuturing helpfulness” from others. Really, I think she is functioning in a state of confusion most of the time.

I have an AS daughter who is 13 and we have been through the middle school math hell. One of the things I have found useful is to make all instruction completely concrete. Do not load up this child with problems—I usually make my child do 5-10 problems (the hard ones) to show mastery, then revisit those types of problems later—several weeks later—to be sure she has retained the information. Also, the math often needs to be broken down into smaller bits—too many assumptions can throw a child like this. There is a fine balance to you have to do the work because the teacher says so, and do the work so you can master the concept. I know my child has given up for the year and basically she is just tired of school. She often works hard in the summer to master more concepts—but the end of school tends to get more and more social (more parties, celebrations, etc) and school can be harder and harder for these AS kids to tolerate.
For math, I also make cheat sheets with the basic formulas or problems laid out—so she has a reference to refer to—this has esp helped in Algebra.
Good luck

Thanks for your reply, ssssf! It is very helpful for me to hear from people with AS daughters, especially those that have travelled a little farther down the AS road than my daughter and I have! I value all replies based on personal experience…parents really become experts in the area of their children and how to manage the difficulties that they face.

Thanks again…to all.

Sorry ssssf…..Brain fade on my part…I accidently typed in your name as the author intead of my own…Oops! Sorry!

just to let you know—my daughter learned not one thing in 6th grade math class—teacher didn’t teach the curriculum and relied on a student teacher to cover it all in 6 weeks. My daughter missed the cutoff for the entrance to prealgebra exam. My daughter had been excelling in math under her teacher in 4/5th grades—the teacher was a math mentor. I borrowed a book on the 6th grade curriculum and taught her the math over the summer. The school refused to allow her to retake the entrance test. My daughter warmed a seat in a regular math class in 7th grade and did not learn one thing in that class. (PS my daughter has been mainstreamed in gifted classes for three years—little to no support). So for 7th grade, I hired the gifted class math teacher to tutor my daughter after school in the pre-algebra curriculum She was tutored one hour a week, with homework, and did this from Oct to April. She passed the entrance exam into Algebra with a higher score than her twin sister, who had had the tutor as her math teacher in gifted-pre algebra.
In Algebra, she was assigned to CPM math, an inferential—non-concrete math curriculum based on social groups. It was an complete failure, and after arguing with the school for the month of October, I got my kid switched to the old fashioned curriculum-Algebra class. She had to make up 5 chapters over Christmas break. She continued all year in this class, and got a steady F. But—as her teacher told me today, she has learned most of the algebra curriculum, and just needs to retake the class to have a solid footing. If my daughter had not been switched, she would not have learned anything and just would have been mad.
So—this is the math hell. The high schools only use the CPM math and my other child—very smart, a very visual/concrete learner—is gettting a steady F and tutoring the other kids in his geometry class. He will have to retake it next year—and hope another teacher does not mark him down for using pictures to figure out the math problems. My daughter will be going to a private high school—where they teach in a concrete fashion.

Mark someone down for using pictures to figure out geometry? What’s next, marking someone down for using the alphabet to find something in a library index, or for using a wrench to remove a bolt in shop?

Hint: *real* mathematicians (and yes I do know many, I left the math PhD program only because of health/personal reasons) use pictures and diagrams and graphs *all* the time. A major issue in high school and college math, and science, and technology, is trying to teach kids to visualize and use graphs and diagrams.

So here we have a program carefully designed to fail kids in Grade 9 for doing what we kill ourselves trying to teach them to do in later years. That’s shooting yourself in the foot if there ever was.

It sounds to me like, along with the pressure to throw out “whole-language” and really teach reading, we also need a group to throw out this CPM math. It is equally damaging.

You have hit the nail on the head concerning math disabilities; kids can’t visualize numbers. This is often the problem with comprehension as well; kids can’t visualize language, spoken or written. Many of these kids are diagnosed ADD and what their real problem is visualization. The Lindamood programs, V/V and On Cloud Nine are excellent for remediation and fun too. I use them in private tutoring as I do PG. Many of our kids in high school don’t have to worry about passing our state tests, they can’t pass algebra or geometry and their problem is multi-step problems- lack of visualization. In my experience, if a student needs a example every time he tries to do the different problems, the issue is lack of being able to visualize, but all we do is to make him do more problems and give him math objectives in their IEP. We have some kids taking the fourth year of Algebra 1. They won’t graduate.

Visualization of letters and numbers was a major problem for my son. He can now visualize much better.
He got there through vision therapy.

It has made a big difference in many areas. He still has further to go.

Shay,

We’ve done visualization work through therapy and my son’s reading comprehension has improved. He is still having trouble with math though.

He seems to forget what to do when doing long division the second or third time he has to divide a number. I did some reading on kids with math and reading disabilities and one article said that kids with reading and math disabilities had better visual-perceptual skills than those with only math disabilities but worse working memory. This is my son–the working memory issue. He has come a long long ways but it still rears his ugly head. I also find that he seems to “forget” how to do long division if he hasn’t done it for a few days.

Would Cloud Nine help with that? And is visualization causal relationship in reading different than visualizing math?

Beth

Just out of curiousity…you mentioned that your daughter doesn’t get any extra support at school, is it because the school doesn’t see her AS problems as real? Is her AS not being acknowledged by the school? You did mentioned gifted classes…I don’t think my girl would ever qualify for that since her LD’s are so bad. I do believe that she is very intelligent and her IQ is average (101) but, to most people , she would come off as “slow” because of LD’s and inattention/distractibility. Just knowing what you went through with your daughter in math makes me very nervous. I have already questioned the 1st grade teacher whether my girl shouldn’t get extra math help, but was told “no” because she is so good at basic addition. I think my girl IS good at addition, BUT only if it is written in columns and not like this: 62 + 10 = 72. She just doesn’t get how to do it if it’s written “longways”. or in story form for that matter. That’s what I find so frustrating…my girl can muddle along for awhile but pretty soon she can’t grasp a concept and that’s it, she gives up.

I have an IEP meeting for her next week to set up her schooling for next year…anybody have any suggestions as to what I should insist on so she doesn’t get so frustrated that she gives up next year? She already has 90 mins of sp ed phonics/reading a day and an OT once a week.

Thanks…

.

Joan V helped me with this question once.

Thing is, I can’t remember the answer.

You can send out a message to her.

I teach special education and have experience with Asperger’s kids. It’s the end of the year and she may just need summer break. She is tired and overloaded. I wouldn’t worry too much yet. Her special education teacher needs to step in and make sure the classroom teacher makes the modifications necessary to keep her sane and happy until the end of the year. You can work on weak skills with her over the summer after she’s had a break. She’s probably just had enough!

You may want to ask for more resource for math. But only if your resource teacher is worth her salt. If that particular teacher won’t benefit her ask for special modifications in the classroom. Request fewer math problems. If the class does 25, she does 10. Ask that the teacher rewrite the same problem in a format your daughter understands, while you continue to work with her at home on the kind she has trouble with. Is she enrolled in Speech/Language Therapy? If not, request a language eval. AS kids have language difficulty and she needs to be receiving Therapy. Ask if anyone involved with your daughter has any autism training, then request that the Spec.Ed teacher receive some. Before the meeting, call you district’s main special ed. office and request that someone with power to make decisions be present. That person can approve autism training. Anything that is not acceptable to you, say so. You have immense power in an IEP meeting. One of my AS kids has her own personal aide in order to ensure she could stay in the regular classroom. Good luck. Read your parent’s rights handbook and know what your rights are.

CPM math is socially based math, written by someone here at San Francisco State University. Imagine kids sitting around in groups, discovering the principles of algebra. imagine a book that does not list formulas at all, but expects kids to develop their own “toolkit” to contain this information. The geometry book does little visually, but writes out every thing in words (according to my son). Again, no lists of principles, sitting around in groups and making the kids teach the course—his teacher actually only teaches one or two days a week. My son gets counted off for drawing out the problem (and solving it correctly)—no points given, points off for failing to connect every line of his triangle and last week got points off (lots of points) for taking three tries to solve a problem during a test, had no scratch paper—crossed off the 1st two attempts work—but the teacher didn’t like the messy paper. So he suffers from a combination of bad curriculum and bad teacher. The dept head admits that the curriculum is bad—but we have to live with it. My husband comes from a strong math background—and yes, we understand that my son is thinking in a strong mathematical way—he just can’t succeed in the class he is in.
I think he may retake the classes on line—there is no summer school here for kids who test well.
My AS daughter got no significant help in 6th and 7th grade for a variety of reasons. She is highly gifted (IQ-140) and comprehends the material in the class. Basically, since the initial fight to get her qualified, no one at the school has understood her or given her proper help. We average 3-5 iep meetings a year—they will give her an iep, then not follow it. They have broken every law in my child’s case. in 7th grade, they didn’t even tell the teachers she had an iep til 30 days after the beginning of school. They were supposed to train the teachers with in the first 3 weeks—and they did it in March. This year, she is under the inclusion program, has gotten some good support, but they have refused to remediate intensely her learning difficulty -which is writing. She reads at the college level and writes non-fiction at the grade 3.1 level—according to the state standards. She never writes papers, or anything much. I am waiting for the next iep meeting (had to be rescheduled) —so I can tell them I refuse to send her to the public high school that has no program or experience for AS and will send her to a private high school. The school district attorney attends the iep meetings and shows her ignorance (on tape!!) so we will see where this will all play out.

The online or correspondence course is through BYU: http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/index.dhtm

My high school student has done an English class through them and someone I work with son has done a semester of Geometry. The courses are in semesters. Some courses are online and some are not. The ones that are online you offer a choice of if you want to do it online or not. Quizes are usually done online and you get instant feedback. My son felt that the English was more work then retaking it at summer school which he did for the other semester of 9th grade English. He has ended up with 12 semesters of English for High School and by golly he doesn’t have to take remedial English in college. If your son has to be in CPM again next year look at other alernatives: community college, online course again.

Helen

Corresponndence courses could be a *very* good choice. Especially if your husband with the strong math background can schedule three tutoring sessions a week or thereabouts to give consistent direction — this would be so much better than the school class.
BYU is, I believe, accredited, so your school would pretty much have to accept this as transfer credit. Might hate it, but have to.
Now here’s a suggestion: have him do next year’s math in the summer. Then the school can’t force him into a math class that he has already passed. He can take art or music or shop or something else that is worthwhile in a social group. After school, have him do a real math class with Dad, and keep ahead of the school each year this way.
I did something like this with my daughter. After the school system ran around in circles for a couple of years, she was in a middle school that was a pit — police car fairly permanently outside the front door, all test scores far below standards, and all that. The math was a joke. The town’s high school had an excellent science/tech program which was just the thing for her, but our own middle school couldn’t get more that two kids a year out of 300 to pass the test into our own high school program. So I registered her in an algebra class in our local junior college (guess why they still had to teach basic algebra?) and drove her there three mornings a week at 8AM, then back to regular middle school at 9. It worked out pretty well. She got into science/tech and had a great high school experience. The geometry was unfortunately a waste later, but that’s another mess.

thanks for your suggestions—our town will not offer summer school for any time in the near future. the community college has had severe cuts and will not accept high school students—except as a last priority. We will try the online course this summer for at least one math class—($375!) and he can maybe retake the other course on line or at school. He has not passed geometry or Algebra 2—he got steady F’s. UC berkeley extension has CA state high school courses and those will be accepted. He also got straight Fs in Chem-but B’s or better in Mandarin Chinese and English and History. We just got him tested to rule out anything else that might be going on. So next year will be chinese, english, history, bio-tech, maybe one math—photography and maybe one semester of PE.
CA has had such severe cuts in education—more are coming, and there will not be much available in community colleges—they received severe cuts along with the universities—along with tuition hikes. now our elementary schools will have no librarians, no art, no music, no nurses, no early grades motor perception, no supplies and no new books.High schools may have 1 or 1.5 librarians.It is scary.

You made me laugh!!!!!!!

Beth

CPM sounds like a very sad educational trend–worse than whole language—which did teach many kids to read. Can any children actually learn math this way?

Beth

Thanks for the reassurance, kristyk…I think you are right…I think she’s had enough of school this year and to her, that is THAT!

Her sp. ed. teacher is wonderful…I could just hug her everytime I see her! She really seems to like my daughter and they have a good rapport. The reg. ed. teacher, on the other hand, does not seem to like my daughter very much and is personally offended when my girl does some of the things that are so common with AS. I think if the teacher could learn not to take the AS symptoms personally, it would be beneficial to both student and teacher.

I am also in CA. I don’t see how a district can get by without summer school. There most be a law that they have offer a course make-up option. Our summer school is only for make-up. The BYU English only cost us about $100 and my son did it last summer.

Helen

there is no summer school unless you got lower that 40% on the standardized tests or failed the high school exit exam. all elementary summer school is gone, and middle school summer school is limited to those who failed on standarized tests. there is nothing for high school kids who failed a class.

We have asked every question there is.

We are now on round two, starting all over again, because we forgot all the answers of the first questions we asked.

Now I made myself laugh.

And we are not LD!!!

I think I will post my question on the math board, after I look to see if I can find an answer from Joan there to my question.

Beth

Depends what you call learning math, same as with wl it depends what you call learning reading.
If you call learning reading being an accurate an independent reader who can work independently through high school and college, I debate whether wl has taught many kids to read — the amount of remediation necessary in high school and college is incredible, and increasing exponentially.
If you call learning math filling in the approved symbols in the approved blanks, this kind of social game playing works fine. But if you call learning math being able to solve real higher-order problems independently, I sincerely doubt it.

On second thought, I don’t want to be misunderstood. This math program sounds absolutely ghastly, but swinging to the other extreme isn’t a good idea either.

As (almost) always, there is a happy medium here.
There is the “whole-language” school of thought (if you can call it by that name) that wants everything in school to be groups and committees and discussions and cooperative work. This goes contrary to everything that has been learned about doing and teaching math in 2500 years of history. You do not vote on 2 plus 2 or the length of the hypotenuse.
On the other hand, there is the nineteenth century schoolmarm school of thought that wants a perfectly neat slate full of a perfect row of figures and nothing else. This is also not productive. Those answers are useless and pointless unless they are attached to something.
Real mathematicians — and more importantly, technicians and architects and construction workers and engineers and health researchers and medical personnel who apply math to the real world every day — communicate about math all the time. Learning to discuss logically, to work verbally with measures and numbers, to explain how and why something works, and to ask the right questions, are all very useful and important skills.
But first you have to have some knowledge to talk *about*. The idea that you learn by pooling many ignorances just doesn’t work.

In geometry in particular, if you have a good class (which unfortunately my daughter missed), you should be developing proofs and learning how logical argument works — that is actually far more important than the facts about triangles.

I’ve been thinking about this question and am trying to put together what I do that may possibly help.

Yes, please put it on the math board. I got requested to do so the last time a math question filled up the reading board. I’ll get back to you over there.

a

She probably is operating in a “state of confusion”. Sensory integration OT might be a good thing to look into. My daughter has global LD’s (verbal and non-verbal) but bright. Keep listening to this board - you can get some great advice from some of the best “experts” who are NOT your “run of the mill” educators.

You are very sweet.

Actually, if you get me, my mother, my aunt, my daughter, my sister-in-law, and my niece all in one room together, you will run screaming in fear that somebody *has* invented cloning — six big-boned blondes with the same voices and no fear of using them …

My daughter draws out all the dots when doing math problems or does this (TO ME) long and complicated way of figuring out the answer (visualization). She got the hardest problem on the test - the one almost everyone missed (except the rocket scientist). Teacher smiled b/c she knew my daughter “got it” even though it took her longer. Of course, we’re only 4th grade so times they may be a’changing.

Thanks for the reply, Leah!

You are right, there is a lot of good information on this board…I’m glad I found it!