4. The teacher won’t let them talk while doing exercises — C has been told off for talking when asking her neighbour for help — they have to “work hard now they they are in Year 5”.
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5. So the teacher is the only support for each child. So it takes a long time of C doing nothing until they get to her. Yet when they get to C she says they just do the same explanation again.
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6. C says she doesn’t know how to read her textbook. She was surprised when I told her the book usually has explanations nearby to the exercises and answers in the back to check. She wondered why her teacher didn’t tell them this information.
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7. C says the teacher just writes the formula and that’s all they have, but the formula doesn’t mean anything to her. In particular for triangles she didn’t have any idea what the “base” and “height” were so the area formula was meaningless.
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8. Their actual assignment asked them to draw a garden with rectangular and triangular features and find the area and perimeter of each. Her triangles were all equilateral. The teacher’s only examples were right-angled. No-one helping her seems to have noticed this mismatch.
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9. Even for right-angled triangles, there was no indication in the teacher’s examples of how to find the length of the longest side, which you need for perimeter. The idea that you could draw it and measure wasn’t discussed.
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10. And then even when we did this at home, that meant decimal lengths, which have no examples in their work so far. It’s all been whole numbers. So basically allowing C to use triangles made the assignment multiple layers harder.
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11. Of course, I was only able to find this out after several hours of work, mostly consisting of me helping C to calm down enough to even consider discussing it. /end
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Replying to @DavidKButlerUoA
Thank you very much for sharing this deeply illuminating and extremely painful story. I cannot tell you how I grieve for your daughter, and how agonizing I find her predicament. I have spent almost 20 years trying to fix problems like this. I doubt there's any general solution.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
Yeah. My actual job is helping people at University many of whom have been through this. I never thought my daughter would be one of them.
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Few people escape the fate your daughter is suffering. It's just that some go a little longer before the condition becomes unbearable. Every year, from eighth grade through the baccalaureate, 50% of surviving math students give up on the subject. Those powers of 2 are killer.
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