[00:00:00] Lisa Chimento: Math, unlike many school subjects, is a naturally sequential topic. You can teach history, geography, science, in pretty much any order you want, but with math, the concepts build on one another cumulatively. If you’re teaching concepts outside of that order, or if you’re teaching a concept and moving on to the next one before a student has had the chance to master it, you’re building on a faulty foundation.

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[00:00:32] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I am so delighted to welcome you all today to this really important conversation about minding the gaps. My colleague, Lisa, and I had a conversation two months ago, and we both realized that we are having an inordinate number of conversations with parents this summer about kids who are struggling.

The struggle is not where you think it is. This conversation is going to be deep. It’s going to be telling, but at the outset, I don’t want you to feel guilty with the information we share with you, because I want you to understand this is so common. As parents, what we have the ability to do is to right the ship. I’m going to let Lisa introduce herself, and then we’ll get started in earnest.

[00:01:24] Lisa Chimento: I am a Placement and Support Specialist here at Demme Learning. I’ve been with the company full-time for the past eight years now, and many more years before that, working conventions during summers. My husband and I homeschooled our 4 children for 25 years, and we used Math-U-See for 24 of those years. It was an amazing experience. I learned more about math, my goodness. I don’t know if maybe I did more than they did, but it was a terrific experience. I’m really, really happy that we’re doing this webinar today. I think it will answer many, many of your questions, and I hope you enjoy it.

[00:02:03] Gretchen: I am so delighted that Lisa had this initial conversation with me a couple months ago, because we tend to, when we have conversations with parents, think that it’s a one-off. All of us who interact with parents inadvertently have had conversations over the summer, and we’ve realized that we’re sort of dealing with an epidemic here. We’re going to reveal to you what that epidemic is, and then some solutions for that. Lisa, let’s start at the very beginning. We entitled this Minding The Gaps. What are the gaps we’re talking about?

[00:02:43] Lisa: Right. I think the thing that’s really important to realize, and I certainly didn’t recognize it when I was homeschooling myself. I’ve learned so much more now, but math, unlike many school subjects, is a naturally sequential topic. You can teach history, geography, science, in pretty much any order you want. With math, the concepts build on one another cumulatively. If you’re teaching concepts outside of that order, or if you’re teaching a concept and moving on to the next one before a student has had the chance to master it, you’re building on a faulty foundation. That just becomes more and more apparent as you go forward. We want to make sure that, as we’re going, each step along the way, we are building those skills and mastering those skills.

[00:03:35] Gretchen: We have so many notes. I have three screens of notes. Lisa has two screens of notes. We want to make sure that this is going to be like eating an elephant, but we want to get through it all with you. One of the things that’s really important for you to understand is, and this is what we see in commonality is, if you have a student who today appears as though they understand, and tomorrow that understanding is gone, or you have a student who’s taking two hours to do one math lesson.

I don’t care whether you’re using Math-U-See or whether you’re using someone else’s, two hours for math is an hour and 40 minutes too long. If you have a student who has mental fatigue or just becomes completely exasperated, you have an issue, and you need to resolve it. Lisa, can you talk about why fact fluency is so important?

[00:04:36] Lisa: Yes. This is a hard one because a lot of times I’ll speak with parents and they’ll say, “Well, what’s the difference? I still count on my fingers. If it gets you the correct answer, that’s really most important.” They’re correct. It’s a valid strategy. Counting on your fingers, or counting in your head, or using touch points, or tally marks, or tapping on the table, or a number chart, all of those are valid strategies.

[00:05:04] Gretchen: Or a calculator.

[00:05:05] Lisa: Or a calculator.

[00:05:06] Gretchen: The calculator. Correct.

[00:05:07] Lisa: They’re all valid strategies to get a correct answer. When you are still in a learning situation, as your students are, it’s a very inefficient strategy. As math goes forward and the material becomes more difficult and more complex, in other words, there’s multiple steps to solving a problem, that inefficient strategy really becomes an obstacle. Again, as I was referring before, math builds on itself cumulatively. If you can picture it like you’re constructing a building, it’s a good metaphor.

Every layer needs to be solid before you add weight to that structure. If your student is still counting, and mental counting is no different than finger counting, so if you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, they just need to think about it for a minute,” that think about it for a minute might be mental counting, and so you want to check. If that’s what’s happening, that’s going to affect, as they go higher, when they start doing multi-digit addition and subtraction problems that involve regrouping, carrying and borrowing, that counting means an interruption in what they’re doing.

That interruption takes their brain away from the new procedures you’re teaching them or the new concepts they have to understand, and it goes back to this counting to go get the facts. “Okay, I’ve got my answer, now I come back to my problem. Where was I?” They’ve lost their place, and there’s no even thinking about, “What was I doing? What was the procedure I was learning? What was this new concept you were teaching?” Because their brain has to be getting pulled away over and over again through the course of that multi-step problem to go and dig for those facts.

[00:06:58] Gretchen: I was talking to a mom at a homeschool conference two weeks ago, and I said to her, “Are you ever deep in a task and your children interrupt you, and then you have no idea how to get back into what you were doing?” She said, “Oh, yes. All the time.” That’s what’s happening to your students with math. She went–

[00:07:18] Lisa: That’s right. Yes.

[00:07:20] Gretchen: Oh my gosh, she said, “I never thought of it that way.” Math is a language. Can you explain what we mean when we say math is a language?

[00:07:30] Lisa: Well, if any of you have ever tried to learn a foreign language, and then you don’t do it for quite a while, and you’ve forgotten everything. Math is the language of science, and it works the same way. If they’re not working on things continually, it’s easy to forget. Just like we were talking about that interruption, I speak to parents all the time who say things like, “We just learned this thing two days ago, and he understood it completely, and we come back to it a day or two later, and it’s like he never saw it before.”

I had a conversation just this morning in a chat with a mom who said those very [chuckles] words, and I just thought that this fits the picture of a child who hasn’t gained fact mastery. They’re still using those inefficient strategies that create that interruption. We want to remove the interruption so that they can move smoothly through a multi-step problem, and now their brain is free. They can focus on the new material that you’re trying to teach them and understand it and retain it from one day to the next.

Understanding today and not remembering it tomorrow is not really serving your goal. [chuckles] We want to continue on with that material. That’s a big piece of it. The other is what you mentioned a little while ago, and that is brain battery, mental energy. If they’re getting exhausted, that fact jumping in and out of a problem, that’s a big piece of it because they’re burning up a lot of brain battery in that process. Let’s preserve the brain battery for what they need it for. They only have so much mental energy to bring to a task anyway, let’s not waste it.

[00:09:12] Gretchen: Right. One of the things that we need to recognize, when you have a child who appears to have grasped a subject solidly, and then two days later they haven’t, what has happened is, it has not transferred successfully into their long-term memory. That’s because in the memory process, it’s too broken up by trying to find those small elements of fact. Lisa, this would be the perfect time to give your favorite quote, which I love and have used all summer long.

[00:09:51] Lisa: I can’t take credit for it because a customer actually said it to me after I talked with her about this issue of the necessity of fact fluency. She just said this thing, and I went, “Oh, I’m writing this down, and I just can’t say it often enough.” These were her words exactly, she said, “Your brain can’t do higher-order thinking if it’s busy with low-order tasks. Counting for facts is a low-order tasks. You might compare it to handing a paragraph to a child who’s still sounding out every letter of every word. They might make it through that paragraph with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but they would never be able to tell you what they had just read because their brain can’t be doing both things. Pick one. Let’s resolve one so it’s just no longer an issue. Let’s get that fact fluency down because they’re not an adult. They’re still in that learning situation, and let’s give him the efficient tools so that they can do the work that we’re asking them to do, and they will feel equipped and feel confident to be able to do that work.

[00:10:58] Gretchen: Lisa, it occurs to me that there’s one more aspect of non-fluent fact mastery that we haven’t mentioned, and that is if you’re skip counting for multiplication facts, that is still counting. If you have to sing the song to get to the answer, you have not memorized the fact. That’s sometimes something that shocks parents because they think, “My kid knows all the Skip Count songs.” Exactly, but that is only a bridge to that mastery because that is repeated addition. It’s not multiplication.

[00:11:38] Lisa: Yes. We need to recognize the difference between number sense and conceptual understanding versus fact fluency. They are two different things. If you’re not using Math-U-See, you’re probably encountering these issues in 1st and 3rd Grade because that’s when we’re teaching addition, subtraction, and multiplication. If you are using Math-U-See, we’re encountering this in alpha and gamma levels, and it’s where these two different issues happen.

My youngest son used to do this thing. I used to call it going around the mountain. He had really good number sense. If I would ask him a fact, he would be pulling things together and making connections, but it would take him a minute to get to the answer. I couldn’t explain to him [chuckles] how that was a great thing, and, certainly, in your life skills where you’re using math, those are necessary skills.

For the efficiency to be able to solve problems and do multi-step problems and later on, of course, in algebra, multi-operational problems, then we can’t spend that time and that brain battery going around that mountain or doing all of that digging for facts. We want kids to be able to know their facts like they know their name so they’re not expending any mental energy and no time.

[00:13:06] Gretchen: Sure. One of the things where public school systems fall apart, is sometimes they teach a methodology of number bonds, where they teach 6 plus 7 is, “Well, okay. I know 7 plus 3 is 10 and plus 3 more would be 13.” That’s a sophisticated form of counting- [crosstalk]

[00:13:27] Lisa: It is.

[00:13:27] Gretchen: -but it’s not 6 plus 7 is 13. [00:13:29] Lisa: Right. It’s great for conceptual understanding and it’s great for number sense, but for efficiency in solving multi-step and multi-operational problems, it still falls short because of the interruption it creates.

[00:13:43] Gretchen: Lisa, where are the places that it falling apart for parents? When you consult with a parent, what are the– I know the answer to this, but where do it fall apart?

[00:13:55] Lisa: I spoke with a mom recently. She had a Rising 4rth Grade daughter. By that point, she had already used two different math programs. We’ll talk about that issue also later. For kindergarten, 1st and 2nd Grade, she used one program. Her daughter had gotten through 2nd Grade and was already encountering multi-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping, where they’re working with large addition and subtraction problems and have to borrow and carry.

Then, when the girl got to 3rd Grade was unable to do third grade work, and so mom used a different math curriculum and repeated 2nd Grade and she still was struggling with regrouping. Some kids immediately show problems right there. They don’t they don’t seem to be able to get beyond that. Other kids show up when they get to multi-digit multiplication because now by this time, we’ve got two different sets of facts we’re dealing with. We’ve got the addition subtraction and the multiplication facts.

Some kids, they just push through or something pushes them through, and then they make it to long division, and very often that’s when the wheels come off the wagon. We’ll get the calls that say, “My kid just cannot understand long division. They are struggling and spending a year, two years on long division when the problem wasn’t with division. It was the fact counting.”

Because there’s so many steps to solve a long division problem, and they’re having to put into place multiplication, and division, and subtraction. Then, if they have to check it with multiplication, now we’re adding the addition facts in, too. It’s so many steps. It’s so many so much computation going on, and they can’t ever get through a division problem. They’re exhausted by [chuckles] the time they finish one problem and then they’re facing a whole page full of them. It’s really daunting.

[00:15:58] Gretchen: Yes. What we want you to understand is, when you’re in a one-on-one homeschool tutorial environment, there’s an added element that your children want you to be happy. They’re going to do extraordinary measures to hide the fact that they’re struggling. It’s up to us to unpack that without us feeling guilty or making them feel guilty. It happens, but if you were required to drive a car with flat tires, you might get where you’re going, but, man, it’s not going to be a comfortable ride.

[00:16:40] Lisa: [chuckles] No, it’s not.

[00:16:42] Gretchen: Lisa, you had a second scenario of a young lady, and we’re going to bring another element into this now. Young lady or young man, I’m forgetting now.

[00:16:54] Lisa: It was a young man going into 8th Grade. He was just starting Pre-Algebra and was already struggling. Mom didn’t understand why, and so I sent an assessment. What I wanted to see was whether or not that student had mastered all of the prerequisite skills to be able to navigate through Pre-Algebra successfully, because by this point now, we’re pulling together all of the elementary skills, and now we’re having to use them in problems that involve multiple different operations.

They’re often having to do lots of different computation, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Negative numbers start entering the equations, and exponents, and fractions, and decimals, and so we’ve got all of these different elements going on. Yes.

[00:17:52] Gretchen: [laughs] Yes.

[00:17:54] Lisa: If not all of those things have been mastered and now you’re having to do an equation that involves many of those different things, it’s really frustrating.

It’s an exasperating experience. I sent her an assessment and I found what I wasn’t surprised about, because when I assess kids in Pre-Algebra or Algebra 1 currently and they are struggling, almost 100% of the time, and I say that without exaggeration, almost 100% of the time, the problem is fractions.

I have my theories about this. I think that a big piece of this is when you are using a typical grade-based spiral approach. They have pulled apart all of the different aspects of fractions and sort of divvy them out in small doses over many years often starting as early as 1st Grade and then going through. What that does is it disconnects all of the different aspects of fractions. It disconnects fractions from division at the low end and from decimals at the high end, and it just pulls it all apart. What kids are left with is the tips and tricks to solve a fraction problem on paper without any understanding of what they’re doing or why. If they forget the tips and tricks, they’re lost.

[00:19:23] Gretchen: Yes. Fractions was the weak point for me mathematically, but I didn’t even know that until I had been a homeschool mom for seven years, dividing fractions. “When dividing fractions don’t ask why, flip that sucker and multiply.” That’s what I was taught in school.

[00:19:43] Lisa: Yes. [chuckles]

[00:19:44] Gretchen: I had no idea why I needed the reciprocal, and it wasn’t until I found my way through six other math curricula and landed on Math-U-See, that someone explained to me why I needed that reciprocal. It makes a tremendous amount of difference. Lisa, it’s important for us before we move on to talk about how vision can be a huge mitigating factor for fact retention.

[00:20:14] Lisa: Yes.

[00:20:15] Gretchen: You can do all the right things and if vision is a factor here, you’re still not going to get the results you want.

[00:20:22] Lisa: Yes. I think it’s a hugely important topic to talk about here because it’s become so enormously prevalent. I think maybe the early use of screens is a big piece of it, because while children, young children’s eye muscles are still developing, if they are introduced to early screen use, what we’ve learned is that it is overdeveloping their central vision muscles and underdeveloping those peripheral vision muscles that are so necessary for tracking and also for convergence. Two different issues going on there.

Those peripheral vision muscles are attached to the retinas in the back of our eyes, and that retina is brain tissue, and it holds memory. A lot of times, when kids are showing early on difficulty with reading in different aspects, and we can talk about what kinds of symptoms show up with their handwriting, with fact mastery, with spelling words, then we’re asking questions about vision.

[00:21:33] Gretchen: With a volatile temper as well.

[00:21:36] Lisa: Yes, emotional outbursts out of the blue with no real explanation. There are other things that it’s connected to, but one of the strangest things that it’s connected to that, who knew, working memory. Getting that vision issue diagnosed, and if there is a functional vision issue, getting it resolved is the first step before you even try to tackle these other things, otherwise you keep running into that same brick wall. Functional vision is a word I’d never heard of five years ago. It’s important for us to know it now. It’s sometimes referred to as binocular vision. It needs to be diagnosed by a developmental optometrist. Sometimes they refer to themselves as behavioral optometrists.

[00:22:29] Gretchen: You can also have a functional vision specialist. That’s the third diagnostician.

[00:22:36] Lisa: Right. They will have the necessary equipment and expertise to properly diagnose this. A general optometrist is mostly going to be checking for acuity. He’s going to pull down that letter chart and he’s looking for a 20-20 vision. That’s not the same thing. You could have a child with 20-20 vision and still have a functional vision problem. The good news here is it’s resolvable. It might take corrective lenses, might take vision therapy, but it’s resolvable. When it gets resolved, it takes care of the things that were tied to it. That would be a thing to check on.

[00:23:13] Gretchen: We will have a reference source for parents in our show notes. Please be sure– I know not always do you check the show notes when you watch a webinar, but this will be something where you can go and we will have a descriptive list that’s lengthy and then some resources for you. I think that’s important. I’m going to tell you how this plays out. I’m going to give you an example of another young lady. Now we’re going to move even older. This young lady was 17-years-old.

Her parents could not get her through gamma. At 17, she had not finished multi-digit multiplication. Her parents at that point had made the decision to have her evaluated for dyscalculia. That was going to be a very expensive diagnostic experience. In the course of preparing for that, I had the opportunity to meet with her parents, and we had a conversation that extended to the possibilities of a binocular vision issue. When her parents explored that in depth, she did indeed have a binocular vision issue. With resolution, she was able to come up five levels of Math-U-See in a single year. They extended her high school by one year. She didn’t graduate until 19. Don’t clutch your pearls. When you homeschool, it doesn’t matter. At 19, she had finished Algebra 1 and Geometry. A year earlier, 23 months earlier, her parents were ready to have her have a permanent diagnosis to explain why she couldn’t do the things her younger siblings could do. I can’t tell you enough how important this is to find an answer if this might be on the horizon for your children.

[00:25:21] Lisa: That’s correct. In the show notes, there will be a link to a place where there is a free screening tool. Go use it, it’s free. It’s quick. It takes very little time, but it will head you in a direction. Either it will rule out functional vision as an issue and then you don’t have to think about it anymore, or it will recommend that you seek out a developmental optometrist. By all means, do so. It’s an important thing.

[00:25:50] Gretchen: Lisa, can you talk to me about the innate fear that a homeschool parent has when they recognize their child in what we’ve described, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh. We’re already behind, and now you’re telling me I have to start over”? You’re not, but-

[00:26:13] Lisa: [chuckles]

[00:26:14] Gretchen: -can you elaborate?

[00:26:15] Lisa: That’s a really good question. Let’s go back to our building metaphor. If you got to the fifth, or sixth, or seventh floor and somebody noticed a crack in the foundation, it doesn’t mean you knock the building down and start all over again. This is my heart to you parents who’ve been told, “Oh, your child’s at a 2nd Grade math level,” wait a minute, that tells you nothing. It doesn’t tell you anything.

We want to pinpoint which skills are missing, not slap some label on or give you this broad thing, because it’s likely that 99% of the skills that are taught in 2nd Grade math, your student has already mastered. Maybe there’s one small but foundational gap that needs to be addressed. You don’t need to spend a lot of money and a lot of time going back through an entire year of 2nd Grade math.

What we want to do is pause forward motion temporarily so that you can fill in that gap and restore stability to their math structure and their confidence, and help them feel equipped. They’ll have the right tools to do what they want to do. It does not mean going all the way back or starting again from the beginning. We’re talking about a temporary pause. That’s something also that you want to share with your student, particularly an older student who might feel like, “Oh, no. I can’t go back and do 1st Grade math.” No, you’re not doing 1st Grade math, you’re filling in small foundational gaps.

[00:27:53] Gretchen: Lisa, toward that end, there were several parents who said in the questions they submitted, “How am I going to get buy-in from a student who’s already discouraged and has that self-perception of being behind?” Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:28:13] Lisa: Yes, I was really appreciative that people asked those questions. There were quite a few of them. First of all, I would share that building metaphor with them because we need to all understand the way that math builds and how it differs from other subjects that they’re learning. Next is, I want to stress the importance of multi-sensory engagement. Whenever somebody is struggling to learn anything, if you can engage multiple senses in that learning experience, they have a far better chance because we all have our learning preferences.

Some people may be more visual, more auditory, more tactile, but if you can use and engage all of those senses, they have a much better opportunity to learn and understand. The brain is getting that information through all of those different neural pathways, and then it can connect and make those links between those different neural signals. It will tell the brain this is important. It will give it importance enough to move it into long-term memory.

The other thing that I want to talk about though is that, not just receptive learning, but expressive learning. Math-U-See, one of the core methods of Math-U-See is the teach-back. It’s such a critical thing for students to be able to teach back what they’ve learned. I think in some homeschool settings, we’ve missed over this. For those of you who went to school, you can recall those dreadful, mortifying moments where the teacher calls you to the board to do a problem in front of the whole class.

Nobody’s favorite thing to do, unless you’re a math genius, but there’s such a value to it. Because when you are speaking, and narrating, and verbalizing what you’re doing out loud, and you’re showing your steps, it slows you down, it gives you time to think. It’s putting that information into a place in your brain where you can retrieve it when you need to later on. If you can engage that student not just receptively but expressively where they are having to use manipulatives, and write it out themselves, and speak it out verbally, all of that engagement makes such a much more successful experience. This is a tough one, especially if you’re dealing with adolescents, and I’m going to say this but it’s the truth, especially if you’re dealing with adolescent-

[00:30:46] Gretchen: Boys.

[00:30:47] Lisa: -boys.

[laughter]

[00:30:49] Gretchen: Yes. Nailed it. [chuckles]s

[00:30:51] Lisa: To use manipulatives to encourage them, “These are not toys, they are tools.” I have had engineer dads show up at a convention booth and have his jaw drop open when he sees the way these manipulatives are used to teach higher-level math skills, fractions, decimals, algebra, exponents. It all can be done with manipulatives, so don’t discount that.

Here’s another one, and I’m so sorry teenage boys, my apologies in advance, show your work. This is the hill worth dying on, mamas, it really is, because of this one big thing, errors can be valuable things that happen. Because math mistakes will happen, it’s part of learning. You can make gold out of those errors if you can look back over your work and identify where the error occurred, and so, “Oh, I see where I went wrong in this 10-step problem,” and go in, zero in on that thing, you’re probably not going to make that error again. If there is no work to review, you have just wasted a valuable error.

Now they’re just probably going to make the same mistake over again, and we haven’t learned anything from it. I know this was this is a tough one. I’m going to point you to some tips for success documents [chuckles] in our digital toolbox for Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2. Let me be the bad guy, because I wrote those tips, and they do lecture those kids on those very things. That way it’s not just, “Oh, my mom’s fussing with me,” somebody else is saying this too, because it really is important.

[00:32:44] Gretchen: I think it’s also important for parents to understand, if you are like me, I’m a hesitant mathematician. Now, I understand math in a greater depth and a greater breadth than I did when I was a student because of what Math-U-See has taught me. There comes a point in time, if you’re a hesitant math parent, your students knowledge is going to step beyond your knowledge. If they learn the process of talking themselves through a problem, it rescues you as a parent.

I often tell this story about my youngest son coming into my office as a senior in high school. He’s got a single calculus problem on five pages of work. He said, “I need your help with this.” He smacked it down in front of me, and I said, “All right. explain to me what you’re doing.” He’s going through and explaining and we get through the first page, and I’m like, “Okay. Only four more pages left.”

He gets to the second page, and he goes, “Oh, this value is wrong. It needs to be negative. I have it as positive. Thanks mom.” Out the door, “Y’all, I did nothing.” I did absolutely nothing, except encourage the discipline of walking yourself through the math problem. That’s a valuable point for parents to understand, to recognize how it’s going to change your child’s brain, and how they’ll be able to grasp the ability to take control of their own learning. That’s huge.

[00:34:24] Lisa: Absolutely. I have three boys, so I’m not dissing the boys at all.

[00:34:28] Gretchen: [chuckles]

[00:34:28] Lisa: I had to go through this fight three times. My second son, who is probably the strongest math student of the three and went well into higher-level college maths. I remember one weekend when he was home on vacation from college, and he had a giant whiteboard on the wall of his bedroom, and it was full of numbers and math problems. I walked in and went, “Whoa, what is that? How many math problems is that?” He said, “It’s one.” I said, “That’s one problem. How long does it take?” He said, “About 45 minutes.”

I just waited. I let three seconds go by, and with my tongue in my cheek, I said, “Huh, you probably have to show all your work, don’t you?” He rolled his eyes at me and said,

“Yes,” [chuckles] because we’d had that battle so many times, but he had learned it for himself. There was no way you could skip a single step and try to do it in your head. You had to write everything down.

He shared something else with me. If you moms are still fighting with your kids, especially if they’re going to be going into higher-level maths in college, if you get to college and you don’t show every step, even if you get a correct answer, your professor is probably going to mark the whole thing wrong and assume that you cheated, because it’s so easy to cheat. Even if you got the final answer wrong, if you showed every step, you can get partial credit for every step you got right.

[00:36:03] Gretchen: Indeed.

[00:36:04] Lisa: These are the excuses I hear, “Oh, it’s a waste of time. It takes too much time to write it down.” “Yes. If you got it wrong, you’re going to have to do the whole thing over again anyway. How much time did you really save? Let’s not go there.”

[00:36:17] Gretchen: Yes, exactly. As an aside, my 26-year-old son, because I too have three sons, when he was a freshman in college, I have vivid memories of he and Lisa standing in a Math-U-See booth in Arizona working out a calculus problem. The funny part was watching people walk by and come back to go, “What are you doing?” Watching the two of them talk their way through that problem was the best example you could possibly create of why it’s so important to say it out loud. We lose that and we particularly lose that with boys because around 11-years-old, they don’t want to say anything.

[00:37:04] Lisa: Yes.

[00:37:04] Gretchen: Encourage them to do that. It will come back in tenfold blessings for you as parents. Lisa, we’ve got so many more things to talk about, but we’re almost at the end of our notes. Then we can turn our attention to all of these fabulous questions. Can you talk about what happens with program skipping?

[00:37:27] Lisa: Yes. I understand it. You’re working with a particular curriculum, and your child is struggling, and you’re trying to figure out what it is, and you don’t know what it is. You think, “Well, maybe it’s the curriculum. Let me try something else.” I have spoken to parents, and sometimes they’ve used as many as four or five other programs. Sometimes that’s after-

[00:37:49] Gretchen: [chuckles]

[00:37:49] Lisa: -putting them out of school where they were struggling.

[00:37:51] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:37:52] Lisa: If you’re in that place and you’re not really sure, I would ask you, give us a call. Let’s find out if it’s the curriculum or if there is a math gap that needs filling in. I will tell you, especially for those older kids, and you’re either heading towards high school levels or you’re already there. The thought of having to go back or stop and fill in a gap is daunting. Let me tell you, sometimes it’s just one small thing, and then you can leapfrog over many other math levels and get them back where they were.

If you are in those higher-levels and we find out, for instance, that fractions were the problem, you can do an accelerated push through because it’s not like they’re learning it for the first time. They’ve already seen this work. They’ve already worked with it before. Think of it like you’ve got a bunch of loose threads out there and they just need to get tied up. We need to make those connections so that fractions make sense.

Sometimes a quick pass through, for instance, the Epsilon level, where we focus on fractions, does the trick and then they can go back to, whatever, Pre-Algebra or Algebra 1, wherever they were and struggling. Suddenly everything clicks because the fractions make sense. They need to be able to manipulate those numbers. When they get that fractions work solid, they really understand what they’re doing, their chances of success in algebra go way up.

[00:39:26] Gretchen: Absolutely. One more quick story. A young lady that I had the privilege to work with now 10 years ago, she had failed Algebra 1 twice. Her evaluator in Florida had recommended that her parents talk to me. This was well before the AIM programs that sit on your shelf behind you, Lisa, and are up here behind me. Her parents could not figure out what they were doing, but they were curriculum shopping, trying to find something that worked. Her evaluator suggested we figure out what the gaps were. Long story short, she had gaps somewhat in addition, somewhat in subtraction, a little bit in multiplication, not all the multiplication numbers, but six, seven, and eight.

[00:40:23] Lisa: Six, sevens, and eights, classic troublemakers.

[00:40:26] Gretchen: Yes, and she had gaps in fractions as well. I asked her if she would be willing to work with me to fill those gaps, and it took us a school year. Then she stepped into, at the age of 17, into Algebra 1, and finished Algebra 1 with a solid 94. She was able to get the Florida State Scholarship, is it the HOPE Scholarship, do I have that right? Anyway.

[00:40:58] Lisa: Out of my head.

[00:40:59] Gretchen: Yes, anyway, she was able to procure that scholarship. She went on to college, and today she’s a middle school math teacher. Now, I think you’re crazy to teach middle school math at a public school. I did ask her several years ago, I’m like, “Why? Why that?” She said, “Ms. Gretchen, there are so many me’s out there. I want the opportunity to help them see that the future is bright.

[00:41:28] Lisa: Oh, that’s awesome.

[00:41:29] Gretchen: I have learned to be able to do that.” I want to encourage you as parents that this is wholly doable. Lisa, we had so many great questions. Let’s take the tough one first, which is teaching foundational math skills to dyslexic students. This is a personal journey for me. I have two students who are dyslexic, but I’m going to let you talk about it as a placement specialist first.

[00:42:00] Lisa: Okay. This one, when I’m talking to moms, very often they come armed with the argument, “My child is dyslexic, so they can’t memorize facts, and then they go on to tell their story.” I just want to be gracious here and don’t want to be argumentative or stubborn about this. I basically just go, okay, take a deep breath because I’m going to say something that you might initially disagree with. We have seen that this can work. It is true that dyslexic students classically struggle with retrieval, that recall of information. This is where the multisensory engagement can make such a huge difference. Because, as I said before, we all have our learning preferences, and some children have learning challenges.

If you are engaging multiple senses, not only is it getting through to the child in the way that they learn best, but it’s also developing all of the other ways they learn. Because as adults, they’re not going to be able to go to their boss at work and go, “I’m sorry, I’m a visual learner, you’re going to have to show me that.” You need to be able to learn in whichever way things in life are presented to you. We want to develop all of those ways. The other thing is that when you are engaging multisensory, it is putting that stuff, that material that you’re learning in a part of your brain where it is easier to retrieve it when you need to.

We have seen older kids with dyslexia use our AIM programs to gain fact fluency. It has been a game-changer for them. They thought they could not, their parents thought they could not, and it changed their minds about that.

[00:43:57] Gretchen: It does indeed. Now, my profoundly dyslexic son was told when he was evaluated for dyslexia, he wasn’t college material. Don’t bother to send him to college. He’s that kid who stood in the booth working out calculus problems with you. He holds a degree in computer science. He’s a network systems engineer. I want you to know that part of the reason your child can’t memorize facts is because they don’t have an interest in memorizing facts. I wager that if there were something that was of high interest and high value to them, they can expound on that ad nauseam, which means they have the capacity to remember and memorize. They just don’t have an interest to do it with math facts.

Being able to use that multi-sensory, multi-step process to move them from the concrete of the manipulatives to the representational of what do you see in your head to the end of the equation, which is the abstract Arabic numerals that we work with, is profoundly game-changing. Don’t write them off because they have a dyslexia diagnosis. I beg you because it makes all the difference in the world.

I’m not special. He’s just brilliant. That is what I hope that you find in your own children. Don’t let a dyslexia diagnosis be a dead end for you. A diagnosis is not a destination. Lisa, can you address this question about getting kids who have been allowed to be lax to become consistent and self-motivated? The operative word in that sentence for me was self-motivated, because I think we need to talk about that a little bit.

[00:45:54] Lisa: Yes, actually, the conversation that I had this morning in chat dealt very much with that thing. We had a child who the behavior was, “I just don’t want to learn this anymore. I just don’t want to do this. I don’t want you to teach me.” What I said to the mom was, when I hear things like that, what I’m hearing very often is, I don’t feel equipped. I don’t know the things I need to know to be able to do the things you’re asking me to do.

This comes up very often if you have a child who has tendency towards perfectionism, because maybe they’re great at everything else. They’re great readers and spellers, and they’re good artists or whatever else that they really excel in, and here we have this one subject that just doesn’t seem to be a successful experience. You’ve got kids who their anxiety has come into the situation, of course, because every time you say math, let’s sit down and do math, it’s so dreadful to them because they don’t feel equipped. They don’t even have the words or the knowledge of what to say. I can say that to you, they don’t feel equipped, but they don’t know that. They don’t know what they’re experiencing except anxiety and exasperation.

Before you write off attitudes or laziness or lack of motivation or behavior as the reason, give us a call and let’s find out if there are some foundational gaps that are actually creating that anxiety and that behavior, because once they feel equipped and confident, all of a sudden, things just totally change. I had one mom, this was an interesting conversation. She recognized that her daughter didn’t know her addition and subtraction facts, so she bought the AIM for Addition and Subtraction course.

While they were in the middle of it, her mom reached out to me and said, “I’m having a little trouble because it’s asking her to engage verbally, that she not only has to build it with manipulatives and write it, but she has to say it. She feels silly.” She was probably 12 or 13 years old. You’ve got this adolescence where there’s so many other things going on in their brains and their bodies.

[00:48:23] Gretchen: This is a girl.

[00:48:24] Lisa: This is a girl. She was embarrassed. She didn’t want to say it. I said to her mom, “Maybe if you share with her that this is not about doing some silly thing, but this is actually creating something in her brain that’s going to make a difference, and how confident she feels later on.” She wrote me back and said, “I never thought that that would work, but I just said to her, “This is for your brain.” She said, “Oh, okay,” and did it. “I didn’t know that was going to work, but I was just trying whatever I could. That worked for her.”

Sometimes kids don’t realize when you do this thing, it’s going to help your brain. Then you’re going to be able to do this math work later. This is what we’re left with sometimes, be able to explain those things because the children themselves don’t know what’s going on. If you can be real with them and let them know we’re doing these things, when I’m assessing you, it’s not so that I can give you a grade. I’m not going to pass you or fail you. We want clarity because once we have clarity, now we know what we need to go in and tackle. Once we tackle that thing, you’re going to be successful, and we’re going to move forward. Then you’re just carving out a path of success for them. I think it’s important to verbalize that to your children, especially the older kids, so that they can see what it is, where they’re going. They’re not just doing this thing because they’re being told to.

[00:49:57] Gretchen: I think it’s also important to recognize that self-motivation for something that already frustrates you is almost impossible. Each one of my six children reached that point of self-motivation at a different age. My eldest son is brilliant. He taught himself to read at the age of four, but he couldn’t be left alone to do a single math problem until he was a senior in high school. That kid that came in with the calculus problem that I didn’t know what to do with, he said to me in fourth grade, “How about you give me a list? I’ll let if I need you.” Every child is different, but don’t abandon your child to math by themselves until they indicate to you they are ready to row the boat on their own. The last thing I’m going to say about that is it’s not a seven, eight or nine-year-old.

[00:50:59] Lisa: No, it rarely is. That’s for sure. That’s an exception to a rule for certain. I know homeschooling parents are busy. You got a lot of plates spinning, and it’s hard, but we’re not talking about an hour-long session every day. You mentioned this early on in our talk, Gretchen, about time. We like to share a general rule of thumb. You can add two or three minutes to your child’s age, and that’s really their optimal time for learning new material. That might sound ludicrous to you because you’re feeling like we have so much to cover, but what’s more effective than sitting there for an hour is taking small bites over more sittings.

Maybe you want to do 15 minutes in the morning and maybe 15 minutes a little later on in the day if you have a lot to cover. It would be better to do 15 minutes once a day than do an hour once a day. Honest to goodness, it makes a difference because once you’ve crossed that neurological threshold, you’ve undone all the good work you did in the first 10 or 15 minutes anyway, and they’re not going to be able to retain it. Keep those sittings shorter, and you’re going to see a difference in their long-term retention.

[00:52:16] Gretchen: Lisa, there was a question that said, “Should you add new skills if your child has not mastered previous skills, and should you keep going with built-in review or master one skill first?” I think the clarification here is you should always continue to rehearse skills you have already learned. Mastery doesn’t mean you’re never going to touch a skill you’ve already addressed. However, if adding another set of skills causes consternation and frustration, just like Lisa said, you have a foundation that needs addressing.

[00:52:59] Lisa: That’s true. There is a difference between spiral review and cumulative review. A lot of people will say, “Oh, well, we don’t want to do Math–See because it’s mastery and they’re never going to review those things again.” That’s not so. We don’t reteach previously mastered concepts, but there is continual cumulative review of previously mastered concepts. That’s the difference. You can rehearse or re-see material that you’ve seen a million times before, but if you’ve never truly understood it, then the review is not doing you the good you think it’s doing. Review is for things you have mastered. If you haven’t mastered it yet, then our feeling is stay with it until you’ve mastered it, and then you can review it later on as you’re adding new skills to it. Going back to that building metaphor, it’s much better to wait to go forward until you have mastered one skill at a time.

[00:53:59] Gretchen: Yes, exactly. Lisa, can you speak to the parent? I have this parent’s heart in my mind since I read this question a couple of days ago, and it’s how do you motivate a discouraged student?

[00:54:13] Lisa: Yes, well, first of all, it’s going to depend on that child, their own motivations. You brought up something before about the differences in your children. I think a lot of it is going to do with what does that child love? What are the things that really light them up? Speak to that, because they’re going to need math in their lives, no matter what they do in their lives. They might not go on to be computer science majors in college. They might not go on to be engineers. I spoke with one mom. Her son was struggling, and actually, it was this rising eighth grade boy, and I said to her, “What does he want to do when he gets out of school?”

She said, “We have a horse farm, and he loves horses. He wants to work with horses. He wants to run a business, and he wants to work with horses.” I was like, “That’s awesome. What he’s going to need? He’s going to need math. He’s going to have to balance his books. He’s going to have to pay bills and give invoices for whatever he’s using his horses for. Let’s get him to that place where he is strong in the life skills of math. He might not need to do Algebra 2 and pre-calculus and calculus, but he’s going to need at least Algebra 1 in geometry. Let’s get him there, but let’s make sure that he’s mastered the prerequisite skills that he needs to be successful in each step going forward.”

My husband was in telecommunications for 30-plus years, and he was great at what he did. In his last job in that field, there was a buyout, and they consolidated companies, and they consolidated all of their tech department, including telecommunications and computers. Everything had gone computerized, and he didn’t have the experience in it yet. He was 50. He was laid off. His entire department from his company was laid off because they used the people from the company who bought them out. He found himself at 50 having to figure out what to do, and could not get a job in that field any longer because he didn’t have the voice-over IP experience.

I said, “Well, why don’t you take some college classes at the local community college and beef up some of your skills?” He was in a panic because he had never gone to college before. He was a terrible high school student, 30-plus years before. I said, “Well, what are you nervous about?” He wanted to take computer classes. I said, “What are you nervous about?” He said, “Math.” I said, “Well, aren’t you the lucky guy? Because look what I have on my shelves.” Because I’d taken my four kids through it. I said, “Where do we want to start?”

I assessed him. Where did he feel strong about? Sure enough, he was nervous about fractions and decimals. I said, “Here you go.” I handed him the epsilon and zeta levels. In two months, he went through two full levels of math. Went into his office every night, came out every night, and went, “Holy mackerel, I have never understood math like this before.” He went through both of those levels and went on to take 11 college courses and got straight A’s, and made the Dean’s List in every single course.

It is never too late to learn. You might have a high schooler. You might have a senior in high school. You might be beyond high school. It is never too late to learn. Find the things that you love. Find the things that motivate you. Find the things that you want to do. Then figure out what math you’re going to need to be able to do that thing successfully. Let us help you figure out what skills you need to fill in to make that a successful journey.

[00:58:11] Gretchen: Amen. I think it’s also important as parents to recognize the discouragement. Sometimes, as parents, we believe that speaking to it gives it a life that we don’t want it to have. I’m going to paraphrase a young lady I met. She’s a young adult. She’s very neurodivergent. She said, “If you’re neurodivergent, you know it. What annoys you is when the people around you don’t want to acknowledge it.” It’s important for us to acknowledge, I can see you’re discouraged. I can see this is hard. If there was a way to make this less difficult, would you be willing to work with me? Sometimes, having that difficult conversation humbly and honestly, and maybe more than once until they’re comfortable with the conversation, naming it gives them the ability to grasp it and then release it. I think that’s wildly important.

[00:59:21] Lisa: Right. That validation. That’s wonderful.

[00:59:24] Gretchen: Lisa, we’re almost to the top of the hour. There’s a couple of questions I wanted to make sure that we address before we finish. One of them is juggling multiple learners and different levels. This doesn’t necessarily speak to a child who’s struggling, but it can. I need you to talk about why it’s so important to take that struggling child and teach them individually.

[00:59:52] Lisa: This happens a lot, too, with twins. It’s just never fails to amaze me, parent of twins or children very close in age, and they are working at wildly different levels, and you want to do them together. I know it feels like a time-saving thing, but if they’re not at the same level, that’s going to be a really difficult situation for the child who isn’t learning as quickly. It’s the same situation in a classroom when you’ve got all of these divergent skills going on. It is necessary to address each one as they go and let them work at their pace, let them learn in the way that they learn, and address what’s going on. Address even one skill to the next.

I know people like to have a schedule and I let them know Matthew C has no schedule because one lesson might be super easy for that child, and they can get it done in two days, but another one might be a huge cognitive jump, and they’re going to need the time on it. Give them the time they need because when they’re done, they’ll be ready for the next challenge. They’ll feel equipped to take on the next challenge because every new lesson is going to be a challenge.

[01:01:02] Gretchen: Absolutely. It’s also important to recognize that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly without getting a different result. If you find yourself butting heads with your child or repeating the same lessons or repeating the same stopping point in different curricula, it’s time to reach out to Lisa or our other colleague, Amanda, and have an intentional conversation with them. Their contact information will be in the show notes so that you can send them an email if you want to be discreet or schedule a time for a conversation, because we want to help you get this right.

One of the things that is a privilege to work for this company is to recognize that every child is important, and we want your child’s success, and we’re going to help you. We’re going to come alongside you and make that happen. Lisa, we’re past the hour, but I know you have some closing thoughts. What are those?

[01:02:09] Lisa: Yes, just to piggyback onto what you said, every student’s journey is their own. They’re not cookie-cutter children, and they’re going to have their own journey. Let us help you figure out where they are and help set them on that path to math success. We’re really excited, and it’s a privilege to be able to speak with you and work alongside you.

[01:02:30] Gretchen: Absolutely. I want to thank you all for letting us come into your living rooms today, for trusting us to have this intentional conversation. What we’ve talked about is not easy to hear, but we do have solutions, and we are willing to help you find them. Thank you all so much, and we’ll look forward to your joining us again soon. This is Gretchen Rowe, and I thank Lisa so much for being here today because this was a fabulous conversation. Take care, everyone. Have a blessed afternoon.

[01:03:03] Voice-Over: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demilearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

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