My younger boy has dysgraphia, which had a major impact on his math. I was searching through my files for the difficulties we had with math, and ran across this lovely little peak into his brain that although not about math, I thought many of you might find interesting. It just shows how complex the brain is, and how real learning disabilities are. I typed this. DS was 16 at the time. "It is not a processing speed problem. It is as if I'm missing a piece of my brains that allows it to make automated movements. Each different letter is not a single sign, it is a collect of strokes that I have to do. Y is 2 strokes; other people have a letter as 1 stroke, they even have whole words as a single movement. I tell my hand to write 'the.' It has no idea how to write 'the'. It tells my brain that. My brain say write a 't'. My hand says which stroke. I say the down stroke. Then it asks what's next. I say the up hook to connect to the h.... I am not drawing letters. I remember when I used to do this when writing thank you notes to grandma, I'm not doing that now. Each letter is composed of 2 or 3 different movements. Some letters are only 1 easy movement like a,e,d. O is hard for me as I do an o as an 'a-stop'. If I don't say stop, I write an a - so an 'o' is two movements. A's are one of the only letters that is automated. N and r are difficult. I naturally do an r, and have to think to extend it to an n. So an n is two steps - an r plus an extension.... It is as if I am on a moving walkway in the airport. My thoughts are like when I walk on the super fast moving walkway. Writing for me is like when you step off. There a physical shock of stepping off and feeling like you are wading through molasses. It is distracting..... When I try to write faster, my hand panics, and it starts to jitter and send signals to my brain saying 'panic.' This negatively impacts my brain, making it unable to send better and clearer signals to my hand."

Each ADHD kid is different, of course. The kid I'm thinking of, could not focus for more than about 90seconds, and then would need to do something else. I personally found it exhausting to try to help him. His parents did not want to medicate him, which I respect.This kid also was being forced by the school to just go way too fast. He was having to go to school, work with me 2x per week, do math homework after dinner, and wake up in the morning to do more math homework. He was working 7am to 9pm 5 days a week, and still had a ton of homework on the weekend. Clearly, way way too much. The problem I had was trying to work at the speed of the school, which for this kid was impossible. Could I have taught him without needing to keep him up with the class? I'm not sure. 90seconds is just not a lot of time to get an algebra concept cemented.

What does your son want to learn? How does he learn? What does your dh want to do? How much time is there each day or week?

I My point to all of this is that there is not 'math skill', rather there are many different components that come together to give a kid success in math. Most, but not all, can be remediated.

My understanding is that the number of neural connections are what give you general intellegence, and the number of neurotransmitters give you speed. So the kid I taught with slow processing speed, had plenty of neural connections to get through calculus, but just not enough chemicals to allow her to work at a neurotypical speed.

I almost put that one in my above list but ran out of time. I have taught 2 kids with dyslexia that had trouble with math because of it. Dyslexia is a decoding problem, and math does require decoding. This problem can be remediated with time. With the kids I taught, they could not do algebra because they could not do fractions, and they could not do fractions because they had not learned their multiplication facts. This is a standard problem with dyslexia but in my experience, dyslexic kids who could not learn their multiplication tables when young, can do it at about 14. So both got them memorized, then I taught them fractions, and then algebra. The only math kids that I have been unable to help is those with ADHD and the kid whose memory was so bad. The ADHD kids simply cannot focus long enough to learn anything, and the kid with the poor memory could understand math and do it, but then couldn't remember it 5 minutes later. The kid with truth dyscalculia would never be able to learn algebra and there was no reason to try. However, we just switched to qualitative stats. The kids with ADHD and the bad memory could not even do qualitative stats.

Yes, that sounds like what happened.

@cintinative My understanding is that learning disabilities are just the bottom of a bell curve, but they are then compared to your general IQ. So if your IQ is low, and your math skill is low, it is not a learning diability. There has to be a decently different percentile to 'count'. That of course does not help a kid who is struggling. I'm a math tutor, and I have seen a lot of stuff. IMHO, the idea that math skill is a single thing that can be measured is ridiculous. Here are some examples of what has caused poor outcomes in math for some of the kids I have worked with. 1. Poor memory. You can teach them something and they simply forget. This requires drill drill drill unfortunately. But I have seen it bad enough that there was no way to remediate it. So a kid who couldn't learn his math facts. I sat with him for 10 minutes with THREE cards 2*7 3*7 and 4*7, and he could not remember them after 10 minutes of drill. This kid could understand math and do it, but would forget it in 5 minutes. That is a kid who will never be good at math because nothing would ever build. 2. Slow processing speed. You can be conceptually very good at math, but then not able to do it fast enough. This can cause a kid to never be able to keep up with a class because everything is just so slow to get done. This is a chemical in the brain issue and cannot be remediated. The solution is individualized program that just goes way slower, or spends way more time each day on math (like 2 hours). The kid I worked with was able to get through calculus, but had to do double the time of a typical student, so like 2+ hours a day 7 days a week. 3. Poor working memory. This is a kid that simply cannot store anything in the brain at all. You especially see this in geometry, where kids often 'see' things, but it is actually a big picture thing they see with some sort of leap. Kids with poor working memory are terrible at geometry because the big picture requires working memory. But they can often be taught algebra because they can simply write every single thing down, even the smallest steps. This will however slow them down. 4. Poor language skills. A lot of math has reading in it. I taught a kid who at the age of 14 could not tell you the answer to "you have 3 apples and I give you 5 more, how many apples do you have?" She did not know if you add, subtract, multiply or divide. However, she could do 3 by 3 digit multiplication and division by hand, and could divide 2 and 1/3 by 5 and 1/7 by hand. This required us to go back to first grade problems and just do LOTS and only slowly build up. By 19 she was taking Calculus. She is now in actuarial science. 5. "true" dyscalculia. This is a kid that has no number sense. I had a kid who had been tested with dycalculia, so I wanted to see how bad it was. I asked her to add 9-7. Using a TALLY CHART, it took her 2 mintues to get 3. Yes 3. She, however, was amazing at language. So I got her through 2 years of statistics with a calculator. She could not pass algebra because she could not understand numbers, but she could USE math to solve problems because she understood language. She just needed a calculator.

LOL. 65sq meters is about 650 sq feet, so I got my unit wrong! I have, however, lived in 200 sq feet with my dh and a baby. Now that was a bit tight.

I always find it so interesting that most people on this board are either rural or suburban. There are some city folk like us, but not many. I really feel for your transportation issues - it is just such a huge issue for so many of you. My younger boy had 9 activities per week because he loved loved loved being out and engaged in the world. But starting at the age of 12 he walked or bused to all but one. So while he was gone in the afternoon, I picked up tutoring for high pay and squirrelled away some money. City living is expensive, and we lived in only 65 sq feet with 2 children, but from the point of view of transportation, it was worth it.

Sometimes it just takes longer for some kids, and sometimes kids do better as they get older and their brain matures. I totally get the secondary math being frustrating thing. I am in the camp of doing math that is useful for kids like your daughter. Qualitative statistics would also be a good choice.

I did not implement the writing program that I laid out. Instead, I did what you mentioned above, I used bits and pieces from all the curriculum that I had read and taught it on a need to know basis. Basically, by reading all the different programs, I now knew how to teach writing and didn't need to follow them as written. LToW: Agreeing with Cintinative, you can use the ANI chart and the 5 common topics without getting buried in LToW Writing across the curriculum: this is done exactly as you described. You use the topics your kids is learning about, and teach them how to write with those topics. It is much more efficient and usually more fun than a separate writing curriculum. So on the first essay, you make sure they know the 5 paragraph essay style and have them focus on that. Then you read it, and make 3 suggestions for edits - maybe one structural, one gramatical, and one stylistic. Then you start the new paper. You pick something to teach, maybe the hook and have him focus on that. Now you expect the essay to have both the 5 paragraph structure and the hook. Then you pick 3 things to edit on that paper and move on. Rince and repeat. Oral compositions: Have him orally write a paragraph. So if you are working on the hook. Have him say to you in 'written language' not casual oral language, a hook for 3 different topics that he is not going to write down, but is just practicing orally. We also used to play an oral game called 'the best' that I made up. As fast as you can, tell me why the color paint used on my wall is the best. Next time it could be 'tell me why this style of heater is the best', "Why is xxx character in xxx movie is the best?". Whatever you want. First they list the 3 things. Then they have to orally write a very short 5-paragraph essay arguing for the best. You do it too, where they pick the topic. It is a fun game, and you can make it harder and harder by picking things that the kid knows less and less about or that are more and more silly. 'why are those clouds the best?' 'Why is the drain outside our back door the best?' Anything you want. Really helped my kid get faster at thinking and writing the basics. Grammar: if you love it, do it! My older boy loved it and did heaps.

My older boy is not fast. Here in NZ they don't have tests like AMC or AIME -- all math competitions are proof based. So he got into the IMO camp with the equivalent of the USAMTS - a one month take home exam. To this day, he is just not fast enough for things like the AMC, not all kids are.

Sounds to me like she needs 1 on 1 instruction, not a classroom. Can you hire a tutor or teacher her yourself?

My grandfather was a young chemist in 1940 and was drafted to help build the bomb. He never discussed how he felt about being forced to work on the Manhattan Project or how he felt about it being used on Japan.

I agree with Momto6, sounds like your son is ready to write across the curriculum. This approach is more efficient than using a curriculum, because writing across the curriculum is tailored exactly to where your son is at and what he is already learning. Plus, you find it easy to implement which means that your teaching will be more targeted. Teach one new thing each essay, and have him focus on one thing to improve with each essay. Then after the essay is completed, give 2 or 3 suggestions. As for oral work, I did a lot of this with my younger and it helped him pick up speed. In order to do well in GCSE, your son will need to get faster so that should be one of your goals. You can do this through 1) writing more essays (practice increases speed, 2) learning a set structure (IEW approach), 3) Oral composition (which allows for more practice). If this gets too repetitive, you could vary the style of essays to give a bit of variety, so some are just school type essays and others are more creative nonfiction (longer and with more advanced features, deviating from an IEW essay approach). LToW - I reviewed this curriculum a while ago. I do not find it easy to implement and there is a lot of teacher prep. What it is really good at, is teaching 'invention'. So if your son has nothing to say, you could use their methods for invention without using their curriculum. Grammar - If you are worried about time, IMHO grammar will not help with speeding up your son's writing. If he loves it, by all means keep doing it. But otherwise, the most efficient path is to remind him of his grammar knowledge while you and he are editing and proofreading his papers. I would suggest that he pick a sentence in each paragraph that he thinks is awkward, and then figure out grammatically why it is odd. Then fix it. Very efficient, and directly relevant to his own writing. HTH Ruth in NZ

That is super cool! And it brings up a good point. You can call a class 'Ecology' but study it in different ways. We studied Biology this way. We zipped through the basic content and then focused in the second half of the year on Biostatistics and modelling of population dynamics in the rocky intertidal zone. DS was a mathy kid, so we focused most of our effort on the math of biology. So if you want it both ways, pick the standard classes and then study the topics in non-standard ways. This allows your child to cover the bases but still have deep dives.

I've often wondered if it is applied vs theoretical interests. I *used* math to answer ecology questions, and I *hate* AoPS and its style of problem solving. Whereas my ds is theoretical. He creates math to solve problems, and loved AoPS and their style of problem solving. So for jobs, maybe this cut.... Math Content focus: engineers, mathematical biology, acutuarial science, economics, statisticians Problem solving focus: mathmaticians, theoretical physicists

Hanging? 0. I don't have a closet. lol We do have one closet in our apartment, but my dh took it over many years ago for his suits.🙂

You can take unschooly interests and then study them with academic methods. This is what I did with my younger. No textbooks, no traditional classes, just difficult questions that he was curious about that we went about trying to answer through research, discussion, writing, thinking.

So the question is: What is the larger view? For my older, this was classic literature. Lots and lots of deep, powerful, reading. For him the larger view was understanding the human condition and all the different ways people can experience life. For my younger, this was big picture problems - The effect of colonialism in Africa. The economic, political, and social response to the Indian Ocean tsunami, etc. The larger view for him, was that real life is not silo-ed like high school classes. Seems like you need to have a think about what the larger view means to you and your child.

I completely agree. I think it is more the worry that I avoided. I think it takes a strong person to go their own in homeschooling way knowing that in the end they will be 'judged' based on typical American expectations of an education. Clearly, going your own way works both to educate a child and to get them into a good school, it is just a scary path to follow for many. I think this is why homeschooling has headed more and more over the decades into outsourced classes in highschool. Those of us that do it our own way are becoming the exception to the rule.

Not speaking directly to you SeaConquest, but using this as a jumping off point to people who are new to accelerated math kids. I did want to comment on the 'slowing down'. I think many newbies could this means not letting kids move forward in math or not letting them do as much math as they want. But what a lot of us mean is focusing on the other stream of math - problem solving. As I see it there are main 2 parallel streams in math -- Content and Problem Solving. The American school system is almost exclusively the Content Stream, so kids get very asymmetrical in their math ability. This is what AoPS calls the 'Calculus Trap'. So 'slowing down', can be put more positively as evening out the skills in these 2 streams by putting a massive focus on Problem Solving and Proof Writing, and not marching forward in content. The Problem Solving stream takes a very long time to become skilled in, but because it is so difficult to 'measure', it is not the focus of a school system that needs data and proof of learning. But my ds found his focus on Problem Solving during middle and high school served him very very well in University and now into Grad School.

Sure. By age 10, I was pretty sure there was something wrong. DS had beautiful handwriting but it was unbelievably slow, and he could not seem to spell anything, and had no idea where to put a period. He could write and edit and make good pieces of writing, but I seemed to be way too involved. So from age 10-12, we worked intensively on increasing his handwriting speed -- fun speed drills, challenges, timers, etc. NOTHING worked and it only created stress. We also worked intensively on spelling -- a solid 30 minutes per day (and had since he was 8), and we tried 8 different programs, once again, NOTHING worked. We worked on grammar, because he could not understand where a period went. But through all this, he had just beautiful style to his writing, adult level style. So I just struggled with thinking he had dysgraphia. At the age of 12, having worked diligently for all of primary school, I finally came to understand the challenge I was facing. The reason his handwriting was beautiful but slow was because he was drawing all the letters, and he could not remember how for form them, so to write an 'h', he would coach himself with his internal voice "start at the top and one hump". This was for every letter. For spelling, he could spell words by sounding them out because he knew the rules and had good phonemic skills, but nothing was automated. He had to sound out even basic words like 'cat' to write it. He could not remember how to spell any irregular words including 50 of the top 100 words. For punctuation, even though we had done years of grammar, he could not identify parts of speech, or tell you what was the subject, or where a period went, or how a sentence was structured at all. For paragraphs/essays, he could not write an introductory sentence, and could not structure a full essay by himself at all. Even after years of narration, and IEW and WWS work. Basically, he could read but was illiterate in writing. And this was after an academic education with a diligent parent for 6 years. In addition, there was a huge problem with math. He could not encode ideas into symbols, which of course is what math is. He tested off the charts (quite literally) on mathmatical understanding, but he could not ENCODE. He was very very 2e here. I won't go into our math troubles unless you are also struggling. So starting at 12, we got him tested. He scored 99 percentile IQ, and 5th percentile for all the above skills. This qualified him for testing accommodations, which he still uses today in university. Then we developed a plan. 1) we would abandon handwriting with the exception of math. 2) we started 'typing dictation' for 30 minutes per day to remediate his spelling and punctuation in the context of writing. We started with Cat in the Hat. The goal was automation of some sort. Over the following 5 years, we moved up the books to Frog and Toad, and then Narnia, and then harder books that gave him joy. He absolutely loved this time as much as I hated it. But it worked. 3) We wrote together for 2.5 hours per day. We folded all literacy education into this time. We researched, we outlined, we discussed paragraph style, we wrote, we edited. We trialled mindmaps, coloured pens, outlining text, cutting up others work and moving sentences around. Basically, we tried every single thing I could think of to help his mind understand language. The key is that we did ALL of this together, and without a program or worksheet. I adapted to where he was at on the day, and we would move forward. Now, at age of 19, he is successful. He can type an essay test under time pressure and get an A. He has amazing proofreading skills, outlining skills, and writing skills. He still needs me to work with him as a writing tutor on large research papers that are required for some classes in unviersity. He gets 10 extra minutes for every hour in tests. He does not physically write, and he got someone else to filling in bubbles on his scantron chemistry exam last week. But besides that, he has achieved what he set out to achieve. It was an enormous effort, superhuman in some regards. But we did it, and I am very proud of him.

My younger ds has dysgraphia. We waited for a diagnosis until he was 12, because I suspected it already and only got him assessed to get testing accommodations. For us, since my ds was not in school, there was no 'assistance' that we needed. Rather, we just had to do the hard work. 3 hours per day of working side-by-side for 6 years starting at the age of 12. For us, there was no magic bullet. Hard work was the answer. I'm happy to answer questions about what we had to do if that would be helpful. To anwer your question: I think you know there is a problem, so there is. Testing can confirm this, but it is clear to you there is a problem and you are the primarly educator and parent, so trust your gut.