Education stories?
>One year, I had a kid who barely showed up (like, 1-2 days out of every 10 school days), and he was one of those kids where you can’t tell if they have an undiagnosed disability and need support, or if they’re just rude. I let him use my calculator, which was just a regular old solar-powered TI-30. I was walking around the classroom, helping kids with their work and discussing the activity, and this kid flags me down and says that my calculator is broken. I’m like, “okay, just do your best and I’ll be there in a minute” and pick my way over to him, thinking, ugh, guess that old beast I’ve had since middle school finally bit the dust.
>I look at the calculator; it’s on and seems to be working fine. I ask him what the problem is; he says the calculator doesn’t work. I ask what isn’t working; he just stares at me. I take it, type in a couple numbers, and add them together; it works as normal. I tell him as much, and he says, “it wasn’t working for me.”
>I tell him to try again, and stand next to him while he types in the numbers he’s trying to add - which I now see are 20,000 and 10,000. Which, first of all, you should be able to add that shit in your head by ninth grade, but whatever, obviously this entire thread is full of stories of kids lacking this kind of basic numeracy knowledge.
>But here’s the real problem: motherfucker typed in the commas. He typed in 20,000+10,000 and hit “enter,” and it threw up a syntax error.
>I referred him for special ed evaluation (not based on only this incident - he was struggling in general). He was not found eligible. No disability, just a kid with huge gaps in his background knowledge and skills, likely due to lifelong attendance problems that caused him to miss out on fundamental elementary school experiences.
