Concepts not sticking for son in algebra. Any suggestions..

He needs organized, systematic teaching, not bits and pieces (this is the advice in most fields, right? Even more so in math.)

His teacher with the A for daily homework seems to be working on the theory of throw everything at the wall and hope some sticks. For a certain small number of students who can self-direct and put it together on their own, this can work out; and for a number in the middle, they can go through the motions and rituals and pretend to have learned math which the teacher pretends to have taught, which is all they want to get out of high school. However for someone who really needs teaching and who wants to succeed beyond escaping, this is not good.

Two things to do: First, you really should find a tutor. More bits and pieces of help on top of bits and pieces in school just will not build up a strong system. You need a tutor who is a math person, not an elementary teacher who does math on the side, but a professional math teacher or a college math student.
Second, you need an organized program. You can look at things like Singapore Math if it goes that far, or at old books (pre 1960) in used book stores, or you can get Schaum’s Elementary Algebra and College Algebra self-teaching books — very straightforward and a long-time standard for college and university math and science students.
A tutor and some organized lessons together can really turn things around, and then you can get some value out of the teacher’s daily assignments.

we have a couple Hands On Math books. They seem to really help cement the information. They make a Hands On Algebra you may be interested in.

here it is at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0876283865/104-6548824-5643921?v=glance&n=283155

He might have to focus more on learning than on getting good test grades foer a little while, but it will pay off. Figure out the least he has to do to get those A’s in the homework, make sure you do that, and then spend the othe rhomework time **learning** the math (with a tutor or some of the materials people have mentioned already).
You might even check to see if your local community college has a program called ModuMath which is a pricey piece of software that actually has excellent instruction with good visual & algebraic presentation of everything from the very very basics to college algebra. (We’ve got it, and community colleges are their main market… for that matter, you could contact them and ask if there is an institution near you that has it… try www.modumath.com )

Olive,

Four things.

1. Forget any perfect ideas about what a school represents or will provide. Get what you get from it and accept it as a “helping hand” in educating your son. Resistance, as all the best baddies say, is useless. School, and it’s A’s and certificates, is not the be all and end all of a happy future - as hundreds of millions will attest.

2. You don’t have to buy anything if you have access to the internet. Try a search using the words: algebra lesson
My search returned 290,478 results (adding the word “free” reduced this number to a mere 184,321), the first of which was:
http://www.lessontutor.com/eesAlgebra9SeriesP.html

3. At some point, you’ll have to decide that helping your son might include you having to do a lot more things that are new and/or bothersome than those you’ve learned to accept so far - like learning algebra. Find the lesson in question and learn it yourself (you may have to start at lesson 1), then tutor your son, using free internet resources. Algebra is really, really fun when you get into it. A therapy in itself in an illogical world.

4. Give thanks for the blessing that is your son and all the new things he’s leading you to discover, about the world and your own potential, every day. You COULD be sitting comfortably watching the…no, it’s too horrible an idea to even express on a public forum.

There is a self-teaching homeschool program for Algebra II called Teaching Textbooks. Website is http://www.teachingtextbooks.com.

From what I have heard about this program, a good portion of the beginning is a review of Algebra I, so it could represent a slow start. However, the way the concepts are presented, the program as a whole is excellent. Not sure how helpful it would be to your child for this school year, because it is a very sequential program.

What you might want to do is get a copy of “Intermediate Algebra” by Lial (one of the authors). The ISBN of the student text I am thinking of is 0321064593 if you want to search on Amazon or half.com. It can be an advantage to buy the newest edition in a package that includes the solutions manual (student text only contains answers to odd questions, no solutions worked out). By purchasing a bundle from the publisher, you can get this for the same price as a single new student text. Website for that type of bundle is http://www.aw-bc.com/catalog/academic/product/0,1144,0321279204-VP,00.html

Nancy

Brian, You say that so well, both the goods & the bads :-)

It really makes my day when one of my students starts ‘getting’ the algebra well enough to take control… and they start LOVING it. After all, once you get it, there really is a right answer, and all kinds o fbalance and harmony.

And why wouldn’t they love it? Whatever your personal take is on the whys and wherefores of developmental acronym labels (capital punishment for a crime they didn’t commit?), what causes the symptoms and what might cure them, we may all agree that, for the child in question, it has to be really tiresome to be that confused and that “wrong” all the time.

Anything they may learn that conforms to a simple, unchanging rule, anything that may be logically applied, each and every time, without fear of failure or contradiction, any rock they may cling to in their own individual stormy sea, has to be worth any amount of time and effort on our part to teach them.

[i]For twenty pages perhaps, he read slowly, carefully, dutifully, with pauses for self-examination and working out examples. Then, just as it was working up and the pauses should have been more scrupulous than ever, a kind of swoon and ecstasy would fall on him, and he read ravening on, sitting up till dawn to finish the book, as though it were a novel. After that his passion was stayed; the book went back to the Library and he was done with mathematics till the next bout. Not much remained with him after these orgies, but something remained: a sensation in the mind, a worshiping acknowledgment of something isolated and unassailable, or a remembered mental joy at the rightness of thoughts coming together to a conclusion, accurate thoughts, thoughts in just intonation, coming together like unaccompanied voices coming to a close.[/i]
Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Welp, after a pretty strenuously focused day myself, hearing a student (who isn’t exactly ravening on, ‘cause focus is elusive) quietly chortle “Halleluia! I thinking I’m beginning to understand this!” makes you willing to get up early in the morning and come back tomorrow…