Dennis DiNoia: 00:00:00.313
So when I go back to the question, why take the SAT? Here’s the answer, so that kids can have an amazing life. So if you want to know why to take the SAT, that’s why. Because you want your kids to have an amazing life, and it’s an easy conversation to have with them. It’s not about how much information they know. It’s not about what they’re going to learn or not going to learn in college. It’s really about their future. And I think one of the things that we don’t do is that we don’t treat the SAT with that kind of high level of what’s on the line. [music].

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:36.782
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe and it’s my pleasure to welcome Dennis DiNoia to The Demme Learning Show. I am so excited for this conversation. We get to see each other a couple of times a year, not often enough. We’re pretty much ships passing in the night at homeschool conferences, but I have to tell you, I admire this man so much. He has so much to share with you all today. I don’t know how we’re going to stuff it all into a single hour or so. And Dennis, would you please be so kind as to introduce yourself?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:01:07.472
Absolutely. So hello, everyone. My name is Dennis DiNoia and I’m Mr. D from Mr. D Math. So it’s just a treat to be here. And I have to say one of my favorite things about being in the homeschool market is that I get to play with people that do what we do. Oftentimes you get around people like every time we’re at conventions and I see Math-U-See and I see the Demme’s and I see Gretchen, we actually have become friends. We get to– can socialize when we’re at least at the events, we can go out and do things together. And in typical industries, you can’t do that. But we’re there to support each other because the end result is that we’re out to support families in home education. And the fact that we get to do this together is just a joy and it’s a treat. So Gretchen’s like, “Hey, come and do this podcast. Let’s talk about the SAT.” I’m like, “Are you kidding? This would be so much fun.” So I’m super excited to be here.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:00.083
I’m just delighted to have the opportunity to spend a whole hour with you where we’re not being interrupted by families at a conference. So–

Dennis DiNoia: 00:02:08.530
Right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:09.397
–we’ll probably be interrupted by families today. And that’s a good interruption. So [crosstalk].

Dennis DiNoia: 00:02:15.673
Yeah, we’re not running off to a speaking session, right? So we’re actually here together.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:21.154
And before we get into this, I ask you a question. I want you to tell me how you got to where you are today.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:02:26.941
All right. Well, it’s kind of a funny story. So this goes back to the mid-80s. Can you believe it? I’ve been around this game for that long. And I started out– I graduated from college in 1984. And when I left college, I went in right immediately into the corporate world and I absolutely hated it. It was like, “This is not for me, being somewhere every day, having to–” Well, there wasn’t anything about it that I liked. And yeah, it just wasn’t working. But I happened to be a youth group counselor at my church. And so one of the days, and it was the teenager groups, and so one of the teens came in and he was in an algebra one course. And he said, “Hey, can you help me with this math problem?” And I said, “Yeah, I took a lot of math classes in college, so sure,” right? So we sat down, we looked at it, and we got done, he looked up at me. He said, “You explain this better than my teacher.” And it was that moment that it was like, “Wow, what am I doing? It’s time.” That was my message.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:03:29.361
And so I went down to the school board, talked to them, and I said, “What does it look like? What do I need to do?” And actually, I thought I was going to be a business teacher because my undergraduate was in business. So I thought, “Well, I’ll teach the business classes or whatever.” And they were like, “Well, you’ve got almost enough math credits to be a math teacher. And we have a critical shortage in math. So if you’re willing to take a few math classes, we’ll bypass the internship. We’ll bypass you having an education degree, we’ll take your business degree, have enough math credits, and we’ll put you to work and said, “We know you’re going to find a school that wants you.” And so that was, I think, the next week I had a school that hired me and off we went. So that’s how it all started.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:12.062
That’s a divine providence. And I laugh because you know that I have sort of an adversarial relationship with math. So I marvel when you tell that story, because I think goodness gracious. I can’t imagine being in that position and going, “Hey, I could do this.”

Dennis DiNoia: 00:04:29.102
Yeah, well, it’s great. It’s like be around young people. Do something kind of fun. It was cool, right?

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:33.918
That’s right. And you’re still cool. So how did Mr. D Math evolve from that then? How did you find your way into the homeschool world?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:04:42.773
Yeah, so as a public school teacher– so I don’t know– I always call them the recovering public school teachers whenever I do presentations at homeschool conferences, right? So one of the things about– I was in Florida at the time. So in Florida, Florida doesn’t pay very well. That was one of the big deals. So I had to supplement the income because I still wanted to pay bills and kind of have some kind of an ordinary life. And so I started doing tutoring and I was one of those road warriors, much like Steve. It’s so funny. I’ve heard Steve’s story, and he was doing so much that traveling from co-op to co-op to co-op and all the things he was doing as Math-U-See was getting started. So I was doing– I was one of those road warrior guys. So I’d go and do my teaching job during the day and then I was out doing tutoring every afternoon and evening. And that went on for years and years. So as time progressed, I left the public school system. I kind of got that same place with how I felt about corporate America. I was like, this is just not for me. But I continued the tutoring. And I discovered kids that happened to be homeschooled. And so we started working together.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:05:54.188
And as homeschoolers go, they find a good thing and they tell their friends. And that’s what I love. It’s like it’s true testimonials as to something that’s working. So the next thing I knew, a good portion of the kids I was doing tutoring work with were homeschoolers. And a mom said to me– she goes, “Why don’t you just write your own program?” And it was one of those thoughts that– you know when you have that thought like, “Man, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do”? And then you talk yourself out of it because then you think, well, who am I? What am I? What do I know, right? And this mom was like, “No, no, no, really. You really need to write your own program.” So I started researching, found recording equipment, found what I needed to do, and took five different textbooks and threw them all on the ground, and just started going through each one to be like, “Well, what’s good? What’s good? What’s good?” And then started writing content. And that’s how it started. And that was in– that actually started at the first course launch in 2010. So it was about 14 years ago.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:51.365
That’s pretty awesome. And so tell me how– now you’re also a published author, so you don’t rest on your laurels at all. Tell me how you evolved to write the book Teach, which by the way, will be in our resources as a link. And it’s a terrific book. I’ve listened to it twice and read it once. And I just loved the message that you delivered there. So tell us a little bit about that message and what motivated you to write it.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:07:19.730
Absolutely. So the good news is that it’s a two hour– a little over two hours to listen to it. It’s a short read, but it’s conversational style in how the book was written. The whole point of the book is about creating independently responsible learners. That’s the whole intention of the book. And it really is to turn learning over to the people that are doing the learning, which are our kids. And that’s how it should be, but so often that we think that we’re the ones that have to do all the teaching. So we go through everything from– and the funniest story is how this all started for me as a public school classroom teacher. And with kids that were in dropout prevention– this was 1988. So this is a few years back and this is how it all started. And I was one of those, I was going to change the world. That’s what us new teachers are going to do. We’re young, we’re hungry, we’re excited.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:08:14.255
And so I had this group of dropout prevention kids. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t get them to go back and look at their homework and look at what I had written in the comments and just wasn’t working. And I did this for a whole semester. And I finally kind of got frustrated, really. And I told the kids, I go, you know what? The odd answers are in the back of the book. You grade your own work. And if you got a question, let me know. Out of frustration, right? And what ended up happening was all of a sudden, the kids, they would come up– first, they’d come up and they’d say, “Mr. D, there’s there’s something wrong with the textbook.” Really? Well, what’s wrong with the book? Well, they got the– the answer in the back’s wrong. And I said, “Oh, really?” So they got curious because they had to take ownership of their own work and they wanted their work to be complete. If they just gave it to me and I gave it back to them, they didn’t care. But all of a sudden, now they’re seeing the answer and theirs is not that answer. Now they were curious. And so they started asking questions.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:09:12.632
And as all good things that happened in public school, peer pressure set in. And so the more kids that started asking questions, the other kids wanted the attention. So they started asking questions. And I thought, we’re on to something. And so we’ve modeled everything we do in our company and everything I do as an educator around the idea of having kids be self-directed in their learning. And we had them start doing it, checking their own work. And then from there, reteaching that and how to present your work. And I was fortunate enough to work with a charter school based in Hawaii. Gretchen, I don’t know if I ever told you this story, but I got hired. This was in 2011. I got hired as a standardized testing consultant to this charter school in Hawaii. So I was living in Florida then and I had to travel to Hawaii 12 times over three years. Did I ever tell the story?

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:58.006
No. That sounds like a hardship tour.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:09:59.231
I know everybody feels bad, right? And the whole point was that this school, they had pretty much the worst test results in the state of Hawaii. And then on top of that, Hawaii was the worst state in the US in terms of their standardized testing and their state test. And so they said, “Look, you’ve got to come out here and you got to do something.” So we went in and I started working with the school and it took about six months to even get the teachers to buy into what we were creating with them. And then once they did, we’re like, okay, we’ve got something going. The next year they had the highest set of learning gains in the entire school’s history. They’ve been in business for 20 years. They won all these awards and they they got their six-year accreditation. It was really, really cool. But what I got and what I got from that school that I didn’t expect to get was that the school’s charter was based in a performance-based learning platform, which meant that the kids had to do portfolio presentations at the end of the year. And so they were more vested in what they were doing in terms of how they presented their work than they were in the standardized test, which made a lot of sense.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:11:06.434
So we still had to get them to take the test and do well in the test, but we had to also support what they were doing in those portfolios. So I learned a lot about self-directed learning from my time at that charter school, which then we could start to build into our programs as well so that we could start to see about, well, how do you present your work and how do you make it more self-directed? How do you get it that it’s performance-based? And so that is in some of the chapters in the book are kind of dedicated to that about how do kids present their work. And why should they? It’s that aha moment when you teach someone else, something that you learned, that’s where mastery happens, as opposed to them taking their paper, handing it to you, you give it back to them. You learned something as the person as the evaluator. You learned what they weren’t sure about. So you try to reteach it instead of having them teach it to you so that they can sort it out for themselves along the way. So that’s a good chunk of the book.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:57.721
Right. And one of the things that I loved about that book is. So much of that is the philosophy that undergirds Math-U-See. If you know it and can teach it, you really know it, and that makes all the difference in the world. Well, I invited you here to talk about the SAT because that probably strikes more fear in the heart of parents, particularly parents whose kids want a post-secondary experience, than anything else. And most parents are just so flummoxed by the idea of helping their kids prepare for the SAT that they do nothing, and I want to change that story. And I think you’ve got a really great way to help parents reframe this. So where do we begin?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:12:40.490
Well, it’s kind of funny. You have to answer the question for yourself and for kids too. Why are they taking the SAT? That’s the very first question to consider. And if we asked people now, and we polled people now, their answers are going to be somewhere between, “To get into the right college, to get a scholarship.” I actually asked a family this one time, and they said that it was all about getting to go to college because they wanted to meet their future spouse, and that’s where college was going to make that happen. Right? So it was about dating. I was like, “Okay. That’s fine.” But when you really look at the SAT and why people take the SAT, it’s about how to get into the right college. It’s about scholarship so that you can get grants, money so that you’re able to go to those colleges. And what you don’t notice is that it’s never about what we call the celebration of knowledge. It’s not something that we’re like, “We want to show everybody what we know.” It’s not that at all. It’s really about– what? It’s about, “Well, because we want them to go to college.” So I walk people through this question. And so I ask teenagers this. I’m like, “Why do you want to go to college?” And they’re funny. And they look at you like, “What do you mean, why?” “No, really. Why do you want to go to college?”

Dennis DiNoia: 00:13:52.830
And so what are the answers to that? The answers to that are typically, “Because I want to get a great job.” Sometimes it’s, “Because I want to meet my future spouse.” Right? So they have that, or maybe they want to start a business. But it always comes back to that future and what their future life looks like, and it’s not about what they’re going to learn in college. “I’m really excited to learn all this information.” No, no. “I’m going to college to get a great job.” Awesome. So now I’m asking them, “Why do you want a great job?” So, if you noticed, we started with, “Why take the SAT?” “To go to college.” “Why go to college?” “To try and get a great job.” “Why do you want to have a great job?” And it’ll come down to that they want to be able to provide for their families. They want to have an amazing life. So when I go back to the question, “Why take the SAT?” here’s the answer. So that kids can have an amazing life. So if you want to know why to take the SAT, that’s why. Because you want your kids to have an amazing life.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:14:45.776
And it’s an easy conversation to have with them. It’s not about how much information they know. It’s not about what they’re going to learn or not going to learn in college. It’s really about their future. And I think one of the things that we don’t do is that we don’t treat the SAT with that kind of high level of what’s on the line, when instead we get kind of caught up in– we get the fear of it, and we think that we have to know all this content. You don’t have to know all the content. You just have to be prepared when it comes time to take the test. So probably start there, and then we’ll keep going.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:19.962
Well, and there’s a degree to which– it’s not what you know. It’s how skilled are you at taking that test. So where would a parent begin?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:15:32.872
Yeah. Okay. So I’ll tell you some places not to begin. Okay? How about let’s start there? Right? One of the places not to begin is, do not go out and buy those books that– and if you’re seeing video, great. But you know those books, and they’re 1,200 pages long, and you’re going to drill and practice slope-intercept form of a line. Then you’re going to drill and practice the quadratic formula. Then you’re going to drill and practice something to do with trig, sine, cosine, tangent. Why that doesn’t work? Even though of the companies out there. They give you those big thick books and they say you have to practice, practice, practice these kinds of problems. While it’s great to know those kinds of problems, and you want to be aware of them, that’s not how the test comes at you. The test doesn’t come at you with 50 questions about slope intercept. No. The test comes at you with slope intercept, the quadratic formula. You’re going to see something with the Pythagorean theorem. There’s all these different ways that the tests come at you. And so, what we want to do with parents is start with practice tests. See what a test looks like and have young people take the test. Take it yourself, moms and dads. Why not. I know you might get a little frustrated. I don’t remember. That’s okay.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:16:39.278
Because what you’re looking for is the gaps, and the gaps are going to point to things that you know and to the things that you don’t know. It might even point to some things that you didn’t know that you didn’t know, but it opens up a world for the place to practice. If you’re getting started, start with a practice test and work backwards instead of starting with drill and practice, drill and practice because you don’t have a roadmap. You need the roadmap from what the actual test looks like because you’re getting a feel for the test and you’re starting to understand the test. There are so many great resources out there and the College Board, the creators of the SAT, have a really great practice site now called Bluebook. You can practice with the Desmos calculator. So it’s a great way to get started but start with practice tests. That would be the place to get started to really give yourself a roadmap as to, “Okay. Now what do I need to focus on so I can help prepare? Now I know where my gaps are. Now I know where my strengths are as well.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:40.849
Yes. Okay. Is Bluebook the best place to go? Because in my head, when I helped five of my kids prepare for the SAT, it was to get that big fat book that had the practice tests in it.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:17:55.377
Yeah [laughter]. So right now, Bluebook is the best place to go because the test is online. Khan Academy had done this big collaboration with the College Board and had made all these practice tests. But Khan Academy doesn’t even have access to those yet. Khan Academy has the old structure of the test where you could still practice with a timer, which is awesome because you want kids to do that. You want them to know what are the time constraints. The Bluebook is something you can practice. You can download the software and then be able to do simulated practices that allow you to use the Desmos calculator. If you’re not using, you can still use your TI-84 scientific calculator, you can still use those as well, but it gives you the time limits. It also allows you to practice. What it doesn’t do. Now, consider that it’s new because this just started last March given where we are now in August 2024. The test started for our guys not quite a year ago. And when we’re getting going with this and working with it, the test prep materials are still relatively new.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:19:04.226
So even if you use the thing from the College Board, that site, it’s really not going to give you a score and simulate your score. You’re going to see what’s right and what’s wrong. And again, that’s so you can start to prepare and go from there. We still have practice tests. I’m sure you guys have practice tests you have out there for the kids and give them access to it. Khan Academy is still a great place to go for resources. The best thing to do is go online and Google, “SAT practice test.” Not necessarily their test preparation, but the practice test themselves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:39.924
Sometimes I think though test preparation part is so many words thrown at you that you drown in the words before you ever understand what you’re trying to do. I think that is maybe a demotivating factor for parents. They look at that and think there’s so much we have to wade through here. I don’t know where to begin there. If I am a parent of a first-time student– because you’ll learn with each child. So if I’m getting ready to prepare my eldest child to begin the prep, what age? Where do I start?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:20:20.526
That’s a really great question. So it’s going to depend on your young person to be to really kind of the best way to say that because, preparing for the SAT, really to prepare for it, you need about six to eight weeks, right? And when kids get ready to take it, they should have completed algebra 1, geometry and at least be in algebra 2, if not completed algebra 2. So oftentimes what happens is we start preparing them when they’re in middle school. But the math, they haven’t seen yet. And so it’s not just the content and how they ask the question, but it’s also the content itself. And it’s just something they haven’t seen, so they get frustrated. So, for me, it’s one of those things that it’s like, we say cram for the test. This is one of those times that cram for the test is a good idea. That what we want to do is we actually want to start to prepare a couple of months before we’re going to take it. And the other thing I would share about that is that there is a thought out there about taking the test cold to see where they are.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:21:26.465
So I’m going to– I’m going to make a make a jump to if you’re going to get a driver’s license and you’re going to take a driver’s license test, do you want to go in and take the test cold just to see where you are, or are you going to prepare for the test first and take some practice tests, right? It’s kind of like– again, it goes back to that “What’s important?” right? It’s important to take that driving license test and pass it. It’s important to do well on the SAT as well as you can. So I am not a fan of take the test cold. And there may be people that do. By the way, for people that do, I want you to know that your reasons for doing that are just as valid as my reasons for not doing it. So I’m not saying that what I’m saying is better or not better. I’m just saying in my world, it’s just, for me, it makes more sense to do the preparation, give kids times to do that. And you can always start having them, as they get into pre-algebra, algebra 1, you want to start finding practice problems. But then this is on parents because you’ve got to find the practice problems that align with where they are in their courses. So that would be one thing.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:22:31.620
But if you really want to give them, let them get the math under their belt. Let them get through algebra 2. Some kids will even be in pre-calc before they really start. It depends on where they are in their math journey. But have them wait till they’re age-ready, that junior year of high school, maybe sophomore year of high school, if they’re going to do the PSAT. They can start as a freshman and start practicing. But just realize that even as a freshman, there may be content that they just haven’t seen yet, and that’s okay. So it’s not to get frustrated by that because then kids think, “Oh, I’m not going to do good on this because I don’t know what they’re talking about.” And it’s not that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it is that too, but it’s also that that content is just something they haven’t seen yet.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:12.018
Another question that is sort of tangential to this is– I often talk with parents, particularly when we’re at homeschool conferences in the Midwest, and they don’t talk about the SAT. The SAT is kind of the coasts, right?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:23:25.585
Right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:26.690
West. In the middle of the country, it’s the ACT. The preparation process, though, I presume is equivalent, the things that you are saying.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:23:36.637
Is exactly the same.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:38.167
Are there things that are different?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:23:39.879
Well, no, it’s the same. What do you want to do? You want to get practice tests to the ACT, right? You’re going to go through that same process. You want to get used to how the test is being given. You want to get used to the way that the language is. And the SAT is getting an– oh, sorry, the ACT is getting an overhaul, and it probably will look a little more like the SAT in years to come so be ready for that as well.

Gretchen Roe: 00:24:03.730
Oh, that’s interesting. That’s something I did not know. So that’s something that’s in process now, as far as it’s over.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:24:10.173
They’re working on it. They’re always working on it. And you look at the SAT, how many times it’s been redone just in the last 10 years, right? In terms of when they were doing the where you got points counted off, if you got something wrong, now you don’t. Then you couldn’t use the calculator, but you could on part of it. And now we’re going to make it online. You can use the calculator the whole time. They changed the content of the SAT, where they focused. It used to be more just algebra 1 and geometry. And now it’s algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, some pre-calc, if you’ve got some trig in there, which typically we’re going to see what they need to see from a geometry course. And then you’re also going to see things on statistics and probability. So those are the things that they’ve added. So what they did in the SAT is they made it a little more like the ACT in terms of the content required, because the ATC always had more content, but they weren’t as crazy with the logic-based questions. So the SAT kind of toned down the logic-based questions. They still ask weird questions. Don’t get me wrong. When I say weird, they’re sometimes a little strange, but they expanded the content, which had them have to kind of pull back a little bit on the way that they were wording the questions. And so I think the ACT is going to try to keep pace with that so that they’re going to continue the content, but they might make it a little more challenging for kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:30.761
Do you recommend that kids take both?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:25:33.139
It’ll come down to this. What college do you want to go to? And look and see. There’s a great website, Gretchen, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. It’s called College Navigator. So I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that site or not. And I don’t remember the exact URL for it, but the college navigator, you can Google College Navigator.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:53.644
I’ll find it and put it in show notes.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:25:56.175
Okay, so what the College Navigator does is when you’re on that site, it has every college university across the US. And when you go in there, you can put it in by your zip code. You can put it in by the state, however that you want to do that, and find local colleges within a 150-mile radius of that zip code. But what it’ll do is it’ll pull up that college and it will tell you things like the campus size, the kinds of students that attend there, but it gives you their SAT and ACT requirements. So some of them– and you’re going to see some states now are test-optional. So some of the and some of the states where they were moving away from the SAT and then they decided that wasn’t such a good idea. Now they’re bringing it back again. And then some states in the Midwest, some of the Midwest schools, they more rely on the ACT score. So I think it depends on, again, looking to the future about where kids want to go. And there’s also the school of thought as well that some kids will do better on the ACT than the SAT and some kids do better on the SAT than the ACT. So it’s a start with a practice test and see what feels comfortable to a young person, but also know the school that you’re applying to and what scores that they’re going to accept. That’s the most important part.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:06.644
Okay. And that’s good information to have. It’s hard to hit the target if you don’t know where the target is, so.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:27:12.872
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, for the kids and they’re like, “Oh, I have to have a perfect score,” right? But you don’t. You just have to know what score they want you to have so that you can be admitted into the program, right? Or what score you need for that scholarship that you want.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:25.224
Now, you said two things that I want to revisit here. First thing is now that the SAT has been taken online, I remember one of the things with all of my kids that we were very intentional of making sure that they had a solid foundational skill set because you don’t have time to do computational math while you’re figuring out the nuances of this more complex math that is presented in the SAT. Does that does that still hold true? Or has that changed taking this element online?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:27:58.562
So there’s still, there’s still things that are complex. However, here’s what I would tell you is learn how to use the Desmos calculator. You can go online and because when you look at that calculator– give an example. Let’s say that you’re being asked to look at a system of equations. So a system of equations just means there’s two or more equations. And to get a solution, if you were graphing the equations, you’re looking where those the graphs intersect, whether they’re lines or parabolas, whatever they are. On the Desmos calculator, if you put the equations in, it pulls the graph up and it shows you the points of intersection. It shows you where the solutions are. It shows you the X and Y intercepts. There’s a whole area in there that does statistics. There’s an area that does least common multiples and greatest common factors. So understand how the calculator works. It’s a tool that you have access to, and it’s a great, great thing to have. And if you’re comfortable with the TI-84 graphing calculator, use that as well, either way. So when it comes to the more complicated kind of math, it’s not so much that it’s more complicated kind of math. It’s do you have the tools and resources to be able to analyze what you’re looking at so you can come up with the right answer.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:12.724
And then the second question I have, you talked about parental involvement in this process. And so I’d like you to visit that again, because I think for a lot of us, particularly in the homeschool world, we make the misapprehension. And I’m going to call it a misapprehension because I think it’s as critical for a parent to be involved mathematically with their child in the high school years as it is with their kid in the elementary years. How is a parent going to support this process? It’s kind of hard to learn in a vacuum when you’re all by yourself, so.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:29:48.886
Absolutely. So let’s go back to something that we do at Mr. D Math, and you all do at Math-U-See. When you’re having young people practice and they’re working with practice tests, there’s two things about the practice test. So one of the things is language. You’re taking a math test. We’re talking about the math portion of the SAT, but one of the most important things is what do the words mean. And sometimes you’re going to see on the SAT that they’re not asking you to come up with a numerical solution. They’re asking you what the word means in the problem. What does this refer to, and what meaning does this have? And so knowing the language, the language of math is going to be very, very important for young people. So why would I say that, and how does that tie into parents? Because if we sit down and we give kids a practice test to do and they work it out and they get the right answer or they get the wrong answer, that’s where they are. But if you have them come back and teach you the moms, the dads out there, grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, whoever, right, have them teach you about what they’re learning. They have to communicate in language. And they have to be able to use words where they understand the meaning of the words. And that’s going to help them with the language part of the SAT.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:31:11.391
So it’s one way where it’s like, “Okay, I know that you need to practice this for however much time a day or whatever that you’re doing on there.” And it’s kind of like– we tend to just like, “Clean your room,” right? “Did you clean your room? Did you practice SAT? Did you do the dishes? Did you walk the dog? There’s all those things. It kind of fits into that. As opposed to, “Let’s sit down. I want you to show me what you learned today. Teach me one problem from the practice test.” Or, “Teach me five problems from the practice test.” Or take a practice test yourself and go back to your young person and say, “I don’t know how to do this. How do you do it?” But have them teach you and in their communication, in their language, it is going to take them to a level of mastery that they currently won’t have by them just doing practice problems themselves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:56.035
I love the way that you have said that. Frankly, that’s one of the premises of your teach, is to help a student understand that being able to understand successfully means being able to explain to someone else. In closing, what would be your closing thoughts to parents today so that they could take away something to really ponder on? And one of the things I want to revisit with you is talking about having those intentional conversations with your child about what do they think they want to do? Not carve it in stone, but what do you think you want to do?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:32:36.750
Yeah, yeah. As we leave, if you think about that, why are you taking the SAT? You want to be able to answer that question because it’s not about how much math you know. It’s not about how many words that you know, the vocabulary. It’s really not about that. It is about what is it that you’re up to in your life. And that is where it’s going to come to. And then the other the other part of that is, be willing to do the homework on knowing your score. What score do you need to get into that school? We tell young people all the time, the chances of you getting them all the right is almost zero. It’s very rare that somebody gets them all right. In fact, when somebody gets them all right, they go back and they change the test and make it harder. That’s that’s what they do, right? So, and that’s on purpose. But it’s not about getting them all right. It’s knowing your score. How many do you need to get right? Where do you need to be to get there? So again, it’s taking those practice tests and seeing what the simulation comes out to, where you want to be, kind of overshoot that in the practice so that when you get to the test, that you feel comfortable with that. But oftentimes I think we get really, really stressed. But anything that comes with being stressed about something comes back to, are we prepared? Are we doing the preparation?

Dennis DiNoia: 00:33:58.117
One last thing I’ll share with people about this. This will leave you something for another time, Gretchen. Test preparation enforces– when I say enforces, like works with, strengthens, and builds executive functioning skills. It is one of the things that we do in education that I think gets overlooked in terms of being able to let kids be able to adapt, to organize information, to be able to deal with– sometimes they like they answer things too quickly, being able to regulate themselves. And those are all executive functioning skills, topics. And test preparation can help with several of those along the way. So that would be something I would leave people with. Take test preparation as something that is like taking a math class or taking a history class. Have it be a course all in itself. It’s important.

Gretchen Roe: 00:34:44.210
Absolutely. It has been my pleasure to host you for the last hour. I have learned so much, so many things. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thank you all again for joining us today. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. And be sure to rate, review, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Dennis, thanks for this time. It was amazing.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:35:10.933
Thank you so much. It was fun.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:11.405
We’ll have to do it again sometime.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:35:12.585
Absolutely.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:13.755
All right. Take care.

Dennis DiNoia: 00:35:14.280
Bye.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:15.028
Bye-bye.

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