Project Math Access DVD 06 - Perspectives- Part 02 Transcript Start Audio Description: Part two, evaluation student progress. Marien Massa: When you go through a book for the first time, it takes you a long time to write that first test... plus I’m trying to get it on the computer and get all these diagrams in. I was getting frustrated. It took me about four hours to write the first test. I send this test to her and it doesn’t come back for a while. I call down and said, “You know, I need that test tomorrow. Could it get here like soon?" And so she brought it up and she didn’t say anything, and we had the agreement John would get extra time on his tests. So, he would start it in my class and then we made arrangements for later in the day. During my plan period, he actually had free time to work. So, she actually would meet with him during that time... and if he had time he would do his test then. If he had questions, he could come up and see me, or I would go down there. Many times it was difficult because I was with him like two hours a day, minimum... sometimes a lot more than that because I would see him before school also. It got to the point where the brailling part was the test, where it was becoming a burden on her just to get them brailled. If it was a four page geometry test, it would be pages for her to braille, all these diagrams. She finally came to me one day and said, “This is way too much. This can’t go on this way.” And John was not being real successful either. I mean, he was passing, but not where he was in his other classes. He was an A-B student and he was getting a C-D, and that was very difficult for them to deal with. I tried to explain that geometry is a very visual course... and it is very difficult to explain to somebody even when they can see sometimes what they’re looking at, let alone with him. So, I would sit down with him when he was supposed to be taking the test and start evaluating what was happening and so on. So, it was a lot of time on your part that you’re not expecting to have to give up. So, the analysis was that it was basically the diagrams that he was struggling with. She finally came to me after the last test. It took him almost four hours to take the test. It took her at least five hours to braille the test. It took me about three to four hours to write the test to give it to her in presentable form. We just said that wasn’t going to work, so we decided we would make some adjustments. So, we all sat down and talked about it, and my relationship with her was beginning to get better. In the beginning, it's like she comes up, she throws the stuff on my desk and she leaves. She is not talking to me, whatever. She is not here most of the day, and then she demands this at a certain time and it's like I have to drop everything to go do this... and I can’t always drop it and do this. So, it was an understanding on her part what goes on with the rest of my day. I have five classes. I have a duty. I have 30 something kids in every class. If he was supposed to be a regular student, I needed to give them just as much time as I was giving him. So, we came to the conclusion we would put him in an altered grade, everybody agreed with that. But, with that altered grade, we needed to make some adjustments as to what would help him, be the best for him. So, after sitting down and analyzing it, most of it is, because he cannot read the diagram. I mean, he can see what it is, but he was missing a lot of things. So what we decided to do is, I would alter the test slightly from the other students, maybe decrease it a couple questions, not necessarily... try to keep most of the questions the same but explain what the diagram is. That helped a lot for him, so he didn’t have to try to figure it out. Now, the problem with that is a lot of times in geometry you want the student to figure out what’s in the diagram, so there was a problem there. That is probably why we went to an altered grade a little bit. We also found out it was better for the student to have a multiple choice question instead of just a question that is open-ended, and he had to figure all this out. At least he could narrow his choices down. Or, maybe the diagram wasn’t explained as much but he could figure out from his choices what we were looking for or what the intent was supposed to be. So, at the end he got a C and everything kind of was okay. We altered his final and everything else, so he did get an altered grade, but he basically knew the basics of geometry.