Case Study: William

When William’s mom approached me about tutoring him, he was in 5th grade. She was homeschooling him because he’d had such an awful experience in 3rd grade that she had pulled him out and started homeschooling him. 

You see, William had undiagnosed learning challenges that made it VERY hard for him to learn in school. Negative experience after negative experience had done a lot of damage to his self-esteem. And he was behind in his skills. Which only made him feel worse about himself.

After homeschooling him for a little over a year, she had made a lot of progress with healing the wounds from school and getting him back on track in lots of areas of his learning. But not math.

Math caused meltdowns. Math caused tears. Math caused yelling. William’s relationship with math was affecting the WHOLE FAMILY. 

William’s mom couldn’t give her other two children the attention she wanted because William’s math was impacting everyone’s day. Every day. 

He couldn’t do long division. He also couldn’t do multi-digit multiplication. He didn’t know his math facts. And he was so negative about his relationship with math it was impacting his relationship with school, learning, and worse, his mom. 

She reached out to me for help. I started working with William immediately.

The first thing I did was work to uncover his strengths. We did some work together so that I could get to know William better. I wanted to find out what his strengths were and what his weaknesses were. Knowing his strengths was crucial because you can’t build on a gap or a weakness. We had to find out what he was good at so we could use that as our foundation.

Next, in those early days we also began to work on his mindset. We worked to identify where he held a fixed mindset about his abilities. We worked to recognize when that fixed mindset voice was taking over. He was able to recognize that voice and interrupt it. He wasn’t ready to replace it, but the process of unwinding his negative math identity had begun.

As we were working, we began to find his path to success. We found the blocks that were getting in the way of learning the math he was supposed to be learning.

William, like many students with dyscalculia and/or dysgraphia, couldn’t organize his work on the page so he got lost in his own work.

William also didn’t know his math facts. And using up his working memory to try to figure them out made it so he got lost in his own work even more.

So I removed the barriers.

I started writing for him. And we always used a multiplication chart. Then, we used the area model for multiplication to organize his work. It might take a while to do a problem this way, but it broke the problem down into chunks where William could be successful.

We found a way that William could be successful. It didn’t matter what other kids were doing. What mattered is that it worked for William.

Once William was able to experience success, his confidence increased. He was willing to try more problems. And have more success. 

Soon he began to believe that maybe he could do math.

I still remember the first time William did a 5 digit by 4 digit decimal multiplication problem.

(We had moved on from whole number multiplication and division to decimal multiplication and division!) 

We called it the octopus problem. (Ignore that my octopus drawing has only 5 legs 🤣…)

He was SO PROUD of himself. 

This is a screenshot of our work from that day.

He was still talking about it.

A year later.

Remember how he didn’t know his math facts? Because we had a strategy that was successful for him, he was able to put in the repetitions. Practice practice practice. 

Now he knows most of his math facts. 

Now he’s doing multiplication in his head. 

He’s moved past the area model and is able to use the standard algorithm. 

He still sometimes uses his multiplication chart and he is allowed to use a calculator for some things. But he is thriving in his math class.

Because he finally had success. And began to believe in himself.

THAT is why I love math. Not because it’s math. But because of the transformation it can bring.

Recently, William’s mom, Aminda sent me this note:

Katie has helped my son in math and in his life. He used to shut down, filled with stress when he sat down to do his math. A couple of days ago, he reflected that tutoring has helped him to stay calm. His stress came from feeling like he needed to be perfect, but that he wasn’t capable. He said he no longer feels that way. We see the benefits of this growth in all areas of his life where his stress was negatively affecting him.

Who would have thought math could do that? And who wouldn’t want that for their child?