knock on wood

C. is having a good math year.

I've hesitated to say so; I think all of us, the teacher included, are wondering whether this is real. But I think we're past the point at which it makes sense to wonder whether this is a fluke.

The year started badly - dreadfully, in fact - with a D- on the first test.

Things picked up a bit when I pitched in with multiple-houred sessions of parent reteaching, but I figured I was looking at another school year of emergency preteaching, reteaching, and all the rest of the fol de rol.

I wasn't.

Those days are behind us (knock on wood!) I don't preteach, I do very little reteaching, and -- this is the interesting part -- when I do need to reteach, C. picks up the concept rapidly.

This vacation I'm doing a fair amount of reteaching because C. missed 4 days of the last 9 full days of school. He could go in for Extra Help and ask his teacher to reteach the material, but since I want him to return to school after break having completed all 4 of the missed homework assignments, I also need to teach the lessons. In other words, this is something I want to do, not something I absolutely have to do.

Going into the break, I was a bit worried. I had found the homework assignments challenging myself. Somehow the point-slope formula was mixing me up, and I'd never done a word problem involving linear functions.

So I had a time of it figuring the concepts out myself. How was C going to handle it?

He handled it fine.

Yesterday he correctly and efficiently did a point-slope problem I had hosed entirely, then explained his success by saying, "I used logic and reasoning."

Yeah, well, I used logic and reason, too, but I went on a wild goose chase instead of seeing the simple and should-have-been obvious solution. ^* C. looked at the problem and saw the solution immediately.

C. also missed the classroom lesson on finding the equation of a line parallel to another line. That seemed like a fairly big concept to me.

No problem. He instantly saw that a parallel line would have to have the same slope in order to be parallel -- and that it would have to have a different y-intercept if it wasn't going to be the same line. Looking at a line on the coordinate plane while thinking all this over, he had one of his "Oh, yeah" moments. After that he knew how to find the equation without further instruction.

We owe all of this to C's teachers. He has two math teachers this year because 8th graders have "Math Lab" 3 days a week. Both are terrific as far as I can tell. They're also experienced. The main teacher has been at the school for close to 10 years (I think); I'm not sure how long the other teacher has been here but I do know that he taught in NYC schools prior to coming to Irvington. He may also be in the 10-year category or close to.

They've done a fantastic job.


Math A archived exams
Math A Regents prep

knock on wood
true confession
wild goose chase


^* A few years back I read a study that distinguished between great math students and OK math students that I probably can't find again. The difference between the two groups was that the great students produced efficient and elegant solutions while the OK math students went on wild goose chases. They'd solve the problem, but it wasn't pretty.