As previously documented in this space, Kevin’s performance in the Algebra 2 Honors course this year hasn’t been quite up to expectations (should point here, to be fair to Kevin, this is a honors course for 9th graders…he’s one of about 20 8th graders taking it). Did finally end up meeting with his teacher; she’s very nice and asked if there’s anything that she could do and it’s really not that. Kevin just needs to buckle down and:
a) write out all of his work. One memorable night in September (as his parents were figuring out just what was going on with his grades) he was sent back to his room to rewrite his homework. Kevin’s tendency is to try and cram 60 problems, with steps, on one side of a piece of paper. Believe we have this under control now.
b) write down his work. Kevin was losing points left and right because he would do the problem and just write down the answer. He knew this wasn’t acceptable; have no concept why he kept doing it until his concerned Mom and Dad started bearing down and checking everything. This doesn’t happen any more.
c) stop the carelessnesss. Having 60 problems on one side of the paper leads to writing so small that you mistake your negative sign for a dot or something and make a small critical error that kills your problem. We’re trying to teach Kevin techniques to check his work, but, it sounds like that he just doesn’t have time on his tests to do that. For now, he’s forbidden from checking his work in the back of the book for homework; he has to bring it to Mom or Dad first and we’ll check it. I’ll tell him he has 1 or 2 or 3 wrong and we’ve been making him go back and figure out where he went astray.
Is it getting better? Slowly….for the first time this year he hit the maximum on his homework grades (which should be easy points) and the downward slide seems to have stopped. When I work through the problems with Kevin, it’s not that he doesn’t understand it. Which I guess is what has made math this year so frustrating for Mom and Dad (and by extension, Kevin….)
