It is not uncommon for a student to have to relearn content for the ACT/SAT even if that student did very well in a math class. My son is a top notch student in math but had to really study the geometry for the SAT because he simply forgot it all. He ended up relearning it as he prepped for his SAT Math 2 test and did very well, but I would never have had him retake the entire class in order to succeed on the SAT. That is unnecessary.
I am going to agree with the other posters who have mentioned Thinkwell as an option. It is a full course, it is interesting and entertaining, it can be done self paced. It is only $125 for a full year’s login and by coincidence, it is on sale at the homeschool co-op for 45% off. (Next week only - PM me for details.) I have one kid using it as a full course for homeschool and the other used the thinkwell videos as enrichment.
WIth the online course, your child can focus on the specific areas that need remediation rather than sit through an entire course a second time.
Why don’t you simply call the GCs office and schedule an appointment to discuss this? A calm discussion as to why you think this is important and possible alternatives would not be adversarial.
Can he supplement w Khan Academy?
I don’t know how your school is organized, but you also might talk to the head of the math department for what they suggest. I’m of the opinion that auditing the course as a review sounds more sensible than taking it for a grade. I’d be worried that taking geometry twice looks like grade grubbing. The goal is to learn the material not to get another A.
TO BE CLEAR, the math teacher told me “Advanced Geometry covers 30-40% more material at 2x the pace.”
Appreciate all suggestions. Auditing would be fine with me. End of the day I just want him learning the material and taking on the burden of teaching him 30-40% of a geometry class outside of school hours—to make him college ready in math—isn’t realistic, for a number of reasons.
According to his friends, Psychology covers about 50% of the material in AP Psych and students routinely take fall Psych as prep for winter’s AP Psych. If Geometry covers 60-70% of Advanced Geometry this represents similar redundancy, in a course with far greater implications (e.g. ACT, trig, college-readiness).
“…teaching him 30-40% of a geometry class outside of school hours—to make him college ready in math…”
The “regular” math sections are college prep classes which, by definition, prepare him for college math. The advanced classes, which do cover more material at a faster rate, are just that - advanced. They are not meant for everybody, and they go above and beyond what would be expected for regular college readiness. If everybody were expected to take advanced classes to fulfill high school requirements, then they wouldn’t be “advanced”.
Are you looking for him to perform at advanced levels in all of his classes? Is he going to be retaking English, Science, Language, History at advanced levels as well, so he is “college ready”?
You are making the assumption that the 30-40% more material covered in the advanced geometry is what he missed on the ACT. You don’t actually know if that is the case. Again, since he took a prep class did he say that the geometry in the class was unfamiliar to him? If so, you next step may be to ask the counselor to let you ask the advanced math teacher if your assumption is correct. The other issue with the ACT is speed. It may be that your son just works more slowly on the geometry questions and thus missed more of them. Is this high school such that a regular level math class does not make the kids “college ready”?
In our district, some AP courses (biology and physics for example) have pre-requisites of the same courses at the high school level. The two are considered distinct classes in the same subject. They may cover some of the same material, but the college class goes into more depth, requires more analysis, and covers more topics. Others, like AP US History, are instead of the high school level class. That is, you can’t take US history and then take AP US. It is one or the other. Our high school does not offer regular Psychology, only AP Psych. To me, there is a difference between taking the regular and then taking the AP and re-taking the same class at a different level.
What does your son think about this? Does he really prefer to sit through geometry AGAIN rather than learn some topics on his own? If he audits it will he do the homework (since the teacher may well not grade it if he is not in the class). Do they even allow audits in high school?
@mom2and I am not really assuming that. It may be true, it may not be true. But after learning 30-40% more geometry material he will be in strong shape to self-teach himself any remaining ACT geometry gap (as well as the few trig problems).
@mjrube94 Math is his worst subscore, by far. So no, he won’t be retaking English, etc.
@mathmom Grade grubbing was another possible motivation for pushback that I thought of. The Advanced course is weighted. A higher value grade would be nice, I guess, but it has zero to do with my motivation. End of the day the result of averaging a 4.0 and a 4.4 is largely meaningless.
@mathyone “30-40% more material at 2x the pace” was from a math teacher. Not the counselor.
You really need the details of what he missed. Did he take an old ACT exam? Or an exam put together by the prep course? You don’t know if the missing piece is covered in the advanced class. Maybe he doesn’t know circles and he missed every question on circles. Maybe he mixed up complementary and supplementary angles. It could be a few easy fixes. The ACT math is not especially difficult, but it is a race against the clock. Maybe there were a lot of geometry questions at the end that he didn’t get to. There are multiple explanations and without the details you can’t determine the most efficient way to resolve the issue.
TO BE CLEAR, the math teacher told me “Advanced Geometry covers 30-40% more material at 2x the pace.”
Yes but you aren’t listening to what I and @mom2and are saying. How do you know that regular geometry did not cover all the material required to answer the ACT questions? I see no evidence that his class was lacking anything, only that the other class covered more–which could well be material that is not even tested on the ACT and therefore would be a waste of time for your purpose of increasing his ACT score. You seem to want to blame all of this on the teacher and the school, but I think before pointing any fingers you need to look closely at exactly where your son’s deficiencies are and whether these things really were not taught in his class.
Kids forget things all the time. My daughter got an A in honors geometry and she still had to study geometry for these tests. It may well have been covered, and he was able to go through the motions well enough to get an A on the regular level geometry test he was given, but later it’s forgotten or else he is asked to use the material on the ACT in a way different from what he is used to and he can’t do it, even though he knows all the concepts necessary to solving the problem. I know plenty of kids who did well in honors algebra1 yet were unable to use simple algebra concepts in subsequent courses. Has he gone through a thorough math ACT prep and is still unable to do the problems because he’s never seen the material before and doesn’t understand it? A lot of kids want to go through math without really understanding what they are doing–they just want to see a model problem and imitate the solution. Then if they get a variation on that problem, they are helpless, because they haven’t been thinking and solving problems, they’ve been copying a model solution by rote with different numbers.
OP, ^^^^ is very true. My kids all took honors geometry but were well past that class by the time they took the ACT. Each had to spend some time re-learning the formulas, approaches, etc. I’m not a big math person, but I think that geometry sort of “stands alone” in HS math; it can be easily forgotten for this reason, and maybe that’s what has happened here. Luckily, I think the essential ACT concepts can be refreshed fairly quickly.
I understand review is generally needed—but re-learning =/= learning.
If your concern is more that he may be missing pieces of geometry for future math classes, then that may be a valid concern IF he is now in honors algebra. If not, he will be fine in regular algebra and then pre-calc as a senior. It really will not matter for college. And, as someone said, taking the same course over may actually not look good on his transcript. He would be better off taking honors level math going forward even with a study hall, and reviewing the “holes” or forgotten material. If he is looking at competitive colleges and he wants to double up on math, he may be better off taking algebra II and pre-calc this year (rather than repeating geometry) and then calc as a senior.
Hope this works out to your satisfaction.
@cpamom, to be clear, I’m not accusing you of grade grubbing and the GC may not be thinking in that direction either. It’s the college admissions officers I’d be worried about. I also agree it’s worth looking into exactly what questions were answered incorrectly and why. My older son always got a few math problems wrong and nearly always for either misreading a problem or leaving out a step. He ended up with higher verbal scores even though he’s a math guy.
“I am not really assuming that. It may be true, it may not be true. But after learning 30-40% more geometry material he will be in strong shape to self-teach himself any remaining ACT geometry gap (as well as the few trig problems).”
This doesn’t make any sense to me. If I’m missing fundamentals, I need to learn the fundamentals. Taking the advanced class and then teaching myself fundamentals is an inefficient way to go about that.
Speaking as an ACT tutor, there isn’t a one to one correlation between math grades and math ACT scores. If there were, we wouldn’t need the ACT; we could just look at the transcript. A bad math score does NOT mean that the HS course was deficient. It might mean that, but it might mean that the course was fine and the student has a lot of trouble applying the math he knows in a 60-minute, 60-question multiple-choice format.
I agree with others that taking geometry twice looks very weird on a transcript, and I would expect colleges to view it skeptically. It sure doesn’t look like a student challenging himself, which is the #1 thing colleges are looking for.
“I don’t believe any counselor truly cares how a student does on the ACT, nor is it in her job description to construct a plan to cover an achievement gap that will result in a low score.”
If this is a private school with any pretension of academic respectability, the counselor’s job depends on the kids getting into top colleges. It is decidedly her job to care. Maybe this is a crummy school without ambitions for its students, but if so, the problem goes way beyond this counselor.