AnonyMom

BigAppleDad--

Hope you've met with the testing psychologist at this point and have a lot of useful information to help your son.

I've been thinking about your son's predicament a lot, and my feeling is that his old school already labeled him in a way that is much more subversive than a label of LD. When the school noticed a very bright youngster was not succeeding in math, they failed him when they didn't try to figure out what was going wrong. This failure of theirs was couched in erroneous assumptions/labels -- that your son wasn't all that bright; that he wasn't trying hard; that he wasn't motivated; that he didn't care; that he was just another under-achieving drop-out in the making; that he didn't do his homework because of all of the aforementioned reasons (when it probably would have taken him 15 hours to do a single problem set, given that he didn't get it and given the LD); and if negative stereotyping involving race was involved, assumptions even more poisonous to your son than the ones already listed may have been in play.

If the school had picked up on the fact that they had a bright (brilliant -- look at his scores) child who was inexplicably failing math the first time he messed up a math quiz, or the second, or the third, or the 14th, and referred him for testing, he would have a correct LD label, years of perceived competence rather than failure in math, and his self-esteem and sense of himself as an intellectually competent young man would be intact.

I'm not completely clear from what you've told us whether your son has the sort of LD that means that he will need to use a calculator and have math presented to him in a different way from other students in order to fully get it, that his LD goes specifically to comprehension of math concepts and ability to formulate math problems, or if his processing issues mean that, once someone teaches him the math he missed appropriately, he will simply need a lot of extra time to succeed on tests and quizzes.

Either way, your kid is now a couple of years behind his classmates in math, and the notion of getting him caught up in time for school a month from now does not make sense. I wonder if the new school, understanding the extent to which the old school failed your son, and the negative consequences this has had for him, would allow him to take math outside of school, using, for example, one of the excellent online programs (Stanford has one, but it may start with math more advanced than is needed right now. But it would be worthwhile to consult with their math person to find the right program for your son.) supplemented by a tutor who gets it. Otherwise, your S will find himself in a class with much younger kids, or in a very slow, and probably inappropriate math track. It may very well be that once he gets caught up, and if he is given enough time to do his math, he will be able to jump right in with his classmates. Or it may be that he will never like math, do the minimum he needs for college/SAT's, and go on to do wonderful things in a humanities field in which he already excells.

But what I'm suggesting is that it might be good to find a way to pull him out of the kind of lock-step, negative math class experience he's already had, and that he has to have feelings about, and approach math in a new way, with input from a learning specialist who fully understands both the LD and the humiliation your S has already suffered with math in the old school, where no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't do it.

Also, when going for extended time, remember that with the more advanced science he will be taking in high school, there is a lot of calculation and setting up of problems and formulae. Do not even think about restricting extended time to math. Cognitive processing/fluency issues cut across subjects. The verbal tasks on which your son excelled tend not to be timed as are the performance sub-tests. Check out your son's reading speed and see if he runs out of time, or lacks the time to review his work, or seems to go slower than comparably bright students in humanities subjects. Even though he is doing fine in those areas, it may be that extended time would help level the playing field for him.

Please update. We're pulling for your son.