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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Need mentoring advice
LS (little sis, not loveshine) made a freaking 72 in her math class. She's always struggled with math, and last year ended up with a tutor (which brought her to a B-)
This year she's done nothing but feck around with her friends, focus on the only class she enjoys, and generally ignore math as much as possible. I need advice on what to say to motivate her without putting her down. Everything coming into my head is what my mother said to me, and it hurt me more than helped me.
Re: Need mentoring advice
She pulled a 72 without trying? That doesn't sound terrible to me, but I had to bust my ass (and my teacher gave me extra credit for spelling my name right) to pull a D- in one of my math classes. I had to do summer school for another one.
I would ask her what kind of tutoring is available to her, and mention college? I mean, she might not get it at all, and there might not be anything to be done, so I'd tread lightly, and make it conversational - could you tell her about your own struggles with a HS subject?
I guess 72 is alarming because she *barely* squeaked by. It makes me worry that next year it will be harder, and she'll be SOL because she's set this pattern for herself.
I did tell her that it was my experience that people who are good with Algebra are terrible with Geometry, and people who are good with Geometry are terrible with Algebra. I'm hoping she falls into that, and takes to Geometry with ease. I have stressed that she'll need to take math classes in college and it's a great idea to go ahead and get into a groove of seeking tutoring, because it *is* her hardest subject, but she's just goofed off the whole semester.
Part of me really wishes I was closer, so I could sit down with her and go through it with her, but part of me is kind of glad I'm not because I might wring her little freckled neck, for being just like me at her age. LOL
What's she thinking of majoring in? As an English major, I got to take "Math for Poets". One semester, and we got to write essays for tests. I'm not kidding - that teacher was awesome.
Depending on what she does, she may not have to take math, and if not, she might respond well to knowing that her math problems have a time limit on them. I know if I had seen that light at the end of the calculus tunnel, I would have been at least cheered up.
1. I think she needs to work with the tutor again. A B- is great for a kid that struggles in math.
2. I would encourage her to stop telling herself that she is bad in math. The more she believes it, the worse she's going to do in the class. Most kids will shut down when they think that they aren't good at something.
3. What grade is she in?
I didn't have math for poet but I had stupid-people's-math and I felt stupid. I hated every minute of my math classes and never "got it". Had I done better in high school math I would have met my college requirement (or i'd have been able to take a different math course)
TT, that's how I felt in HS, and everybody just kept saying "It gets harder in college! You'll still have to have math! You'd better get it!"
Only I couldn't get it. It wasn't like Nola's post, where I shut down because I felt stupid. I knew I was smart, and I knew I couldn't do these maths. If someone had said, "Try your best, see if a tutor helps, and know that if you major in something non-math-related, you won't have to take another four years of this torture," I would have been so relieved. Still would have gotten Ds, but at least the stress would have been gone.
I also completely failed chemistry, because the math was too complex. Some people really CAN'T do it - telling them they can when they know otherwise can backfire, too.
This was me, to a T. What does she want to do when she grows up? BMom is right, there are lots of things that don't involve math that she could study. Heck, even in biology, the worst I ever had to do was simple algebra and exponents/logarithms.
If she gets geometry, then she'll probably do great in trig, too. When I was in HS, I knew that crappy math (college algebra, precalc, calc) was just something I had to get through on the way to things I actually liked, and that at least helped keep it in perspective. Maybe perspective will help here, because when you're struggling with something, it seems disproportionately important/awful.
She doesn't really have an idea of what she wants to do. She has an affinity for languages, music, and history. In talking about life goals she wants to travel all over Europe (both Western and Eastern) and visit parts of Asia as well.
She's a freshman in HS, enjoys band, and parties nearly every weekend, all weekend.
I'm all about cross-discipline, but I have to say, I find the idea of 'math for poets' distasteful. To get a degree, you need to be able to do a certain level of math--the same way you need to do a certain level of reading/writing. Starting w/ essay questions? sure. But only if you can get to solving algebra in ways that make sense in the math world before you're done.
(and I was always appalled that we offered 'poets physics' or WTF ever but science people were expected to be literate. Huh, so, you read CP Snow's 'the two cultures' and decided that it was dumb, you only wanted to focus on one?)
Will the "math must build' thing help?
I mean, every math person I know has the tale of squeaking through something and being fine with it...until 3 years later when they didn't have the foundation to do what they NEEDED to do.
Hell, taht's why one of the kids I just finished watching be tutored is taking 'dumb person math' right now--she knows lots of stuff but her grasp on fractions is so bad that she can't pass the placement and it IS going to mess her up. So she got bumped back to level 0 math class.