looking for book

DOn’t know that book, but Chinn & Ashcroft have several books (and Chinndoes separately, as well) *full* of teaching and learning strategies for students with LD.

Most “tricks,” I have to say, don’t work for most of my students in the long run. I can, though, sometimes figure out which students will benefit from which tricks and they love ‘em.

I mistrust tricks and the more I see the more I mistrust them. As Sue says, they simply don’t hold up in the log run. And then the student who has been working on tricks for years is left holding the bag, unable to progress and with several years of skipped learning to make up.

I use a lot of concrete llustrations, a continual alternation between reasoning and drill, and old-fashioned books that bring up the sakme topic over and over and over again in sixteen different positions. I ask questions, make sure the student understands and replicates every step along the way, and we plod on. The results are not showy or overnight but they are solid, stable, and permanenet.

Yea, but “same sign, add & keep, different sign subtract - keep the sign of the bigger number, then you’ll be exact” sung to the tune of Row Your Boat… along **with** extensive work on the concepts, that is something that will stick in my guys’ heads when they walk into a test and everything else evaporates :-)
- but those “tricks” that are really mnemonics are different from the shortcut tricks that some of my students have independently evolved (or the weird twists like “send the x over to the other country and flip its sign” instead of adding from both sides of the equation) … they end up backfiring if that understanding isn’t grounded underneath the “trick.” (Now, how do I get B. to *stop* trying to teach that trick to his fellow students/????? Aargh…)

I prefer the rule:

DRAW THE PICTURE AND LOOK AT IT

Seven words, solves the problem of adding signed numbers completely, also solves most issues in trigonometry. Huge time saver.

What picture? (I do have lots of students who draw a number line)

To add signed numbers, you draw vectors, ie directed arrows with the lengths noted. You base the first one at zero and then go up or down as appropriate. You can use a formal number line but the whole thing isn’t necessary, just a zero position and roughly scaled directed number vectors.

Hmmm… I’ll try it - prob’ly won’t *call* ‘em vectors at first :-)

The number line is nifty. How to do your inequalities on the number line is nifty also. Later on, how to do inequalities on the cartesian coordinate system is nifty too. But, one thing that is puzzling is how to do any of that if one does not understand the number line nor the cartesian coordinate system.

You know, one can use a way basic calculator for integers. After trying hard for a long time one can just grow used to a calculator for integers. However, I have recently learned that if you cannot do anything with integers past using a calculator, then you can really be in a bad place academically when you have to learn the number line and graphing.

What would be an intervention for that, then? Heck, I made up a manipulative for graphing that is totally ethical. It is a T Square that I made to look like a cartesian graph in order to know X from Y. It is ethical for schooling because it is just a darned ruler with an X and Y and two number lines marked on it, no formulas or anything are written on there. Man, I use that and everything I can think of for graphing and I am still lagging behind my fellow classmates. But, I have a kind prof and I am going to take my test later than my peers because I am honestly behind in learning this graphing 100%, not in my classwork. So, I think that if an l.d. student is given a calculator when they are a youngster for integers, then it is quite bad. You guys should be commended for not giving a calculator for that stuff with the integers because it totally harms a student not to ever understand the number line.