who's the boss?

Following instructions is important.

But does there come a time when following the instructions is actually injurious?

Some background:

The student had previously demonstrated the ability to go far beyond the work currently being done in the classroom. But yet in this case, the instructions became more important that the content.

Look closely at the picture.

You can see the erasure marks.

When a student is more advanced than the work being given, would it be better to have FIXed the worksheet?

Catherine here, parachuting into Vormath's post

I wouldn't normally post an anecdote about my own kid inside someone else's post about her kid, but in this case, because we've had so many Comments, I think this material belongs here.

For new visitors, I'll explain that quite a few parents here have mathematically gifted kids.

I do not. Nor is my child studying a constructivist math curricula (thank heavens for small favors). He is in the 8th grade & taking New York state's standard Math A course, which you can take a look at here or here, if you're interested.

The material in Math A is not hard.

Here are a couple of questions from the 2006 Math A Regents exam:

While solving the equation 4(x + 2) = 28, Becca wrote 4x + 8 = 28.
Which property did she use?
(1) distributive (3) commutative
(2) associative (4) identity

What is the product of 10x⁴y² and 3xy³?
(1) 30x⁴y⁵ (3) 30x⁵y⁵
(2) 30x⁴y⁶ (4) 30x⁵y⁶

A micron is a unit used to measure specimens viewed with a microscope.
One micron is equivalent to 0.00003937 inch. How is this
number expressed in scientific notation?
(1) 3.937 × 10^-5 (3) 3937 × 10^-8
(2) 3.937 × 10⁵ (4) 3937 × 10⁸

The test contains some short answer word problems, too:

In Clark Middle School, there are 60 students in seventh grade. If 25 of
these students take art only, 18 take music only, and 9 do not take either
art or music, how many take both art and music?

Running at a constant speed, Andrea covers 15 miles in 2 hours.
At this speed, how many minutes will it take her to run 2 miles?

A recent survey shows that the average man will spend 141,288 hours
sleeping, 85,725 hours working, 81,681 hours watching television,
9,945 hours commuting, 1,662 hours kissing, and 363,447 hours on
other tasks during his lifetime. What percent of his life, to the nearest
tenth of a percent, does he spend sleeping?

So that's Math A.

I took the exam after working my way through Saxon Algebra 1. I passed with distinction:

Raw score: 76 out of 84.
Scaled score: 94 out of 100.

I missed 4 2-point items. One was a logic problem, one was on probability, and one asked me to determine the equation of a perpendicular line. I had never seen any of these topics before, so I missed the answers.

I missed only one item on a topic I had studied, and that was a graphing-a-linear-equation problem, a procedure I could do in my sleep when I took the test. So I chalk that miss to temporary brain freeze.

In short, I worked my way through Saxon Algebra 1 without benefit of class or a teacher, I took Regents Math A, and I missed one question I'd studied before.

Not a hard test.

C., my child, is your basic bright, industrious, middle-class kid with parents who happen to have 2 Ph.D.s and 3 Distinguished Teaching Awards between them (sorry, I know that's boasting, but it's relevant) so he gets a lot of teaching at home, both direct and incidental. A whole lot.

The reason I'm posting here, inside Vormath's post, is that C. is experiencing the mirror opposite of what Vormath's gifted child is experiencing; he is being given work that is far over his head, work he can't possibly do on his own without extensive parent reteaching and/or expensive tutoring (rates start at $80/hr), and my school is not going to do anything to fix this situation.

The result is that he is having the same experience V's child is having: he is being forced to do work that is not at his level, and his parents cannot persuade the school to provide him a curriculum that is at his level. The school does not respond to parents. Period.

I'll add that it's not just C. who is "struggling," the middle school term of art for kids in C's boat. Quite a few of the kids are struggling, and the school is well aware of the situation. Kids have always struggled in this course; suffering, struggling, and failing in the middle school accelerated math track is a time-honored tradition at the middle school.

Why is C. struggling?

He is struggling because the "Phase 4" track, which is simply the regular math track accelerated by 1 1/2 years, is and has always been built to serve as a "wash-out" course. In Irvington, Phase 4 math has been to academically inclined middle schoolers what biochemistry always was to pre-med students and probably still is.

It's the course that separates the men from the mice.

I suspect that no one in the math department would admit this today; I don't know that anyone admitted it in the past. The steady failure of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students in accelerated math has always been seen as natural and inevitable, nothing to do with the curriculum, the pedagogy, or the teaching. In fact, the math chair, who was respected and even revered, seems to have been widely viewed as fair and caring, a teacher who tried her best to keep faltering 12 year olds in her class. The one time I spoke with her directly, I liked her very much myself.

At home the "tries hard" children -- I owe this expression to Rudbeckia Hirta -- would cry over their homework and their grades (I know the stories firsthand); at school parents would meet with the math chair; together the grownups would search for some solution. Finally the child, or the parents, would give up. "It's not worth it," the parents would say, and they were right. It wasn't. It wasn't unusual for the regular-track kids to fare better on the state tests than the accelerated kids. Parents who lived through those years told me these things, and I believe them.

Watching this scene unfold year in and year out, parents and students have drawn the appropriate conclusion. Last year one of the kids on C's bus, who is mathematically talented, as are his sibs, told the other kids, "Ms. X [former math chair and, I assume, developer of the course] was a great teacher. She washed kids out if they couldn't do the work."

In case you're wanting specifics, here's how you take a group of bright kids who've tested into a beginning algebra course and set them up for failure. Consider this schedule:

• Friday, 9-21-2007: first homework containing word problems assigned

• Friday 9-28-2007 test on consecutive integer problems & motion problems

We're talking about perhaps 5 days of class time. These students had never set up and solved a simple algebra problem; they had never written -- or even seen, unless their tutors taught them outside class -- a "let x equal" statement. Starting from nothing, then, in 5 days the kids were taught:

• number word problems
• consecutive integer word problems
• distance word problems (2 trains left from a station)
• coin problems
• age problems
  

And there you have it. If this is Tuesday, it must be consecutive integer problems.

The district flatly refuses to address the situation, or even to acknowledge that it exists. This is just the way it is. Math A is a "hard" course; at most 10% of the kids should be taking it according to one of the teachers at the middle school. Instead the course is oversubscribed with 25% to 30% enrolled because pushy parents got their kids in where they didn't belong. (So they get what's coming to them. This, too, is not said, but we hear it.) This has been the narrative for many, many years, and it will take a paradigm shift to change it.

Meanwhile we have no disadvantaged kids taking algebra in 8th grade; we have virtually no middle class kids taking algebra in 8th grade. On back to school night, when you look around the classroom, you see that the children we do have in the class are the children of doctors, lawyers, scientists, and professors.

And a number of these children are struggling.

In Irvington, you (almost) need to be the child of an internationally known research physician to survive algebra in the 8th grade.

What this group blog is about, in part, is the fact that nearly every parent (and many of the teachers) here is dealing with a school district that simply does not respond to parents, to dissident teachers, or to the broader public.

By and large our schools, at least in my experience, do what they do. It seems they always have.

What's different now is that parents, teachers, and the broader public have blogs and YouTube and Yahoo. We can protest in plain view.

And we do.