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Permalink Reply by Petra Keepence on April 6, 2010 at 3:35pm

The school should be providing him extra support no matter what grade he is in. I understand that tutors are expensive but try your local university as there are plenty of students eager to gain experience in tutoring children if they are studying to be a teacher. I pay $50 hour as a single mum to have my son with a private, one-on-one tutor. Trust me, it is worth every penny.

I wish you and your son all the best. Good luck

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Permalink Reply by Belinda Pryor on April 7, 2010 at 4:33pm

I agree a tutor is always a good thing. My son goes to a tutor once a week by an ex primary school teacher who is amazing and i pay $40 an hour. I am also a single parent, it can be done.

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Permalink Reply by Alana Jenkinson on April 11, 2010 at 3:08pm

unfortunately my mother was told by my year 10 teachers that if I needed help I had to ask for it. problem was, as my mum pointed out, I didn't know I needed help.

I was also lost in the system and I see so many children lost at far younger ages. I am now a dance educator - (private ballet school teacher and studio owner). I see so many of my pupils in frustration from very young ages from their experiences at school.

The unfortunate problem is teachers - I have respect for good teachers - and I pray every year that my daughter gets one of these 'good' teachers.

haven't been lucky all the time and it shows in the results.

The main problem is that many people just simply shouldn't be teachers - they just aren't the right personality type to adequately have the patience required for the job.

It is a teacher's role to find the way for a student to retain informtaion and then be able to implement that information at a later time. Most teachers are presenting the information but are not 'breaking down' the information for students to be able to understand.

I disagree that as parents we are now required to 'pick up the slack' of poor teaching - I am a result of poor teaching and I am unable to help my daughters through their education because of this. When my mother became aware of how poor my skills had become she took it upon herself to teach me at home - but it was a bit late. I now refer all my students and my daughters to her for any problems with mathematics they may have. Generally my punctuation and english is good, but I also failed due to conflicts with teacher's in high school.

I have gone into buying books I find that simplify tasks for my daughter - I have seen her maths work and I don't understand the question as it is presented far different from when I was at school. Luckily I have different aged students to help me interpret and tell her what is actually being asked.

I found some books in the local book store and I flicked through them to see how they presented mathematical problems. These were simple to understand so I used these to help her practise something then would use the terms from school to do a simlar problem.

I also reverted to things I remembered from my primary school (I was very lucky to have had very old teacher's in my primary education - some of these teacher's were around when my parents were still at school and they battled against the new curriculums and in some cases 'gave up' if they had ways that were better) songs we sang to learn the vowels etc my daughter was expected to read before learning any vowels.

Most teacher's do not actually pay attention to their class themselves. I have found a growing number of my dance students 'zoning out' I call this going to 'lala land' or off with the fairies. You can see their eyes cahnge where they are not really focussed and they are not retaining anything. I usually stop and do something else for a while, but in the classroom as long as they are not 'disruptive' teacher's are unaware of the trips to fairy land the children are taking. My own daughter does it quite often - and most students REALLY don't like me when I know this as they don't get into trouble at school for it. They are well behaved children sitting quietly in front of the teacher, but inside their head is something far from the classroom.

The other idea I was given from my grade 3 teacher when my mum bumped into her at the shops a few years ago was to give little sums while my daughter was helping me around the house. washing is the best because of the pegs - telling them to get a number of pegs then DIVIDE it into 3 groups etc. that way they could understand the word divide and had something to 'play with' to help them work it out, then that was the number of pegs to hand to me. it was very frustrating at first (teaching your own child can be in these circumstances) but eventually she got the idea.

Hope this helps.

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Permalink Reply by Simona Coppin on March 6, 2011 at 10:37pm

I completely understand how you feel, I went through this with my son as well. I also got so frustrated with his school when I would receive no feedback from his teacher saying he needed help in any area. At report-card time came, grades would show that he was doing very badly and my son was absolutely miserable. I had to change the situation and went and bought Excell educational books for him. (Priced between $9.95-$14.95each) These ranged from math, english-grammar and spelling, science etc. I bought these from the post office, they usually have a selection ranging through all year levels. Big W and major shopping centres.

I would spend 15 minutes mon-fri and go through the activities with him. These books explained everything, also included answers and all workings out. These worked very well, but it was a long process. I found that keeping it around this amount of time is easier for them to hold their concentration better. I hope that your son gets the help he desperately needs.

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