[00:00:00] Amanda Capps: I remember sitting in our living room and watching him demonstrate concepts with manipulatives for the very first time in my life. I had never seen math done in a visual way. The light bulbs, it was just connecting. I was sitting there in shock. “You mean this is why you do that?” That’s why that process works, and that’s why you get this answer.

[00:00:27] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe, and it is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to this episode of The Demme Learning Show. Today, we’re going to talk about enduring success and why your child’s math placement matters. Of course, I have asked two of my favorite people on the planet to have this conversation with me because they are our placement specialists here at Demme Learning. They’re also my dear friends, and I will allow them to introduce themselves in a moment. Shall we begin? Amanda, I’ll let you introduce yourself, and then, Lisa, I’ll let you go, and then we’ll get into the meat of the matter.

[00:01:04] Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda Capps, and I live in northwest Arkansas with my husband, Justin, and seven of our eight. We have had one leave the nest, and we currently still have seven at home. The oldest is 23, and the youngest is 5, so I will be homeschooling forever. I’ve been with Demme Learning for 15 years, and mainly in customer service for the majority of those years, but recently have transitioned to a role of placement specialist, which I am absolutely loving because it just gives me so much more hands-on with our customers and helping them transition successfully into our family of curriculums.

[00:01:47] Gretchen: Absolutely, and you’re going to get to hear a little bit more about Amanda’s personal story and why placement is so important in just a little bit. Lisa?

[00:01:54] Lisa Chimento: Yes, hi. Thanks, Gretchen. My name is Lisa Chimento. I live in central Florida with my husband. Our four children are all flown the nest. They were homeschooled. We did that for 25 years, using Math-U-See for those years also. I’ve been here at Demme Learning for about eight and a half years now, full-time, and working as a placement specialist for about four years. Don’t let Amanda’s recent change to placement specialist fool you because she’s been doing that work for a long time. [chuckles]

[00:02:35] Gretchen: In her sleep, I think is probably the proper conversation there. Ladies, let’s open with the obvious question. How has being a placement specialist affected you?

[00:02:48] Amanda: I think it has really fine-tuned my understanding of just what our curriculums offer students and parents, and how, when they are utilized the way that they are designed, they’re just the most phenomenal choice that you can make as far as if you have children with learning differences, if you have children that are math whizzes. It really doesn’t matter what type of learner you have. It just works. It just works beautifully. I love hearing the success stories because a lot of times parents and students can come into our arena with a lot of fear and trepidation because of poor experiences with other options.

[00:03:42] Lisa: The thing that has stood out to me the most is that I’ve learned the difference that addressing educational needs on a skills basis, how important that is. Our culture and our long history, well, not long compared to Europe, maybe, but our history of education deals with grade levels. You’re a certain age, and you’re in a certain grade. Kids are expected to be working at the same level as every other child their age, and that’s not what happens in reality.

When you have a child, whether they’re struggling or not, if you can identify where they are in terms of their skills, and then you place them appropriately according to those skills, then they are moving at their level. They are not behind. They are not ahead. They are where they are. In particular, I think I have really grown to appreciate the unique sequence that Math-U-See uses. Because I’ve used Math-U-See from the beginning with my kids, I really didn’t understand that difference until afterwards, when I saw other programs and the way that skills were introduced.

When I’ve heard parents voice what their children have said, “Oh, I guess I’m just not a math person. I’m not good at math. I really hate math. I don’t know why we have to learn math. I guess I’m never going to be good at this.” Then you find out, “Oh, they’re struggling with this one little area.” Then you deal with that area, and suddenly the world has opened up for them because what they were thinking in their heads wasn’t correct. You just need to find out where they are with their skills, what kinds of things they might be missing. When you go and address those things, all of a sudden, the whole dynamic of the conversation changes. That is a really exciting thing to see happen.

[00:05:41] Gretchen: It does indeed. I think one of the things that’s important for folks to understand as we have this conversation today is we wanted to put faces with stories. Today, we want to tell you why this is important, but we also want to tell you to whom it has been important. We have some stories that we want to share with you today so that you understand that these are real-world consequences for real people.

Once upon a time, there was a radio host named Paul Harvey, and he used to host a segment every week called The Rest of the Story. Today, we’re going to play some Paul Harvey moments for you. We’re going to tell you about some kids who are struggling and then where they are today. I think you’ll appreciate that as we go along. Moving on to the most memorable placement story, Amanda, I’m going to let you tell this from your own perspective.

[00:06:40] Amanda: I was one of those kids. Even though I’m a mother and a seasoned homeschooler, which sounds so strange to me because I don’t feel like that much time has passed, but it has.

[00:06:56] Amanda: I’m a second-generation homeschooler. I don’t know if I shared that at the outset. I’m the oldest of five. Myself and my siblings were all homeschooled all the way through. I was in seventh grade and struggling mightily. My only saving grace when it came to math was I was a good memorizer, but this right here proves that memorization of a process is wholly lacking. Just because I knew how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and I was even starting to apply those to more complex concepts, fractions and decimals, and percents, I was drowning.

None of it made sense. None of it had context. Math just seemed like this elusive subject that other kids were good at, and I was not. Now, history, English, ELA, all of those things, those were my real strengths. Those were where I really shown academically. We had done a lot of curriculum hopping because of the failure for whatever I was using. It didn’t seem to work, or my mom didn’t like it, didn’t like teaching it. Also, her math insecurities were showing up in a big way through this process. She didn’t have a good math foundation. She was not someone who enjoyed math or understood math herself.

That made it incredibly difficult for her to feel comfortable and confident teaching it to us. We had some friends who had eight children, and they had started this program called Math-U-See. The mom was raving about it. She was saying that it was working for all of her kids, all of the different learning styles, that they were just so pleased with it. I’m going to really date myself here. We borrowed a Demme-stration, which was a VHS tape of Mr. Demme, the company founder, basically laying out the concepts, starting with very basic ones in alpha and just trekking up through Algebra 1 concepts.

I remember sitting in our living room and watching him demonstrate concepts with manipulatives for the very first time in my life. I had never seen math done in a visual way. The light bulbs, it was just connecting. I was sitting there in shock. You mean this is why you do that? That’s why that process works, and that’s why you get this answer. It was just bringing things that I knew how to do, but had no context, and making it just make sense finally. It was very exciting.

Now, my parents did something very drastic. I had younger siblings that were basically just getting ready to get started with formal math, education, and that subject. They made the very drastic choice or risky choice. At that time, I think a lot of people were like, “What?” I went back to alpha concepts. We did not have our AIM programs at that point in the history of Math-U-See. I relayed my entire math foundation.

I moved very quickly. I did not spend a lot of time. It only took me a year and a half to get back up to where I should have been if I had followed a sequence from the start. What I gained as far as understanding, mastery, confidence, I would not have been as successful upper-level math student had that decision been different.

[00:10:45] Gretchen: I love that because it’s so important to understand that you were at the beginning of a Math-U-See experience. Now we have these interventionary tools of AIM to help students catch up even more expeditiously without having to go back to the beginning. Having had that personal experience, it also gives you a depth of understanding when a parent comes to you and says, “I don’t know what on earth is going on here.” You immediately have an understanding of where that parent is and how hard it is to watch your children struggle. I’m appreciative that your parents were willing to allow you to take that journey. Lisa, can you tell us about the story you wanted to share about your most memorable placement?

[00:11:36] Lisa: It was fairly recently, too. Within the last six months or so, I had a woman call in, and she was going to be homeschooling her grandchildren. The eldest child was 17 years old. I’ll call him William. That’s not his name. He was 17, and he had been going through school and doing fine with everything except math. He said around second grade was when he started to recognize he was lagging behind the kids in the class, and he wasn’t really understanding some of the things that were taught, but he kept getting past.

His grandmother actually put him on the phone with me, so I got a chance to talk with him, which doesn’t always happen. Probably never. He was so eloquent and respectful, and well-spoken. He shared with me that he had gone to his teachers every year and said, “I’m not understanding. I’m not understanding. Could you please help me with the math?” They just didn’t have time. He continued getting past. Here he was now. He had been held back, I think, a year at school. Then I think he held himself back a year once he came out and started getting homeschooled because he wanted to give himself time.

He knew he needed to get his math skills up. He had really excellent goals for when he got out of school. I asked him what those goals were, and he shared them with me. I said, “Will they require math?” He said, “Yes.” He told me what kind of math he was going to need to get to. I just asked him very bluntly and very plainly, “William, what is it that you want to learn? What are you willing to do?” Because he was of age to really make that decision himself at that point.

He wanted to learn the early foundational skills that he’d missed out on. He knew he needed to get through at least algebra to do what he wanted to do after school. I talked to him about our AIM programs and getting math fact mastery down. He said, “Yes, that’s what I want to do.” I said, “Okay, this is what it’s going to involve.” I explained the program to him, and I said, “Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to put that work in?” He said, “Absolutely.”

I couldn’t get over it. He counted the cost. He knew what was going to be involved. We talked about the fact that he might even need to take a year or two after high school to get that math work in before starting that new program that he wanted to do as a college student. He’s willing to do it. I admire him so much. I was so impressed with this young man. Anyway, his grandmother called me back just about three weeks ago and said they were having a little bit of struggle with it. The two of them got on the phone, and I got to hear the rest of the story.

There were some areas where the program wasn’t being completely used the way it was designed. They had missed a few things in the instructions. We went over those. He had been a little discouraged because he wasn’t seeing the results he wanted to see. Once we explained what needed to change in the way they were working with it, he said, “Oh, I see what we were missing.” I said, “Okay, so you feel a little better?” “Yes.”

They jumped right back into it again. Really exciting. Those are the stories that just make your heart sing when you see people so willing to do the hard work and engage, and then it’s going to pay off. It really will.

[00:15:19] Gretchen: It does make a difference. Understanding that it’s not a forever, it’s just a for now, makes a whole heck of a lot of difference. Also, we can’t step into remediating what we have not learned well using the same things that got us there in the first place. It’s always important for us to recognize that not only do processes have to change, but attitudes have to change as well. Speaking about that, I wonder if each of you would answer for me the question of what you have learned about yourself in the placement process.

[00:16:02] Amanda: Oh my goodness. I think one of the biggest things is learning to be an active listener, to really hear where the parent and the student are at. It’s always a little bit surprising to me how often, when I start in on the questioning, a parent will typically, like, “Are they counting on their fingers? Are they counting in their heads? No, no, they’ve got this.” It doesn’t take very long once we start doing assessments, and we start actually getting the parent engaged with the student. Observing, which is a big part of a successful placement scenario. They’re shocked. They’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even realize that this was an issue, that they were struggling with these very basic skills.”

To be honest, being an older student that came into the program, one of the biggest things that I had to have a good attitude about was using manipulatives. That was something that really, in my mind, was like, “That’s for little kids. That’s not something a seventh grader does.” Our program is very unique in that we use manipulatives longer than any other program on the market. It is critical. They are designed to make things visual, to make formulas come alive and off the page, and to be able to connect information and really master concepts.

That’s another thing that I notice a lot of times when I start questioning if they’re already in our program and they are clueing me into, they’re just not seeing the progress that they want, or they’re struggling, 9 times out of 10, they’re not using the manipulatives at all. Nope, we’re not using those. Nope, we don’t get those out. I’m always just like, “Okay, well, then the fact that you’re struggling at this point isn’t that shocking because they were designed to be used.” Especially for the concept presentation. You don’t have to use them for every problem. We don’t want you using them all the time. They don’t need to be a crutch, but they are an essential component to a concept well learned.

[00:18:27] Gretchen: Neurologically, they entitle us to slot that information into our long-term memory properly for later retrieval. That’s enormous. Lisa, how about you? Answer my question, which was, what have you learned about yourself in the placement process?

[00:18:48] Lisa: For me, a lot of it has been similar to what Amanda has experienced. The editor in me is quick to pick up error and flaw when I hear or see something, and then want to just come up. The firstborn in me wants to come up with the solution and tell you what to do right away. The bossy pants. One of the things that this process and learning to be a placement specialist and working with parents for these years has really helped me learn how to listen and how to give space to parents to tell what they need to tell.

We’ve all been in positions where we’re going, and we’re looking for somebody to make recommendations for us, whether it’s in our health or our haircuts or whatever. We want to be able to explain what it is that we think we need and what’s going on. When a parent doesn’t have that opportunity, it would be so easy for me to just come up with a glib, automatic, “Oh, this is what’s required,” without really hearing the story. Sometimes, in that opportunity that they have to tell that story, things pop up. Some red flags will go up, and I’ll go, “Oh, that’s going to prompt a question for me. That gives me a chance to ask a question that they didn’t even know needed to be asked.”

That happens quite often, actually. Every time it does, and then it results in an answer that lays open what’s really happening. I don’t know if I’m explaining that well, but the parent has lived with this. They’ve lived with this child. They’ve worked with this child. They’ve been going through whatever they’re going through, whatever struggle might be happening with a subject, and they’re pretty sure they’ve narrowed down what’s going on. You give them that chance to tell the story, and as they’re talking, questions arise.

To ask that question, and they’ll go, “Oh, nobody’s asked me that question before.” Then the answer to that question very often unfolds what was really underneath everything that nobody had recognized. That’s just a marvelous thing when that happens. It really is. This has really helped me as a person to be quiet and to listen better and to think of questions to ask rather than answers to give. I think that’s probably the best way to say it.

[00:21:28] Gretchen: I’m sitting here listening to you and recognizing that with two firstborns and an only child, we probably could be labeled the bossy pants trio. Learning to listen to what parents have to say really has made a difference. I wonder, Lisa, if you could, you had outlined a couple of scenarios where we see struggle, where parents come to us, common things that parents say to us, and weird time is just ticking along quickly. I wonder if you could quickly outline those scenarios so maybe parents could understand what this looks like.

[00:22:06] Lisa: Sure. There are a couple of classic ones that occur quite often. A parent will call with a child who’s maybe in fourth or fifth grade, and they’ve been struggling with long division. This is a pretty common place where, as you like to put it, the wheels come off the wagon. They’re working, and they’re working, and they’re trying different strategies. Sometimes they’re working for two or more years, and they don’t seem to be making much progress.

We have diagnostic tools that we can offer them, and they’re free. We send them an assessment. The idea of the assessment is not to say how many they get right or wrong. It’s to be able to see what that child is doing as they’re working. As Amanda mentioned earlier, asking the parent, be present, be in that room while your child is working through that assessment, and observe, and make note of what you’re seeing because what that parent is observing is equally as important as the results of the child’s work.

Then when we get it back, it’s such a common thing. That child is counting on their fingers. Counting up in their head or using touch points or a number line to get their answers. Totally valid way to get a correct answer, but a very inefficient way. When you’re working in long division, and you’ve got all those steps with all those digits, that slowing down and that refocusing of the brain from the work at hand to digging after facts just throws the whole thing off. What we’re finding is lots of kids who are struggling in those multi-step problems, they’re counting for facts, and it’s like, “Wait a minute, let’s pause, let’s deal with the fact issue.”

Those kids get those facts down, and then suddenly they find out there was no problem with long division. It was just the lack of fact mastery throwing everything out of whack. That’s a pretty common one right there. The other one that we find quite often is kids who are working in pre-algebra or Algebra 1, and just struggling like crazy. They’re working, working, getting a tutor, going online, doing different kinds of things, and they can’t figure out what’s wrong. We, again, offer an assessment rather than just saying, “Try this, try that.” We want to see what’s really happening.

The assessment, more often than not, shows that that child does not understand fractions. As Amanda said, that somewhere along the line, they were taught procedures, and they learned how to do the procedures, but they didn’t understand what they were doing with the fractions. Then maybe a little while goes by, a summer goes by, a couple of months where they haven’t worked with fractions, and then they’re in front of them again, and they can’t remember the tips and tricks they had learned to solve on paper. You have to know how to deal with fractions when you’re working in algebra. You have to be able to manipulate numbers. They’re just not able to.

In those cases, we make a recommendation. Let’s take a pass through our epsilon level and get a good, solid understanding of those fractions. Then they get into algebra, and it’s like, there was no problem with the algebra. We don’t want kids thinking they can’t learn these things. They absolutely can. They just need the right tools to do the work we’re asking them to do. When they don’t have those efficient tools, then it’s really a frustrating and exasperating experience, and we want to help find the solution to that.

[00:25:38] Gretchen: Amanda, I want you to answer why we offer, why Demme offers placement for free. I want you to wrap this back into your own experience. You said your mom was not a confident mathematician. Often, we get parents who come to us, and we’re their second, third, in my case, fifth mathematical adventure, and now they’re here. This is a service that Demme offers for free. Why do we do that?

[00:26:11] Amanda: We know here at Demme Learning that proper placement is the absolute foundation to a successful experience for the parent and the student. I actually experienced both of these scenarios that I’m going to outline for you. Typically, we have parents in one of two camps. We have a parent who their math experience was inadequate. They did not have someone who came alongside of them and made sure that they understood. If I had a dollar for every time I had a parent say, “Well, I count on my fingers,” as if that is a good reason to still be counting on our fingers. I do have an answer for that.

Or you have the parent who they didn’t struggle with math. It just made sense to them. When you think about the student or the parent, where math just naturally made sense to them, and you don’t have to think about breathing. You don’t think of breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. That can be–

[00:27:14] Gretchen: Now you’re talking about your dad.

[00:27:16] Amanda: Now I’m talking about my father. Interestingly enough, sometimes, the best mathematicians, the ones who it just makes sense, and they don’t have to work at it, and they don’t have to think about it, trying to break it down and teach it to someone that it doesn’t come naturally to can be really difficult because you’re not going to be able to incrementally break it down step by step and explain all the parts. If there’s anything we’ve done, as we’ve done revisions here at Math-U-See, it’s taking that very thing and implementing it into our curriculum to make it even better and even more step-by-step and easy for a parent to take and teach a child with all the nuances. We’re not going to assume anything because we all know what that means.

I would say that we know how important proper placement is. We are on your side, we’re on your team, and we’re here and available to help you in that process. Because we do want to hear the rest of the story. We do want to hear the success. When you’ve experienced it, you want that for other people. It’s just a natural part of the process because you know it doesn’t have to be where we start.

[00:28:37] Gretchen: Absolutely. I want you all to understand, as you listen to these ladies’ stories today, that these will be two or three stories amongst hundreds that we could tell. Literally hundreds because not a week goes by that we don’t all get the opportunity to interact with a family in some way, shape, or form. I’m going to start because we’re going to move into these stories now. I know we had some more things that we wanted to illustrate for our guests today, but I believe they’ll also see those through our stories.

I’m going to start with my own personal favorite story, which is the story of Julia. Julia was a 16-year-old student in Florida. She had failed Algebra 1 in two different disciplines, and her parents were now at the behest of her evaluator looking at Math-U-See. This was before we implemented the AIM program that you see back here on my shelf. Julia came to me, and when we did diagnostics, she was weak in those foundational skills. Particularly as Lisa identified the foundational skills of fractions. Not only was she counting for facts, but she was also weak in her understanding of fractions.

The particular materials that she had used to study up to that point in time had not done a stellar job of helping her understand how fractions related to algebra. She was willing, like the young man William that Lisa talked about, she was willing to go through and learn what she was missing. What did she need to fill in as far as the gap was concerned? It took us a year and a half for her to fill in the gaps that she had. Then she readdressed Algebra 1 with Math-U-See, and she ended up scoring a 94 on her final exam. She qualified in Florida for, I believe it’s called the Hope Scholarship. She graduated with honors, went on to college.

Actually, now today, as we sit here talking, is a middle school math teacher. She said to me, “Ms. Gretchen,” she said, “my goal is to find the kids like me and help them understand it’s not them, it’s just how they have been taught to this point in time.” Being able to take a child and help them understand that it’s not always them is enormous in helping restore their sense of self and helping them understand that they can have success. Probably the most important thing is that it’s never too late.

I’m going to tell one more story, and then I’m going to let you all move on. That story is based on ‘it’s never too late’. I have a 31-year-old daughter who was in a car accident at the age of 27. She was hit head-on by a driver and resulted in a mild brain injury. She lost her ability to understand mathematics. At 29, she went back through– Now, she’s a college graduate, but her avocation and semi-vocation is to be a wedding cake decorator. She lost her ability to compute fractions in her head.

She actually took it upon herself at the age of 29 to go back through Demme Learning’s Epsilon program and fill in those gaps mathematically so that she could recall and remember, because when you’re baking cakes, the cake math is extraordinary. She just baked a cake at my house the first week of November for 250 people, and she literally had 4 pages of cake math for her to calculate everything that she needed to do.

Not being able to recall that off the top of her head was a very frustrating experience for her. It’s important for me to help you all understand it doesn’t matter where you are. It doesn’t matter what your experience as a parent is. I chose my college major based on what I thought was the least amount of math necessary to get through college. I still have college friends who think it’s exceedingly amusing that I work for a math company. That Math-U-See gave me the confidence to create five college graduates and an electrician for my six kids, so I know this program works. Lisa, I wonder if you would tell the story of Claire.

[00:33:39] Lisa: Yes, I’d be happy to. Claire, and again, we’re using pseudonyms here. Claire’s mom called in. Claire is 11 years old at the time. Her mother made a really wise call. She knew her daughter was struggling with math, did the assessment to see how she was doing with her math facts, and discovered that her daughter didn’t know her multiplication facts. Even though she had done higher-level concepts than multiplication, the lack of fact mastery with her multiplication facts had caused an issue.

We placed her in the AIM for Multiplication course. She did great with it. Then her mom called back. That’s another thing I’m just going to say real quick. We’re not here to give you an answer and then see you later. There’s continuation with many of these families, and we’re here for the long haul to help them. If they need to create a plan and a path to success, we’re here for you. We’re not just here to sell you stuff and see you off.

Then Claire’s mom called back. She had done well with the multiplication facts. Then we said, “Okay, well, now what’s next?” Even though she had done long division, there were elements of division that she was really struggling with. She wasn’t using rounding and estimation, and it was creating a huge problem with her division. We talked about the other skills that are taught in the Delta level. Some of the skills there she already did have, and some she was really missing.

She decided, “I’m going to put her back and start her in Delta. We can move through it quickly because Math-U-See uses a mastery approach. Just really nail those skills where she’s missing things. Fill in those gaps. Then she’s ready to move on. She’s going to be able to jump right back almost to where she had ended in pretty quick order.” That was one really neat story.

[00:35:51] Gretchen: Amanda, can you tell the story about the Algebra 2 student?

[00:35:56] Amanda: This was a scenario where a mom called in because she didn’t reach out to us first. She had pulled a youngest child from a private school, private Christian school. Because of the courses she had already completed and passed in said private Christian school, she ordered our Algebra 2 program. They started or tried, attempted to start Algebra 2. There was very quickly tears and struggle. She actually called and reached out to us. We had a lovely conversation. We decided to start doing some pretty in-depth assessment with this girl. We backed all the way up to Epsilon.

The assessments really showed a major gap in her ability to successfully do fractions, which explained a lot of the struggle that she was currently having trying to attempt Algebra 2. I have since been in touch. She’s reviewed Epsilon. She’s reviewed Zeta. She really didn’t need a whole lot of pre-Algebra. There were some things in Algebra 1 that we did need to address. I think that she will be back in Algebra 2 in no time.

It just goes to show that you can think you know where you need to be, and kids can give you the idea that they are where they are. With that more in-depth assessment, and when you really start looking at those foundational skills, it’s like, “Oh, wow, no, this is not solid. We don’t understand what is going on. We really need to go ahead and back up and take the time to get those things mastered.”

[00:37:51] Gretchen: That can happen in two ways. It can happen that a school, based on their criteria– I had one of my own children once was deemed proficient in a grade because her class had passed the exam for that grade. She didn’t know what she was doing. It didn’t matter at the time. The other thing that happens is our children want us to be happy. They will go to extraordinary lengths to let you think they know exactly what they’re doing when the truth of the matter is they don’t.

It creates an enormous amount of anxiety. Sometimes that anxiety manifests itself in what we erroneously perceive to be laziness or obstinacy, or stubbornness. It’s that they don’t want to disappoint us, but they don’t know what they’re doing. That really does become a problem. Lisa, can you tell us the story about David?

[00:38:53] Lisa: Yes, this was really neat. David was a Haitian boy. He was 13 years old, and he’d been adopted by parents here in America. His native language is Creole. There were some issues with the education he had received up to that point. He had some math skills that he was fine with and others that were really lacking for a 13-year-old. One of the things, as I talked to his mom, she mentioned that he was still getting used to the language. We had some conversation, and I offered her some options. I said, “You could do this, you could do that.”

What she eventually settled on was to go and start with the Alpha program. Even though a good amount of what is taught in Alpha, he was fine with, but she knew that it would give him an opportunity to be learning the language at a pace where it wouldn’t become overwhelming and anxiety-producing. He’d be learning the language of math at the same time, and it would fill in any gaps. I think maybe he hadn’t been taught about place value and the ability to see manipulatives used to build out math work. It would give him an opportunity to work with math skills that he was already proficient with, so there would be a little confidence building in there, and it wouldn’t feel like everything was new and everything was unknown.

He knew some of the math, but it would give him some of the language. As he went on, proceeded from there, the language and the math would be growing together. I thought that was such a neat opportunity that she took to use the levels the way that Math-U-See is laid out to give him what he needed and that he’d be able to work at his own pace that way. That was a really neat story.

[00:40:50] Gretchen: One of the things that I love about our manipulatives is when you have a child who maybe doesn’t have the language skills. I have had the privilege to work now with a couple of families who’ve had kids with cerebral palsy, and they have receptive language, but they don’t have expressive language, but they could manipulate the manipulatives to be able to show that they did understand. That makes such an enormous difference for kids. It’s just pretty amazing. Amanda, how about your story about the kids with AIM?

[00:41:27] Amanda: I will say that that is one thing that consistently seems to come up in placement is the kids who do not have their facts. There are kids that are really sneaky about the fact that they’re counting in their heads. It really takes those AIM assessments and parents being observers and really paying attention to how these students are computing. I remember talking with one mom, and she was just like, “I cannot believe how fast he counts in his head, but he’s totally counting. I can see that that’s what’s happening.” Well, yes, they do need the AIM program, and then multiplication facts.

I don’t know what it is about multiplication in particular, but that tends to be a real gap for kids. My final story that I’ll share was actually my own daughter. Similar to your daughter, she got a concussion in seventh grade playing soccer. We lost pre-algebra completely. We had done, we had completed pre-algebra. She was doing well. She was actually a pretty decent math student. Didn’t love it. Wasn’t her favorite subject, but she was being successful. I just remember the frustration when she realized like, “I’m going to have to do this again. I really don’t. I don’t remember it. I don’t have it. I’ve lost it.” There was the rehabilitation of giving her the time to let her brain heal so that she could learn again and reabsorb that information. Just the patience of getting through it again. That’s not, unfortunately, not a unique story. We do hear that story quite a bit. If you do suspect something like that has happened in your child’s experience and you’re going to need to take a step back, let them heal, and then readdress gaps, it’s very worthwhile to do that.

[00:43:31] Gretchen: Yes, I had a family that I worked with several years ago from South Carolina who had a young lady who had a strep infection. From that, she developed something called PANS. I don’t remember what the acronym is now. She lost her ability mathematically. She was like your daughter. She was at the pre-algebra level. She had regressed so far that she couldn’t subitize. You couldn’t hand her three pennies, and she could go, “Oh, that’s three pennies.” She had to start over again. Through the auspices of the AIM program, her parents were able to introduce Alicia to the things that she was missing and bring her up to speed.

That was pretty profound. I have one more story. This is another Alicia. Of course, all these names have been changed. All of a sudden, we’ve set a name of somebody you know. Don’t assume that it’s somebody you know. This particular Alicia had a son that they had a traumatic family experience. They had to move a couple times. Because of the necessity to move, the consistency mathematically was not there as far as school math. He reached the point where he was further and further behind and becoming very agitated about that process. His parents decided that they would have him evaluated.

In the process of that evaluation, he was diagnosed with dyscalculia. His parents felt like, well, that’s the end. He’s got a math disability and he’s just not going to be able to succeed. However, she had also been introduced to Math-U-See. Actually, the school system was able to use Math-U-See to help him be successful. When he finally returned to school full-time, he was out of school for a year and was homeschooled with her. When he returned to school, he actually returned to school on grade level mathematically, because of the willingness of the school to use the principles of Math-U-See to help him still be successful.

Despite having a diagnosis of dyscalculia, this year he’s a senior in high school, and he’s on the honor roll because mathematically, Math-U-See was able. This is where using these manipulatives to put this information into your long-term memory properly is so critically vital. That’s why you’re not too old to use those manipulative things. Lisa, I think you have one more story for us, and that’s the story about Mark.

[00:46:40] Lisa: Yes. This is somewhat similar to what you two ladies have shared. Mark was a 5th-grader. He had autism spectrum disorder. He was doing actually quite well. He was doing really well in math. His goal was to be an engineer. They had a death in the family. Very close family member died. The trauma of that death just really affected this child. He lost all of his math facts completely. He couldn’t add two numbers anymore. Here was a kid who was excelling in math, and that thing was gone.

Now, you talked about that opportunity and time and the brain healing, and very often that will do the trick, but he was anxious to recover what he’d lost because he had a really set goal in his mind. He wanted those facts back. His mom called in, and we placed him in the AIM for Addition and Subtraction program to start with. Then he will probably be able to just jump right back to the level where he was again. There’s no assumption that every child who uses one of the AIM programs is automatically going to go to a particular level of Math-U-See after that.

Every child is different, and we need to find out where they are. Some kids, like we were talking about earlier, who maybe are in algebra and struggling, they might need to go back and do a pass through epsilon, but then they can often leapfrog over zeta and sometimes even pre-algebra depending on the skills. If we haven’t already made it clear, math is a sequential topic. You can learn history even, or geography, or science, in pretty much any order that you want. Math builds concepts cumulatively.

The reason why this placement is so necessary is because if kids are using a program that doesn’t follow the natural sequence of math, they may have filled in skills here and there, but there may be spots where there are gaps. That’s like you’re constructing a building and there are cracks in the foundation. If you just keep going and going and going, eventually you end up with the Tower of Pisa because the foundation is not able to hold up the weight of that structure anymore. We want to make sure that we get those gaps filled in because it makes such a world of difference in that child’s confidence, in their ability to feel equipped to do the work we’re asking them to do.

It’s really all about putting those tools in their hands. I made a comment earlier today about we get parents sometimes who will call in and say, “Oh, I’ve had my child evaluated, and they told me that they’re doing 6th-grade work.” That doesn’t tell you really much of anything because so many skills may be introduced in a typical 6th-grade program. Do they need to redo a whole 6th-grade program, or do we want to just find out which skills are missing? Let’s just target those so that we’re not wasting your time and money on things that the child is already great at. Let’s find out what’s missing and fill in those gaps so they’ve got a nice strong foundation and they can build securely on it.

[00:50:13] Gretchen: Absolutely. I think it is so critical for us to understand as parents, it’s often nothing that we have done wrong. It is we’ve done the best we could, and our children haven’t had the opportunity to cement their understandings to have that solid foundation. Amanda, I wonder if you would speak a little bit about the possibility of underlying learning issues because this is something we talk about frequently. I know that you have kids who have experienced this. Why is it critical for us to ask the right kind of questions so that parents know what to look for?

[00:51:07] Amanda: Absolutely. We all know that there are definitely, no matter who the child is, everybody has an off day now and then. It happens. We wake up, and we’re all on the wrong side of the bed, and nobody’s getting along, and it’s a dumpster fire day. Now, if that is happening consistently or you’re seeing big emotions when we’re sitting down to do spelling, math, compositional writing, if we are laying our head down on the table, if we are squinting, if we’re having to pull a book really close to our face, those are signs that there’s something a little bit deeper going on.

I have experienced this firsthand with a couple of my kids because they are diagnosed dyslexic and ADHD. When you’re bringing a processing issue to learning, and you’re bringing an attention issue to learning, that’s a double whammy, and it can make things really challenging. What I tell parents a lot of times is labels don’t solve problems, but they do give us valuable insight, and they can open a bunch of tools that can help us support that student better and make their experience less painful or less arduous, which is really important. Sometimes the dys travel together, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia. One is a visual processing where we’re struggling to read.

We’re struggling to become emerging readers. Dyscalculia is obviously the math side of that. We may be really struggling to retain the processes. Dysgraphia is obviously going to show up in our writing and our ability to write and spell proficiently. Attention deficits are going to really affect working memory. There are things outside of curriculum that are available to address those issues and to provide support to families. Again, getting there and figuring out what’s going on is a big part of the challenge.

[00:53:26] Gretchen: Right. In order for parents to understand in more depth what we’re talking about, we’re going to include in the show notes a link to a webinar that I did a little over a year ago with a functional vision therapist to help you understand how much that can impact your child’s ability to perform well. You might be doing everything correctly, but if your child’s vision is off by even the smallest amount, it will affect their ability to recall facts successfully. We want to level the playing field for them with any opportunity that we can.

Lisa, in these last few minutes, I wonder if you could elaborate on something that we often see, and that is why counting is such an ineffective method. We’re going to include a webinar about this, but I just want to include this in the conversation today because often parents will think, “Oh, if I can get to 6 times 7 is 42 by saying 6, 12, 18, 24, et cetera, et cetera, I know my math fact, and that’s not the best way.” Why?

[00:54:43] Lisa: Let’s talk about long division again. That’s a perfect example of why the lack of fact mastery can be such a hindrance for a student. Say you’ve got a long division problem, and it’s a four-digit dividend divided by a three-digit divisor. There are already, with every time you have to divide a number, there are five steps. You have to divide, and then you multiply, and then you subtract, and then you bring down the next number, and then you go back up, and you start all over again with the next digit.

In between each one of those things, they have to compute numbers, and every time they have to compute a number, their head comes up off the page, and either the fingers come out, or their eyes are going to the ceiling, and they’re looking up, and they’re counting, or they’re tapping on the table, or they’re doing tally marks. Sometimes it’s multiplication facts. They’re skip-counting. I’ve seen kids in our long division assessment down the side of the page. They’re doing multiple multiplication problems over and over and over and over again, or they’re doing repeated addition over and over.

Seven plus seven, plus seven, plus seven, plus seven, because they don’t know their seven facts. Now, they’ve already burned up almost all of the brain battery they have to work on this page, doing all of that extraneous work, but now they’ve done all of this other work, and they come back to the problem. I’ve got my answer. I computed my fact. I’ve got my answer. Come back to the problem. Where was I? They have lost their place in the problem. Their focus has been pulled out of this thing. That’s one digit. Now I’m on the next digit, and I’ve got to do it all over again, or I’ve done the multiplication fact, and now I have to do a subtraction fact, over and over.

It’s like they’re in and out, in and out of that problem. We learned something, that your brain cannot be working with higher-order thinking if it’s busy with low-order tasks. Fact mastery is a low-order task. Compare it to handing a paragraph to a child who is 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 about, because their brain can’t go to that higher-order thinking, that big picture, because it was so busy working on the components of reading, those individual letters and sounds. It’s like that with math facts.

Those are the individual elements of math. If they are busy working with those things, they can’t possibly keep up with the rest. It’s just too much. Once they get to algebra, now you’re dealing with a single problem that doesn’t just have a lot of steps, it’s got multiple operations. They have to add and subtract, multiply and divide, work with fractions, decimals, exponents, negative numbers. Too much. The cognitive load is too much. Let’s lessen that load for them. Give them efficiency tools. Math fact mastery. When you ask your child what their name is, they don’t have to stop and look at the ceiling and think about it. They’re right there.

Their name just flies out of their mouth without thought. That’s where we want to hopefully, it might not happen immediately, but we’re working towards that. That automaticity of knowing those facts like they know their name. Then there’s no interruption when they’re working through a multi-step problem. They’re preserving brain battery and using it where they need it. Their brain is free. The focus is there. They can finish working through that problem and learning the new concepts, and retaining them from one day to the next. That’s another thing that parents will tell. They’ll go, “We worked on this thing yesterday, and there was no problem.

We come back to it today, and it was like he never saw it before.” That’s because his brain kept getting pulled away from it. There was no opportunity for even in short-term memory to be able to retrieve it when he needed it again. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s like they’re an obstacle. We want to get those facts so that they’re useful tools for him instead of obstacles.

[00:59:09] Gretchen: Absolutely. Useful tools instead of obstacles. I want to talk about one more obstacle that’s really important. Amanda, I’d like you to speak to this. That really is a parental obstacle, but we tend to voice it out loud so that it becomes an obstacle for our children as well. Can you talk about the fact that there really is no such thing as being behind in math?

[00:59:38] Amanda: Yes. This is the problem that we see most often with parents who are hung up on grade levels. They are so stuck on my child is this age, this grade. When you start talking about foundations and gaps, but wait, they’re really not. Here’s the deal, if you are a homeschool parent, your child is never really behind. You have the maximum amount of face-to-face time with your child. Take advantage of that. Use it. You can do multiple sessions.

We would rather see you do three focused 10-minute sessions sprinkled throughout your day than one 30-minute session with your child because we know that’s how the brain absorbs information and works best and the most efficiently. Utilize the time that you have. Now that we have some of these interventions, like our AIM for addition and subtraction, like our AIM for multiplication with bridge to division, your time can be even more effective. I cannot stress enough being that child whose parents took an incredible risk and did something very unconventional and went back and really took that time.

My mom learned right along with me and relayed her own math foundation. We did Algebra I together. I still remember us both grasping hands and jumping up and down because we figured out polynomials and Algebra I together, and we got it. She had learned it way back, had a terrible experience with her Algebra I math teacher, but taking that time to invest in herself and do that together, that was a huge moment for us. It was like, we did this together. We figured it out. It was a lot of fun.

[01:01:26] Gretchen: I can envision your parents, you and your mom, jumping up and down and being excited. I might have been the parent who, when I saw the demonstration also on VHS, dragged my husband out of bed and said, “Come here, you’ve got to see this.” I never knew how a polynomial actually fit together. It does make a difference. That feeling of satisfaction when your child gets it, and you’re there with them in that process, it makes all the difference in the world. Ladies, briefly, because we are over time, but I thought it was important, would you all offer closing words to our guests today? Since Amanda began this, Lisa, I’ll ask you for your closing words first.

[01:02:13] Lisa: Yes, please just give us a call. Don’t take a guess. Don’t waste your money. Don’t waste your time. Don’t be confused. Give us a call. We’d be happy to talk with you. There’s no bad question. Ask the questions. Don’t be afraid. We’re not here to judge. We’re here to support you. It’s a privilege.

[01:02:33] Amanda: We’ve talked here predominantly about Math-U-See, but we also are able to help you with placement for our other family of curriculums, our Write Shop, our Spelling You See, and our Analytical Grammar. Wonderful ELA. I love the Spelling You See method and approach. It has been life-changing for my dyslexics. I can’t say enough good about our other curriculums as well. Yes, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out.

[01:03:01] Gretchen: Absolutely. It’s been our pleasure to spend this time with you all this afternoon. Thank you for indulging us to go overtime. I thought the information we were sharing today would be worthwhile. Thank you all so much for trusting us to come into your living rooms. We’ll look forward to being able to do it one more time this year, next week. We’re going to recap the Demme year, and we hope that you’ll join us for that conversation. Take care, everyone, and have a wonderful afternoon.



[01:03:27] 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 demmelearning.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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