Always Good to Learn Something New

This is the second year for the Life Garden. We did not hit our participation goals for the year. That's okay. I have one full-time tutee that I work with daily.

After 2 years, I've gotten somewhat use to seeing him take new challenges in strive. I've watched Jamal grow so much sense I first met him 3 and a half years ago as a shiney-faced 6th grader. But that's just the natural course of things. You can't really stop something from growing if you give it the right nourishment. So it is with Jamal, and it's easy at times to wonder if he wouldn't be just as well off planted anywhere. Nonetheless, every so often something happens that reminds us of why the Life Garden has proven a particularly fertile habitat for him.

On Monday we were going over another math assignment: another day, another lesson. Jamal had spent the past 2 lessons practicing how to translate complex word problems based on inequities into algebraic equations with variables on both sides: you know, easy stuff. Same old... same old. Then I noticed something! It seemed that he was getting every other word problem wrong. This was strange. Not that Jamal doesn't ever get math problems wrong, but that it's usually a random thing.

So I asked him to do a few examples for me until I could pinpoint his area of misunderstanding. It turned out that somewhere along the way he had never associated the phrase "less than" with subtraction or "greater than" with addition, as it might be used in a word problem such as this, "If the sum of a number and 6 is multiplied by 2, the result is 10 greater than the number." This is the point at which those of you who despise higher math usually get on your soapboxes and rail against the impracticality of having to learn such abstractions, but the thing is that, as with any problem life may throw at you, you need to be able to make sense of it if you must. Thus, we learn to reason through higher math, if for no other reason, to teach ourselves how to think. It was important that this relatively straight-forward association not become an empasse for Jamal, however, impractical having to make such associations may be.

So we stopped our daily progression through the lessons of the textbook to work on it. For homework that night, Jamal had to translate 50 addition and subtraction problems into "less than" or "greater than" terms, as in "-6-13=6 less than -13". The next day we plotted several of equations out on a number line. Then I showed Jamal how each one could be restated in another way, as in "-6-13 also equals 13 less than -6". These are not always easy associations to make. It the mist of all the intensive practice it finally clicked for him, and it was like someone had slid a brick into place that somehow had been skipped over when his math foundation was first laid.

When we say that "home-school is the environment in which all students can thrive," it can at times, I know, sound like a sale's pitch, but it's not. It's simply a powerful statement of fact. As I worked with Jamal that day, my heart ached for all the students who were sitting in class at that very moment whose teachers didn't have the time or curriculum flexibility to stop, pinpoint and address whatever specific difficulty they were having--particularly if that difficulty were based on something that was missed long before. I'm glad Jamal can be in a learning environment that has the adaptibility to remain partcularly fertile for him.