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Carl usually helps him with his math, I was always really good in math, but through the years so much of this stuff I cant remember. I always have to reteach myself before I can help the kids, I always tell them show me where you are and what you are doing then give me your book for an hour then i can help you... Anyhow, Carl and i do math very differently but here lately everytime he help Brandon with his work the poor child get the same grade as if he had done it himself, and then he still doesnt understand it.. So the other night Carl was too tired to think straight and Brandon was working on multiplying and dividing fractions, so I got voted to help. My poor child didnt have a clue( and I firmly believe some people are not meant to teach math... It can be an easy or difficult subject depending if you understand it....This is my third child to have this teacher and everyone of them have struggled to understand what she is teaching them)..... Any way, I started working with him and within the first few he started to understand it enough to do it in his head without having the long process of writing all the steps out. His first paper didnt have the steps on it and he made a 98 on it(we forgot to put dogs at the end of a word problem answer).... His 2nd paper I helped him with was a 90something, and then his teacher marked of until it was a 49 for not showing his work... Now I dont care if she wants him to show his work or not, we can do it either way, but why 1 paper was fine and the next wrong is beyond me!
I will probably be the one helping him most of the time from now on since he is understanding it with me.... Like I told him it is not up to you to understand my way, it is up to me to teach it so that you understand it.
Our son "speaks math" so he often just "knows" the answer without going through all the steps on paper. It was very frustrating to him to have to show his work, because it meant that his homework took longer to do. He had the right answer, but his teachers insisted that he write out the steps so that they could see whether he was using the process they liked, in arriving at his answer.
And see I think they should be able to use whatever steps they want, I had a teacher that would show 2 or 3 differnt ways, to arrive at their answer. It is the child that needs to understand it, not the teacher. And I dont mean that rudely but I know so many children that struggle with math... I use to love my teachers, if they seen that one way of doing it wasnt working and that you couldnt undersstand they would try another way until you understood.... This teacher doesnt do anything close to that.... She just gripes that you arent doing it right.... I remember showing one of my other children how to do some work for her class, they didnt understand her way.... It was one of those I remember my teacher showing me 2 different ways to work thesse problems.. So I worked with them the way the teacher had should them and they just couldnt understand it, so I showed them the other way I knew, and they caught on.... The teacher was mad, didnt matter that the child now understood what they were doing, she yelled and yelled, I went up there to talk to her, just to see what was wrong, and her answer was simple. " I didnt show them how to do it that way and I dont want them doing it that way, only the way they were taught in my class"....... I personally think teachers are great and that they have one of the hardest jobs around, but some of them just shouldnt be teachers.
