need help for dd - long

Many people who understand language LDs seem to have trouble understanding trouble dealing with spatial things or numbers. Gee, she’s bright, what’s *your* problem? Yet you know that it *is* a real problem.

If she’s very talented musically, then I suspect she has better number sense than she gives herself credit for, which would mean the anxieties are the biggest hurdle there (and that’s not to minimize them in any way). Music involves an intuitive sense of those threes and fours in order to keep the timing straight — and in fact, this could be the key to helping her understand math, if she can make it a logical and even an auditory process.

When was she tested? How would she feel about being “labeled” as having a learning disability? SHe could get accommodations and perhaps course substitutions in math with a documented disability — so if you could find a tester who could see past verbal skills, you might be able to get her some guidance. It would also mean she’d have a place to go with whatever learnign challenges came up. Where is she going to be going to college? What kind of services do they have?

Paul NOlting has written a good book about succeeding in Math despite anxieties adn LDs called “Winning at Math.” From his writings I infer that he works in a college setting — he states (in another book) that more people than we’d think go through college but the few math courses are what keeps them from graduating, even though they are very bright and successful in other aspects of learning.

HOpe this gives you a few more ideas to think about :)

How does she do with interpreting graphs? I could see that being an issue in some non-math courses, as well as interpretations of statistics, though I think good reasoning skills could serve her well if she learns to apply good logic.

Barbara,

I think you might find this article on Spatial Relations and Learning of interest.
You will see your daughter in the article.

http://www.blarg.net/~building/spneeds_arkspatial.html

Helen

Sue,

Thank you so much for responding. Dd has no problem with being retested (she was first tested back when she was 10); she would be relieved to find out why she has this difficulty and find ways to work around it.

She will be in a university that provides accommodations, and she’s only got one more math course to get through, but she did actually just tell me that when she gets into the *real* complex music rythyms, she sometimes gets a little lost. I forgot to mention that she’s also always been on the clumsy side, like her mom. ;-), which is why I kept thinking about that low score on spatial skills.

I will definitely look for the book you suggested, and we’re going to go ahead and start asking around for referrals to someone who can do the testing.

Thanks again! :-)

Barbara

Helen,

I’m going to print this article so I can read it more carefully; I definitely saw my dd in it. Thanks very much for posting it.

Barbara

Actually a lot of what you describe of your daughter sounds like me. I had a terrible time with math starting about the 4th grade,it took until the 6th grade with help from a cousin to learn times tables.The only time I did ok was in 9th grade, the school district had a program that made algebra 1 a two year program. Unfortunately my family moved and I once again in 10th was doing poorly. I didn’t have to take any more high school math after that though. In college, I took the general math class twice(dropped it the first time because I was failing). I was in band also in high school, I couldn’t sight read very well after 32nd notes, but if I heard how the passage sounded, I could play it. My 7th grade son is working on mixed fractions(all operations), I absolutely am lost with them. Dad has to help.

I have a hard time finding my way to places that I have been to hundreds of times. My 12 yr old son helps me get where we are going. I can’t read the directions for building something nor can I exactly use just pictures(I get lost at busch gardens trying to use the picture map), it takes both. I am not able to put together even the child puzzles. A class where this was a problem was economics, when the teacher would put up a graph or chart, it meant nothing to me. Or my Fl history class when I had to put the settlements down on a blank map of the area around Pensacola for a test.

I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 10. Forget sports.Totally inept. I tell folks the only reason I passed was because I wore the shorts. I can’t parallell park to save my life.

However, like your daughter I was an early reader, I still love to read. I was also one of those folks who wrote the outline after I wrote the paper. I graduated from college, the first two years were the hardest because of science and math classes but I got through them. I have a degree in social science interdisciplinary, it mostly encompasses history, political science and a smattering of things like cultural geography, comparative economics, cultural anthropology, sociology, basically where I could read a lot about things I found interesting and had little or nothing to do with math or science. So your daughter can be successful. The junior college I attended had opportunities to go to a math remediation tutoring class( I should have gone, it was suggested to me after my entrance testing), but I have no documented disability other than my dx of add/in last spring(and I am old now). Look into the services available to students with disabilities(tutoring, class accommodations,etc.) at the school your daughter plans to attend. There may be something in place that you could access with the diagnoses she already has.Wish you the best.

I’m working with lots of folks who failed lots of math but who are trying to get through it in junior college. For the most part, if you take it at your own pace with a good teacher who won’t let you take the *wrong* short cuts, most folks really can learn the stuff.
I’ve become convinced that we grossly overestimate the importance of innate abilities.

You’ve got it in one.

In Japan and Germany, where students average one or two years above North America (and before all the old excuses are trotted out, on an *American* test, and yes, in ALL schools, not just the elite) and where “math anxiety” that afflicts half or more of our students here is rare — well, there students asked to explain why they did well in math almost universally gave **hard work** as the reason. Here, where we spend the most money for the worst results, students think math achievement is due to innate ability. Which attitude is one of success, and which is predetermined for failure?

Almost everyone can achieve in basic math — all you need is clear explanations, time, and hard work. The problem is that we have texts that are clear as mud, spiral curricula that try to cover every topic every year in two weeks or less, and both students and teachers who calmly accept and even approve of math failure as “normal” (People who are actually good at math and like it are geeks and nerds, right?).

I didn’t want to jump into this topic and offer advice earlier becuase by the time things have gotten to college, attitudes and habits are pretty much set and often survival is the only goal left. I tried to teach college level for five years and things got worse every year as the colleges adopted more and more of the programs and policies that are already known failures in high schools — one of them being pushing students ahead whether they understand or not, and another being expecting calculators and computers to do everything for you.

If you want to get ahead in math, you can get ahead in math. Sometimes you have to back up several steps and re-set the foundations before you can move ahead, but it can be done. Just get a real tutor who teaches instead of shoving more formulas at you, and it is amazing how much you are capable of.

Without the arbitrary attitude barriers of “well, if it isn’t easy, you shouldn’t even be in this class trying” that pervades american culture, over time a person could actually get pretty far.

I remember reading an article that started wiht contrasting cultural examples — that in America, if there were two children, and one was not as bright as the other, then one would aim for med school and the other would be encouraged to go into other fields. In Japan (I believe), the other son would simply be expected to work harder to get into medical school.

My nonld sixth grade daughter is very good conceptually at math but struggles with the actual math facts and problems. She has always scored very high on some aspects of math on standardized tests but rather mediocore on math facts. She has spent one year in a pretty demanding parochial school where they don’t use a spiral ciriculum and she gets tons of math homework. Interstingly enough, her IOWA math facts scores went from 40 to 85% in one year. Says something abou tthe power of teaching I think.

Beth

I surely would be happy if one of you would name the American math programs that are acceptable! I am not sure whether my child’s Saxon Math is spiral or not since she is only in first grade and that is all I’ve seen. I am assuming you mean that a spiral currriculum skims over multiple skills rather than teaching in depth. You do think some review of previous skills is important, though, right?

Janis

Instead of thinking of it as a spiral, the curriculum would better be imagined as a building — and yes, you go down and firm up the foundations as often as needed, or about twice as often as you *think* you need, if you’re going to teach it well. Review is very, very important. IT’s reviewing, too, that helps you make connections and get a deeper understanding — not to mention the automaticity that makes it so much easier to apply what you know to the next harder step because the easier stuff is … automatic.

Math when taught right is much like a language — if you really know it, you use it without thinking too much about it and thus you are practicing and reviewing. To me, algebra was a very logical extension of arithmetic, not a separate set of procedures. THe primary principle of my education was that “mathematicians are lazy.” So — multiplication is just a lazy way of doing addition…exponents are a lazy way of writing multiplication. However, the step before *had* to be really well understood for me to be able to see its connection to the next higher step.

It takes more time to build that kind of knowledge than to just say “here is an example, do the rest of these like that.” Sometimes the teacher doesn’t realize that it takes more than the time to explain the ideas for it to really sink in; kids need to wrestle with these new ideas. They’re changing their brains when they hold more abstract ideas in there and relate those ideas. So
“Lots of homework” if it’s imitating how symbols are manipulated is a lot less valuable than two of the right kinds of problems… but on the other hand, just doing something three times and moving on is also a huge, huge mistake. IF you’re the adult that understands the math, you see the simple and the complicated ones… you don’t have to do a bunch of easy ones, then one that’s a little harder… I remember a dreadful calculus book I had which taught the concept — and then the assignments were the next step harder!! Not one chance to practice what was presented in the example, with a similar problem. Fine if you’re naturally gifted… but I was one who needed to be taught.

http://fyi.cnn.com/2002/fyi/teachers.ednews/02/16/schools.courses.ap/index.html

I haven’t seen this article, but the “courses go too fast” issue is complicated.

(a) If you don’t have the preparation and expect the teacher/instructor to do all the work for you not only for the course you’re registered in but also for the two or three previous levels, well yes, of course the material is going to be at jet speed.
Having been the horrible mean teacher who followed the easy popular teacher who just didn’t happen to teach, on a number of occasions, I can tell you there is just no answer to this one. This has happened to me at every level from junior high to pre-engineering.
Lie and break every principle you have, pass on kids who are just incapable of doing the things they need to do and are guaranteed to fail big time in the real world, or lose your job.
I happen to work a lot with senior high and college and university as well as elementary, so I see the real world giving a lot of people a kick in the pants, and I see the slippery slope in K-10 that led to it.

(b) If you come to college with two jobs and kids and expect to get out of assignments and standards by whining how difficult life is, same as above. I had a large man in a Calculus 3 pre-engineering class try this one. I felt for him, but I don’t want a professional whiner building the bridge I drive over, thank you, I want someone who learned some engineering. That’s the real world kick in the pants for you.

(c) The spiral curriculum tries to cover twenty topics in a year, meaning less than two weeks each.*Yes, that really is too fast.*Nobody really learns the material, and the test scores and dropout rates show it.
The solution is to make up a curriculum that focuses on two or three topics a year plus *related* review that naturally ties into the new topic, ie for example decimals are a good time to review base ten from the ground up, area and volume are nice ways to use multiplication and formulas, and so on. The problem with making up a sane curriculum is that everybody guards their individualism tightly and won’t accept a US national curriculum, and state-by-state curricula would make moving difficult; this has the ironic effect that the US does have a national curriculum as set by test makers and textbook writers, and the cover-everything-every-year has been accepted as covering everybody’s standards (and mastering none, but the text writers still make profits.)

(d) Back to college level, a bit of simple arithmetic I tell my students every semester (although most of them prefer not to believe it). High school: 180 days times 40 to 45 minutes teaching time gives 120 to 135 hours teaching, without tests etc. 110 hours minimum in class. College: 14 weeks times three meetings per week times fifty minutes per meeting gives 35 hours in class. Hmmm … 35 hours versus 110 — about 1/3 the time. Guess why college instructors don’t play learning games? Don’t re-teach every problem in detail before the test in the name of “review”? Don’t go over every single problem in the text with you? Don’t take class time to discuss your emotional difficulties? Go over the material once and expect you to catch it, or else come to the office on your own time?
A simple rule that is handed out in many college classes: for every hour in class, you *must* spend two hours outside class (that’s where the difference between 35 and 110 comes in, you see). And it’s a good idea to spend a lot more than that.
College instructors lecture and test because that’s what they are given time for. The traditional assumption is that by the time you get to college you’re mature enough and responsible enough to do work on your own, and in fact serious studentsshould be insulted by having to have someone breathing down their neck. Recent social changes and steady breakdown of high school preparation are making this assumption more and more tenuous, but without doubling fees yet again the time just isn’t available.

So the “courses go too fast”issue is compounded of unrealistic cover-everything commercially designed elementary curricula, poorly prepared and unmotivated teachers followed by desperate frantic catch-up, social promotion followed by frantic catch-up attempts, unrtealistic expectations in college, and the design of traditional college courses for which students aren’t prepared.

And its (valid IMHO) argument is that the compression of the material means true understanding of it is sacrificed, even if you came into it with a good background.
At our meeting of developmental reading and writing teachers we discussed lots of the points you brought up — they’re just as true for those disciplines (hmmm…. wonder why I chose that word :)). The teachers expressed the need to be accountable for not promoting students to the next level wihtout certain skills (such as making verbs and subjects agree) — and the rude “reality check” so many students got when the teachers wouldn’t just proofread and “fix” what they had written.

Well …

AP courses are *supposed* to cover college material in the high school. Now here the high school teachers have a HUGE advantage.

As worked out in my previous post, high school teachers have 110 hours of actualteaching time versus 35 hours in a college/university class.

So you can take AP English or Calculus at age 17 with the teacher you know and like and have 110 hours for a nice easy teaching pace, or you can take Freshman English or Calculus at age 18 in a new college with a total stranger instructing (often a totally inexperienced first-year grad student) and a new grading system and have only 35 hours of teaching time.

I work a lot with AP and freshman calculus and it is a very standard class covering a very standard set of material. It can be covered in the time given, if you want to. I’ve seen both good and bad teaching in this as with anything else.

Sorry, I have no sympathy for schools where too many students are failing AP classes. The kids must be entering those classes unprepared. Either the school’s general program is weak — a very common problem — and they are using the AP courses as an excuse; or they are taking too many kids who are not ready for college/university work and pushing them ahead into AP either to fill up the classroom (a notable goal of many administrators who count only dollars) or to make the parents proud.

Again, 110 hours in high school versus 35 hours in college/university; if you want depth, you have a better chance in high school, but in *either* case this is supposed to be a college class for a young adult student, and reading/study/work outside of class is necessary — *that* is where the depth comes from, not from a teacher spoon-feeding you.

Your daughter sounds a lot like my daughter, who is 10 years old right now. We had her tested at the age of seven, and she is due for a re-evaluation this year. She was diagnosed with ADHD but also has strong signs of something called NLD - nonverbal learning disorder. You might want to investigate this regarding your daughter. The simplest way to sum NLD up is that there will be a great discrepency between the Verbal IQ score (would be high) and the Performance IQ score (would be low). These kids have great language (verbal) skills, (but poor comprehension of abstract information) but low skills with math, spatial, abstract material. My own daughter fits this, and I am considering homeschooling right now because the public school doesn’t have the high standards that I have for what I would like her to achieve. They are basically pushing her through school, it is apalling.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about helping you, not my own daughter. Sorry…. :) I would suggest that you check out websites about NLD, there are a couple out there, and they usually are fairly helpful. Hope this helps….