It's been a while since a tutoring report, so here goes. Of course, the holidays had something to do with it, since I didn't see the kids on Thurs. as usual.
I recently read a book about a schoolteacher and the state of education, etc. She seemed to be dealing with mostly poor kids. But in the book, it mentioned some sort of test the 5th-graders took, and most of them couldn't understand questions like this:
Carol can ride her bike 10 miles per hour. If Carol rides to the store, how long will it take?
To solve this problem, you would need to know:
a. how far it is to the store
b. what kind of bike Carol has
c. what time Carol will leave
d. how much Carol has to spend
So I decided to test my kids, but not the little one, and see how they did. My guess was that the older boy who does well in math, would get it right. I was less sure of the 2 3rd-grade girls, but I thought his sister, who's bright, might get the answer right. I had no idea if the new girl would get it, since they said she was having problems understanding math word problems.
So the old girl was first, and instantly, she got the right answer. Next was her older brother, who said, after looking at the question for a minute or 2, "I give up." And when I got to the new girl, I had to explain what was going on a bit, but when she understood the question, she got the answer right away.
So now I'm really wondering about the older boy. He is intelligent, I think, but he is not interested in straining his brain. Why? What can I do to interest him? I bet he'd strain his brain a lot if I just could find the key to unlock it.
Other than that, the kids are doing well. The older boy is reading about water, his sister is still working on
The Jungle Books, and their little brother is learning to print more neatly and get the sounds of letters, as well as learn his left from his right. The girl read
Charlotte's Web at my suggestion and wrote a story for homework that relied heavily on that plot.
So then I went to the new girl. She got the fill-in-the blanks questions easily. I've been pressing for her to skip hard ones and do the easy ones first, but this is a hard concept to teach, since, as the others did, she wants to do them in sequence. And with a bit of thinking she gets the answers w/o jumping around. She is so quick, it's had to teach the concept, but today, I said it again, and she left 2 of the hard ones till last. I have explained to the kids that some tests they get in school are timed, and they will only have a certain amount of time to do them. If they spend all their time puzzling over question #3, they will do poorly on the test, so if they skip it and go on and answer all the easy ones they know first, they will do better. She seemed to understand that and did skip the hard ones.
Isn't it weird that, to pass tests, we have to go against some instinctual grain to do everything in order? I saw this with the other 2 older ones and still have to remind them sometimes. It makes
sense to solve the problems you can and then return to the more difficult ones if you still have time, but why is human nature set up otherwise, if that's so? And I do think it's a natural tendency, since all the kids have it.
I wonder if anyone has studied this phenomenon and found some answers.
I read
The Saggy-Baggy Elephant to the little boy, and his older sister listened in, when she heard it was my favorite children's story. I had told her that my daughter liked the Little Golden Books version of
Hansel and Gretel, and had me read it to her so many times that she memorized it and pretended she could read by saying the words on each page. So the girl asked if I had memorized
The Saggy-Baggy Elephant, and I had to admit I hadn't. I said, "I think my daughter was smarter than me.."