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Oh, palmettogirl, pardon me while I chuckle. Your school isn’t the only one in the state wanting to foist math LDs off onto other schools…my son’s does, too. He emailed his school’s math modeling instructor his diagnosis (and the ‘accommodations’ he is permitted to use because of the diagnosis) with the idea of at least letting the instructor know, before class started, what skills (and non-skills) he’d be taking into the class as a student. He also asked, casually, if the instructor had had any experience in teaching students with dyscalculia.

The math modeling instructor’s reply was most kind, if not a bit predictable… The instructor allowed as how he didn’t have any experience with dyscalculics and suggested that my son go to the local junior college [as a transient student] and then have his math modeling grade transferred back to his home school; “Other than that I do not have the experience to know what you should do or try.” (That the instructors at the local junior college don’t have the experience, either, is not, apparently, his home school’s concern.) In other words, my son’s school doesn’t know how to teach him, how to ‘teach around’ the math LD…but everyone there knows he has to take the math class because that is what is required by the ‘system’ of which his school is a part. It’s up to him to take the required math class the best he can, though…most preferably, somewhere else.

I don’t think it’ll surprise any one in this forum to find out that the instructor also wrote: “I do not have much experience with teaching students with disabilities. I taught a blind student math, but he was actually quite good at math, just couldn't see things like graphs and all the other things.” It amazes me that, in this day and age, colleges/universities still do not understand that a successfully-taught person with a specific LD in one area, cannot be held up as an example of ability at teaching any other LD. In the case of this particular math modeling instructor, to his credit, he did not hold up “the blind student” as an example of successfully teaching math, but, sad to say, my son’s school has, for as long as I can remember, trotted out “the blind student” regularly to show that they do address the needs of the LD student. Now, it seems, they’ve changed their tune a bit—now they simply want math LDs to transient to other institutions for math courses. “Higher education,” don’t you just love it? m.