Hi,
My son, 16 yo, gr 11, is having a terrible time in math this year. The school started a new math program/curriculum that emphasizes writing. Instead of problems to be solved in the traditional way, students are given a few—5 on a test—“open response” problems. They are then to figure these out and write, in English, their strategy. For a child whose major challenge is getting thoughts from brain to page this is a major challenge.
What has happened is that the child does not “understand” the math if they can’t respond in this way. While I can appreciate the merits of this approach it is a math death sentence for a student like my son. In other classes, like history, there are other assessments, so even if the test writing is difficult he can do better on other things. There are alternatives for the teacher to understand what the child knows/is thinking.
We are going in tomorrow to work on accommodations for this with the sped people, but the teacher has already told me she doesn’t understand why my son can’t do this. I explained that even asking him to do it jams his thoughts such that there is little or no output.
Does anyone have experience with this type of curriculum and appropriate accommodations?
As a final note, this seems like such a bias against students with language issues of any type, and is so unfortunate because those are the students who traditionally might have been good at math, imo. It is so discouraging.
Thanks for any help.
KM
We’ve definitely run into this. My dd routinely fails the state testing because she will do all the math calculations but she refuses to write her explaination of how she solved the problem. (She gets the calcs right.)
Does your son use a scribe for written work? That would be one way to accommodate him on this type of test. Or if he can do it orally to the teacher.