chilliepepper
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Posts posted by chilliepepper
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Oh, that's right. When I posted I wasn't sure which board it should go on, since a lot of kids do Algebra 1 in middle school. I'll post it over there too.
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After a year and a half, my (now) 10th grade son has finally completed Mr. D. Algebra 1. Although most of his quiz/test grades are As and Bs (some after several attempts), I'm skeptical of his mastery of the concepts since he only did the written coursework sporadically and all of the quizzes and tests were multiple choice. Recognizing a correct answer is different from coming up with it on your own.
Is there a test I could have him take, to see if he really got it? Maybe just do a Saxon placement test or something?
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9 hours ago, melmichigan said:
Did the go through the workbook sample, they read and take notes to fill in their "workbook" from the videos?
Are you saying that there is a workbook sample somewhere? If there is, can you direct me to it?
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Just now, Farrar said:
CC is expensive, but I always think, well, so is ending up with a year of hand-wringing and wasted time.
You are not wrong. 🙂
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9 hours ago, Farrar said:
Since Mr. D's has gotten a bit of a bad rap in this thread, I feel somewhat obliged to defend it. The live class really does help and the work level is just right for my busy dancer in his full time program. Making it work for my kid who does like to take shortcuts has meant I do need to spot check the work periodically and check in that it's getting done. However, once we had a routine down, it has mostly worked pretty well for him and me. I feel like he's progressing and understanding and it's fine. He's not a very academic kid, so I feel good that he'll be able to go through calculus before the end of high school and we'll probably have him finish out math at the community college next year. When he was mostly done with Mr. D's Algebra II, he placed into college precalc when he took the Accuplacer (which, it's a really cruddy test, but still, I felt fine about that) so I feel reasonably confident that he'll be able to place into calc after the Mr. D's precalc course for next year.
"The work." It really all boils down to that. The Mr. D coursework has a LOT of practice problems, and I gather they are repetitious and not very challenging. Farrar you probably remember that based on J's testing, we were advised that programs requiring copious practice problems would not be a good fit for him, but that if he insisted on continuing with Mr. D, he could skip a lot of them. He did, and he does. And I'm honestly just not sure this is a good idea, especially when he has an i-dotting, t-crossing mom like me. I would prefer for him to be in a program that didn't have so much repetition in the first place, or if it did, that the problems be challenging enough to take him down a notch or two so that he sees the purpose in doing them---while at the same time not making him think that he's just not good at math. A tricky balance...but I guess that's to be expected with a tricky kid.
In other words, you were right. 🤣 At the time I was trying to balance your recommendations with getting buy-in from him in the midst of a huge transition. At this point, I think I will lay it out on the line...since he's the one asking for a curriculum change, I will give him the options of gutting out Mr. D to the end of Algebra 1 (and revisiting the schedule and sticking to it), or jumping in to DO and embracing the amazing benefit of having someone grade his work. Enough of this in between garbage.
For next year, options will include live DO, AOPS (live? I've heard how fast that moves; would be a shock for him), or community college (but dang it's expensive!).
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5 hours ago, kristin0713 said:
What about a kid who is gifted in math but a lazy worker who tries to find shortcuts for everything and does not want any schoolwork to take a long time?
I'm considering both DO and Mr. D for my almost 13yo DS for next year. He will be in 8th grade and doing Algebra 1. He definitely works harder for other instructors than he does for me -- he has demonstrated this in outsourced writing and science classes.
He does as much math as possible in his head, and usually he is spot on. It has been a struggle to get him to write out any work in Pre-A. I keep telling him that the problems will get more complicated and if you don't write it out, you won't know where you went wrong. He is probably headed for a STEM career. But he has an aversion to working hard and an uncanny ability to find shortcuts and loopholes and patterns.
OP, sorry to derail your thread!
Well, since you pretty much just described my second son to a T, I don't consider this to have derailed my post at all! 🎯
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14 minutes ago, MamaSprout said:
15 year old boys are known to game the system a bit. With gifted kiddos, I have found "boring" to be a code-word for "I don't immediately know how to do this and I don't want to risk looking dumb."
I say grab an algebra text book to self-study and give them option to test through each chapter at 90% correct. Set a pretty tight time table for each chapter. If they can't do that, then they need to stay the course with Mr. D. DS is going to be behind if he doesn't get through Algebra soon.
We've had two math streams going for years- regular and fun. Finally at Calculus, "regular" is also "fun".
Thank you. I love this.
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4 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:
I wouldn’t do self-grading. Why do they want that?? That makes me pretty suspicious of their motivations.
I share your suspicion. Which is what attracts me to Derek Owens. Still...in the scenario of trying to get them on board for switching...if their main objection is that they want to keep self-grading, then we could keep that in place temporarily to give them a chance to see if they like DO's teaching style better.
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1 minute ago, SusanC said:
Yes, but given your troubles keeping him on schedule, I'm guessing that he might not be diligent about really understanding his mistakes?
I am guessing that you are right. 😕
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2 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:
Has he ever liked any math?
Not really. He got all angsty about it after being "behind" for a year (that's a whole 'nuther story) and never "catching up."
I actually think that there is a math genius somewhere in there but we haven't found it yet.
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3 minutes ago, SusanC said:
That said, DO does have a self-grade (mom-grade would be a better name)
But I guess they *could* grade their own work if they wanted to compare apples to apples and make it like Mr. D except with a different person presenting and different problems to do. I could also stealth grade it to see if they were being honest (something I wonder about with Mr. D).
I'm inclined to have the older guy finish Mr. D. Algebra 1 by the end of April, then enroll in DO and take a month to "try it on" with a view to whether he would be open to going that route for Geometry next year.
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7 minutes ago, RootAnn said:
It won't kill them to finish their current level of math. They should be over half done if they started at the beginning of the traditional school year
Actually, my oldest son (the one who is supposed to be gifted) has been working on Algebra 1 for a full year now. He started in Feb. 2020 with a Mr. D live class. Hated it and it was moving too fast (it was a compressed, one-semester course) so we switched him to self-paced. He has DRAGGED. IT. OUT. He is 15 years old, gifted, yet taking over a year to get through freaking Algebra 1. I am beyond frustrated.
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2 minutes ago, RootAnn said:
This is a too-easily-changeable mom plus lazy kids.
Ouch! But you are absolutely right. I have a history of chronic waffling. My natural tendency is toward authoritarianism, but some reading I have done has caused me to wander over into an unschooling/TJED mentality with some things. Since I haven't embraced unschooling across the board, though, which I don't think I can ever do, the result is that they don't know what to expect and feel empowered to manipulate me. 😕
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Just now, Not_a_Number said:
I'm sure he has a self-graded option, though. People say you have to write him about it.
Thanks. I'll check into that.
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I hear ya. Guess I'm trying to gauge buy-in before deciding. We have many battles and I've lost a lot of ground with them by waffling around on how much choice I let them have in their educational path. It's definitely a problem.
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Update: Having to send in their work to be graded by a person seems to be a deal breaker with both of my sons and Derek Owens. Ugggghhhh I am so frustrated.
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I have two sons in Mr. D. Algebra and they are both getting burnt out. This is probably the fifth math curriculum they have tried in the past 2-3 years (and I've been here many times trying to troubleshoot math among other things), and the bottom line is that they just don't like to do work. I'm not sure if they will ever find one that they actually like, so it may just be a matter of telling them to suck it up and do the dang work. Which is basically what I've been telling them so far this year.
However.
Listening to what they're saying, they both seem to express a similar sentiment that the Mr. D. videos take so long to explain a concept that they can't maintain focus. They check out, and then actually miss important bits of what was being presented. They then have to rewatch the video to find out what they missed, resulting on having to spend MORE time on it---the last thing they want to do.
It is possible that Mr. D moves too slow for them. This was certainly the case with CLE math when they were younger, causing us to steer away from it even though I loved its thorough, incremental approach. Formal testing on one son (by a member here who could be reading this for all I know) revealed that he is highly gifted, and the other son, though not formally "diagnosed" as gifted, may well be. We have been advised (hello, Farrar) to do something more appropriate for gifted students, like AOPS or Derek Owens, but thus far my sons have resisted. They both CHOSE to do Mr. D (older son because that's what he had already been doing and he doesn't like change; younger son because he wanted a change and I guess he wanted to try what his brother was doing), despite my efforts to steer them toward something else. I think they are now at a point of being willing to be steered.
This morning I started to show the younger guy one of the Algebra 1 sample videos from Derek Owens. 25 seconds in, he declared he wants to switch. I think this is based on his observation that the video is 3 minutes long, vs. Mr. D which is about 30 minutes long. I explained to him that this was just a sample, and that DO might be covering a lot less ground in the 3 minute video than Mr. D does in his 30, but I actually don't know. He said he "can just tell" that DO will be better. I don't think he even heard a word of what was said, though---he just locked in to the fact that the video was so short.
So I guess my question is...would DO be a better choice in terms of presenting the concept concisely and moving on into getting the work done? We need bang for the buck here; my boys do not tolerate unnecessarily long, drawn out explanations.
I feel like the stakes are high here. We've switched curricula SO many times and have had so many false starts. So if anyone has insight into whether another switch would be worth it, I would love to be enlightened. 🙂
FWIW I should mention that both programs have a live online option and my sons do NOT want to do that.
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52 minutes ago, square_25 said:
Yeah, which sometimes freaks me out, lol. Someday, someone will find everything I've said about them on here...
Someday our kids will be reading about themselves here.
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2 minutes ago, Æthelthryth the Texan said:
The biggest problem I have when copying and pasting is it tends to blow the formatting.
Same.
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6 minutes ago, Æthelthryth the Texan said:
Just paste the link from the little sideways V thing on the right corner.
...and just send the person the link? And I guess she'll be able to view the thread even if she's not a member here (which I think she likely is)?
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2 minutes ago, Æthelthryth the Texan said:
If you already have someone and are cool with the eval I would see no reason not to do it, however knowing that a thorough eval is thousands and that CC and CLE have been the totality.of his math experience, I don't think you would exactly be shooting yourself in the foot by making a clean break to another, mastery, manipulative based program. Because at the end of the day, eval or no, you are still going to end up with one of those programs.
True. Yeah I was thinking "oh crap I have to buy another curriculum." I guess that's a lot cheaper than an evaluation, ha! That being said...there might be a number of reasons to have him evaluated anyway, AND it's a different money pot so I'm still going to consider it.
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Does anyone here know how to download a thread from this forum or format it for efficient pasting into an email? I was thinking of sending this convo to the evaluator as a place to start.
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Just now, OKBud said:
Not if there's some issue creating a block between him and the material OR not if he literally could not care less. Some people get stuff stuck in their heads whether they want to or not... some people have well-manned and well-maintained mental bulwarks against what feels like nonsense 🙂
That's true. The weird thing is that there are things that are completely, absolutely, 100% useless and sometimes nonsensical that he will naturally put to a song or rhythm and repeat over and over much to the annoyance of his family. 🤷♀️
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4 minutes ago, square_25 said:
I'd go with your gut here. If everyone else is retaining it and he isn't, something is up, and I'd get him evaluated just to figure out what it is. In the meantime, though, I'd teach him differently.
Sounds like a good plan. Fortunately I recently had my older kid evaluated and really liked the person who did it, so maybe it's time to go another round with her. 🙂 She might even be on these boards. LOL
Is there an outside test to see if Mr. D "worked?"
in High School and Self-Education Board
Posted
After a year and a half, my (now) 10th grade son has finally completed Mr. D. Algebra 1. Although most of his quiz/test grades are As and Bs (some after several attempts), I'm skeptical of his mastery of the concepts since he only did the written coursework sporadically and all of the quizzes and tests were multiple choice. Recognizing a correct answer (or randomly picking until you get it right) is different from coming up with it on your own.
Is there a test I could have him take, to see if he really got it? Maybe just do a Saxon placement test or something?