<p>I strongly recommend khan academy as others have mentioned for winderful and free online videos and practice. He has a great way of explaining concepts.</p>
<p>Our son’s relatively small HS is included in Rate My Teachers website, and we’ve found the reviews are fairly accurate. Even in a private school where teachers don’t have tenure, there are bad teachers. Sometimes they’re new teachers (had that experience), sometimes a veteran teacher with personal problems (had that experience too), and sometimes it’s an important sport’s coach who otherwise teaches with little talent or enthusiasm (ditto). The principal absolutely knows the bad teachers. They’re protected for various reasons, but sometimes with sufficient complaints might get fired. Clearly your otherwise excellent student is not the only one suffering from this bad teacher.</p>
<p>It helps to meet with principal to discuss your concerns, to document problem, but don’t expect her grade to change because you’ve met. Ask for an alternate math teacher for in-school remedial tutoring, if possible. But most likely your best move is to hire a private tutor, and/or rely on purchased software and/or websites to supplement the learning gap created by poor teaching.</p>
<p>Just my opinion but the only sound advice is to get a reputable tutor with experience. A tutor can identify the areas that the student needs help and then zero in to the problem. Also at this point your D needs confidence and motivation to keep going. A mature tutor can help with that. Every thing else is just a waste of energy.</p>
<p>Also just my opinion. I am sure tutors can be a huge help in many situations but I do not agree at all that any other approach is a waste of energy. This certainly has not been the case for my kids. </p>
<p>Khan academy in particular is a great resource for finding gaps in one’s math knowledge base because the student can work through the problems systematically and access the video lectures when they encounter a problem area.</p>
<p>OP, you stated, " She aced right through algebra 1 & 2, but has hit a brick wall with geometry" - did she really take algebra II before geometry?</p>
<p>My S in 11 grade was being tutored for the ACT, and he kept on getting low scores for the math section. Low and behold, his tutor discovered that he was not taught geometry well. Even though he got an A in the class! </p>
<p>On to another example of a bad teacher…S this past quarter was accused of academic dishonesty by his programming teacher. He was having difficulty understanding some of the coursework, went after hours to get help etc. The professor usually teaches upper level programming, and was assuming the class had higher math than they had taken. So S in frustration had his fellow classmate help him with a homework assignment. The university’s policy is students cannot seek help from other students under any condition. Since their homework was similar to each others, they both got F’s on the assignment, and both got written up. Thankfully, the first time is not on their records. My S learned his lesson unfortunately.</p>
<p>I was one of those females who struggled with geometry…then again with calculus, which I didn’t understand at all until my second time through (took first time in HS and passed, but with little comprehension, took again in college at which point it started making some sense to me), but LOVE algebra and statistics… it’s just a WAY different thought process.</p>
<p>Does your Ds HS offer any other type of free tutoring? Our SMALL, rural HS has adult, volunteers come in one evening a week. Also the GC keeps a list of older students who will tutor. If she is having trouble processing how the teacher is teaching the material, sometimes just having someone different explain it or someone explain it in a different way helps with comprehension.</p>
<p>Also are you anywhere near a college? We’re about 40 miles from our state flagship and most of the STEM departments keep lists of college student volunteer tutors. My son had to drive 40 miles each way, but was able to get free chemistry tutoring to prepare for his SAT II’s. </p>
<p>If I were in your shoes, my biggest concern would be impact on the GPA, can she pull her grade up before the final grades come out? If not, is she still able to drop the class and retake in the summer or retake later? If she gets a bad grade and decides to repeat the course, how does your district address that - we have some local school districts that replace the old grade with the new and others that simply average the grades, so that would be something to look into.</p>
<p>There are FEW careers that require comprehension of geometry and it is a requirement of very, very few college programs, so it’s bad to say I’d worry more about the grade than the comprehension, but if her mind just ‘doesn’t work that way’ there’s not much that is going to change that and that’s coming from someone who’s mind definitely ‘doesn’t work that way’.</p>
<p>With “waste of energy” I referred to fight the teacher etc.
Also because time is critical (only few months left etc) an experienced tutor could be more effective.</p>
<p>I think you are placing way too much faith in the public education system to teach your D what she needs to learn to succeed both in school and in standardized testing. It seems to me that there are still a lot of effort she could put into the subject. I definitely struggled through geometry, and it was probably the only math class I have taken that I had trouble fully comprehending (granted I was in 7th grade at the time and my thinking was probably not yet fully developed). There is a relatively simple solution that I’m not sure many posters have pointed out: studying more. If your D goes through every problem in her textbook, finds problems online and goes through those too, frequently visit her teacher to ask for more problems to solve, I can almost guarantee that she will do better. As she is in her freshman year of high school, the workload is likely the lowest it will be in a long time. Why not take advantage of that time to put in a lot of extra work to compensate for her weakness?</p>
<p>I can’t speak to the issue of the quality of the teacher’s teaching or your daughter’s thinking, but I do think that grade inflation (everyone is an A) has distorted independent thinking and ignored the gains that come from struggle. </p>
<p>I recently had a friend, faculty at a prestigious university, remove his daughter from a college and move her to the state university because she received honors. Surprised that his slacker daughter had honors he asked the original college what percentage of students received honors, and he was told 80%. What a joke.</p>
<p>Perhaps your freshman is facing a teacher who is determined to require real learning and consistent performance (hence the problem with quizzes). Try to consider this a learning opportunity for her, and not a failure.</p>
<p>My daughter, who is a senior in Calculus BC, actually tutors freshmen and sophmores in geometry and algebra 2. She charges less than adult tutors, and her knowledge of the subject area is fresh. The students that she has tutored have improved their grades significantly. If money is an issue, then perhaps you can find an older student who was successful in geometry to tutor your child for a reduced cost.</p>
<p>It sounds like she should switch to regular geometry.</p>
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<p>In high school and college, students will have to learn to navigate dealing with bad teachers/Profs as adults have to do the same for bad colleagues and supervisors. </p>
<p>However, it’s no excuse for violating a teacher’s/Prof’s instructions to not seek outside help if that was clearly stipulated on a given assignment beforehand. If he had done that at my LAC, it would have constituted a severe breach of the honor code all students must agree to as a condition of matriculation. </p>
<p>If found guilty by the college’s judicial board, penalties ranging from getting an F for the assignment/course to being suspended/expelled even on the first offense. Granted, they almost never expel on the first offense in practice though it is a possibility according to the by-laws in effect when I attended.</p>
<p>D1 was always a good math student, until she hit geometry. She came home with C and B for her tests. She went for extra help and studied extra hard, but nothing seem to help. As much as I hated i (and D1 felt the same)t, I decided to tutor her. I was kind of amazed at how much I remembered of those axioms. I showed how to do proofs, and there was more than one way of doing those proofs. It was more important to understand the concept and axioms. Once she got the hang of it, she became quite creative in doing those proofs. She ended up with an A+ in that class.</p>
<p>If this wasn’t virtual, I would offer my service. All kidding aside, OP may want to hire a student who aced this course last year.</p>
<p>I agree with the suggestions to use another student or an adult who is very familiar with the curriculum. I’ve seen teachers be very particular that the wording of the postulates and theorems be exactly as in the book. I’ve also seen schools where they include a lot of algebra review on tests and that factor alone could be boosting her grade. </p>
<p>I absolutely loved Geometry-- but all of my kids have hated it. It is a very different skill from Algebra-- not just because it’s more visual but, really, because proofs are very logical. A student must go step by step to solve any proof. Whether the teacher is good or not, if the student has sought so much outside help and is still having problems, I suspect she may not be good at Geometry. The fortunate thing is that the subject is pretty unrelated to much of anything else in high school so it’s not a problem that will get worse over the years (like being bad at Algebra).</p>
<p>If it were my daughter, I would look to see if the school has a repeat policy that erases her grade. If not, I would try to bump her down a level, out of honors. A student who is trying shouldn’t be earning a D in an honors level class. (Sometimes, students earn poor grades in honors classes because of illness or not doing the work. That’s different to me.) If it’s too late, I would get her in with a tutor.</p>
<p>My older D made it through honors pre-calc without needing tutoring in math or any other subject. To be honest I didn’t understand the concept of having a child in an honor’s class and having to pay for private tutors prior to my own experience. It seemed so obvious that the student probably just shouldn’t be in honors math.</p>
<p>But things aren’t that simple. There wasn’t a way that D could have transferred out of her honors math class without totally changing her schedule. Plus she wanted to stay. She went for extra help from her teacher, but that just gave her more of the same teaching style. And believe me, I learned there are many ways to teach (and understand) math. It is a matter of finding someone who has the flexibility and time to find a way of getting the student to understand concepts and solve problems in an individualized way that matches their learning style.</p>
<p>In the end, D maybe needed about 8 or so tutoring sessions to “get” things. But that tutor was on standby for whenever there was a problem. And when my younger d–not a strong math student–began high school, we used the same tutor at first. However, as good as he was for older D, we found someone else who clicked even better for younger d. The tutor took d straight through SAT’s and ACTs.</p>
<p>jamminj,
Our high school math department recommends ALEKS math over any other online math tutorial. Many colleges are requiring math assessments/placements for all entering students. They tend to use ALEKS tests for that. Though this site will cost around $20 a month, it may be worth it. The link is: [ALEKS</a> – Assessment and Learning, K-12, Higher Education, Automated Tutor, Math](<a href=“http://www.aleks.com%5DALEKS”>http://www.aleks.com)</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, good teachers can’t stand bad teachers.</p>
<p>Above all else…this reads as if you’re holding the teacher accountable for this. That’s not the case. Yes…there are some “bad” teachers out there…but I highly doubt that it is simply the teachers fault that your daughter has a D. There’s gotta be something else at work here.</p>
<p>Others have mentioned this, but I’ll mention it again. Many people that excel at algebra find themselves struggling with geometry. It’s a very different kind of math. In a rigorous intro geometry class, you don’t even do any real “calculations” for the first part of the semester. This can differ from class to class though. Is this geometry class very heavily proof oriented, or is it weighed more towards measurement formulas and simple, basic proofs? You said she’s in honors geometry…so I’m guessing that her course is very heavily proof oriented.</p>
<p>I do math tutoring at my college, and we have two different teachers that do the remedial/high school refresher geometry classes here. One of them focuses more on the measurement formulas(calculating area, circumference, volume etc.) and the other one spends roughly the first 2/3 of the semester working almost entirely on proofs. Writing proofs can be very confusing…especially if you’ve started to fall behind. You’ve gotta hang on to everything, starting from day one.</p>
<p>I would recommend a private tutor. As I said, I do math tutoring…and I don’t know how many times I’ve had a tutee that has been really struggling with their geometry initially, but after getting them caught up…and getting them to KEEP up…they do much better. </p>
<p>I’ll also throw in another plug for khan academy. Wonderful, wonderful website. They’ve got every level of math there from 1+1=2 up to fairly advanced calculus and differential equations.</p>
<p>I know a student who is very, very intelligent. Every course was a breeze for her until she hit Geometry. She had a good teacher, a student tutor, and an adult tutor, but she barely passed. Since then, she has continued to breeze through her courses, including Algebra II. I knew her and offered to help as well because Geometry was easy for me. She just didn’t get it. She couldn’t see it, no matter how I explained it to her. I tried 3-D models, I drew pictures with clear explanations, I tried adding more verbal to the visual – nothing worked.</p>
<p>Your daughter may have a bad teacher, or she may be one of those intelligent students who can’t understand Geometry, or both. The girl I knew was in danger of failing, put in very long hours, was totally relieved to get a D, and will do her best to avoid the subject from here on out. More tutoring, Khan – one or both may work. It just might be, though, that this is that nemesis subject to get through and be thankful once it’s over.</p>
<p>To the OP,</p>
<p>In addition to getting a tutor and other great suggestions, give your D the reassurance that one reason why she may be struggling in this class is due to the fact she’s pooled with a lot of other highly gifted students so her overall competition is tougher. As such, it’s not necessary to be too hard on oneself for a poor grade…especially in one class. </p>
<p>However, it does sound like she may need to study harder and smarter than she had to before this class/honors program. </p>
<p>Also, this may be a blessing in disguise as hitting the academic wall and finding the need to develop good study habits and coping skills will serve her in great stead once she heads off to college. </p>
<p>Better for her to encounter it now than as a first-year college student when tuition/scholarship money may be at stake and colleges may not be as forgiving of poor/failing grades as in high school.</p>