My daughter is in the 7th grade. Since 5th grade she has struggled with math although it’s always been difficult for her. She is an A/B student but gets D’s and F’s is math. She is in the lowest level math for her grade and still gets D’s and F’s. She’s a hard worker in school but just doesn’t get math. I have had her at Sylvan for 3 months now and they are pleased with the progress she has made but said she is behind schedule. Any suggestions on what else I can do?? Anything would be appreciated. Thanks!
math
Seventh grade is usually a time where there is a great deal of work with fractions. The “Pizza Game” is good but so is cooking, using different measurements. Color coding also helps. What specific area is your daughter having difficulty? I am a special education teacher, doing inclusion in the math curriculum. Can you be more specific and I will try to assist you.
Re: can't get the math
Sue is right. Hurry-hurry and try to cover everything has failed for your child for the last seven or eight years, so more of the same is going to be more failure.
Sylvan has had a lot of poor reviews from parents here, and from my own visit and from working in another profit-making center, I do not think they do all that much good for very many children. These centers provide extra practice and drill; if your child is in a school that doesn’t have enough of these things they may help, but otherwise, for kids who have real problems understanding a concept or who got lost several years ago and never got back on track, the tutoring centers do not usually get at the roots of the problem. They also are generally noisy and distracting environments, and they are not the one-to-one you hope for but one to three with ever-changing staff.
You will do better looking for a good private tutor with good math knowledge (make sure they at least can do high school math so they don’t teach your child dead ends) and with lots of teaching/tutoring experience.
My experience in working with kids with math problems is that the roots go deeper than can be seen on the surface. If a child has trouble starting in Grade 5, most often it traces back to a lack of mastery in Grade 3 or even earlier, for example not really understanding multiplication. Ususally you need to take a few steps back to get a firm footing to move forward; if you try to build Grade 6 and 7 skills on top of the weak foundation you have now, they won’t hold up. better to go back and master the early skills and then work forward. Yes, it takes time — and the present system is adding on another year of failure, so where is the time going now?
Please feel free to ask me if you need help with any specific topics.
Re: can't get the math
I have heard one or two folks who have had good experiences with Sylvan — because an individual tutor was overqualified and not afraid to use all her weapons of individualized instruction. In any situation, if there’s a good tutor-kid fit, I would be reluctant to change :-)
However, a happy tutoring session where the teacher says “oh, yes, you’remaking good progress”… but the kid is *not* saying “I know how to do *this* now” independently… is an expensive game postponing the work.
Don’t try to catch her up… the most common practice in math is to cover everythign with a student who’s behind, every year. Sorta like giving me a 200 pound weight to try to lift, and wonder how I never get it… or shoving me up a mountain ten times and then wondering why I don’t have any actual climbing skills.
Let her master and understand things. If there’s a way she can just skip math while she’s doing it somewhere else, I’d do that. Or figure out soemthign for her to focus on in “regular” math and only worry about that, and grades be forgotten.