not showing his work on Algebra tests

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My son is a freshman at a private high school. He has always refused to show his work in math, so teachers cannot give him partial credit if he has a small error which gives him an incorrect answer. He easily understands the concepts but does all computation in his head. Seems to be embarrassed to write anything but the answer.

Any ideas on how to convince him to show his work? He is in danger of losing his scholarship money.

He also is too embarrassed to go to a separate room to get extra time on tests and use a calculator.

Has this been discussed before?

Why doesn't he want to show his work? I saw the info about him being embarrassed, but hat doesn't make sense on its own. Embarrassed because...? Is his process different from what the teacher teaches? Why would he be embarrassed?

I was strong at math in HS and majored in it in college. I often didn't show my work because I skipped steps in my head. If that's the case, he can show just what his brain is doing. He doesn't have to show his work in the manner that the teacher taught; he just has to show what his process looks like. If it's 3 steps to his peers' 20, that should be okay if the teacher has any brains.

Math is like music - some people have the gift and others study and study and can only repeat steps. If he's like the former, that's more than okay. His teacher should be able to recognize that and nurture it. But s/he will still need to see HIS process, not necessarily "the" process s/he taught in able to do so.

i know, but he's still yong, you can work on that, maybe you can help him to trace the reasoning in his head afterward
i think that he can be not aware of how he comes to the answer, but when things get more difficult that's more important, the how, than the actual answer
outside of that put in some work on reading/discussing paradoxes, there's child-youth books on that


maybe some like: http://www.books.ie/review/product/list ... tegory/64/
https://www.amazon.com/Course-Greatest- ... THWHB8W5KK

We have a similar issue and with us it is b/c writing is hard for him and thinking through the math for him is way faster. So, writing it down is this terrible, tedious thing. It bogs him down, and I don't know how to explain how I think it feels to him. It is probably similar to those assignments when you have to write down all the steps to something basic like making a sandwich; Except this is problem after problem after problem.

My son is still in middle school, and he is home schooled, so it is a little easier to manage, but I tell him it is like (favorite video game) where you have to hit every item to get the most points, and that to get the most points, he needs to show his work. This way, he at least tries, but it is really hard for him, b/c he also has difficulty physically writing neatly and for long periods.

To clarify: he is embarrassed because he thinks the steps are obvious so it is absurd to write them down. And he thinks everyone thinks like he does - can't take perspective - so more reason to do it all in his head.

Possibly the mechanics of writing bothers him. He has slow processing, so he may feel that writing slows him down even more. He refuses more time on tests (another embarrassment), so that's another problem. Thanks for the video game analogy!! I bet that will help.

To parent of Captain Obvious

This comes up a lot in my world.

So does homework - zero turned in. --

A's on test.

Getting there is more than half the battle say some teachers.
Not relavant and waste of time think some students. ( along with group presentations)
Teaching choose your battles was a lesson that came very late to this "righter".

Money related to your students interest could be hook-
Or not

Phone or more Dead Pool shirts
That may be an answer.

Or not

Above seriously and with tongue near my cheek.

You mention that staying at the school is dependent on maintaining a scholarship, and that his grades due to refusing to show his work may effect the scholarship. Would this be a possible motivating factor for your son? Like if you tell him, "I get it, you don't want to show your work because you do it in your head. But your teacher insists you show work, and your refusal to do so is negatively impacting your grades and may hurt your scholarship. I know it seems ridiculous to you, but can you just do it to satisfy the teacher?" If staying at the school is important to him, maybe this will make him accept he has to do it.

In general, learning to do things that may seem like time wasting busy work, or having to do work or assignments we really don't want to, is simply part of school and really part of life. You can't always do it your way if you want to be successful. I've had many such discussions with my high school aged daughter. For her it helps to just lay it out plainly and straightforwardly, but I totally get that every child is different and this may not be the best approach for your son. Good luck!

I've had trouble showing work because of not knowing how to do the problem or not being able to remember all the steps and then trying to just improvise spending 20 minutes only to get the problem hopelessly wrong and have the teacher inform you not only are you wrong but your work doesn't even make any sense. I have always been bad with math. I tried going to college but I couldn't even pass the remedial math with a tutor helping me, it wasn't the only reason I dropped out but it is one of the major reasons I've decided against further attempts.


Also though some people find it more effective to do math in their head, so I think it would make sense if schools would address that difference create more individual approaches.

My own teenage logic out ruled everything else.

My work with teens these days use logic based models tweaked for individual use.
There is a solution out there.
It may come during a talk , video game or super hero movie.

OY to the world and sometimes Skool aka school.

My brother could never get his head around showing working. Eventually he fell down to 'average'. As far as I could tell, writing things down seemed slow and he honesty did't quite know how he got the answer.

Unfortunately, a lot of students don't understand that math isn't about getting the right answers. Math is about learning about how we think and solve problems. Its not black and white. There are lots of right answers. The idea is to evidence proof that you are progressing in your ability to think through problems.

You might never need to solve for X in your adult life, but you will need to solve problems logically and sequentially, no matter what you do.

Alas, a lot of teachers don't understand this either. Somewhere along the line, someone told your son that he needs to show his work "in case he gets the answer wrong." This is not the best reason for requiring your students to show work.

This skill, of showing the work, is harder for autistics for a couple of reasons. Small motor problems make writing more a pain in the arse. Executive functioning problems make it hard for us to figure out what a teacher does and doesn't want to see. Visual planning skills make it hard to know where to write in those boxes they provide. Unique perspectives make it hard to express how we are seeing the answers because we really are seeing out of the box. We haven't always been provided with the right vocabulary to express our thoughts.

That doesn't mean we give up. That means that we make an effort to compensate. We take the extra time. We go the extra mile. That's a really important lesson for your son.

I used to be a learning specialist in a private school. We had a couple of the more sensitive kids take the test in their regular classrooms and then come back later for extra time after school. (Any last minute learning they do between the regular class period and the after school extra time session is a bonus. After all, it's about making sure they get the material, not having a competition with the other student's grades. So, if they study after they see the test, I was thrilled. That's a good life skill.)

It's also an option to have your son not in the classroom at the beginning of a test. So, he doesn't have to be seen leaving. He will simply not be in class that session. Or the teacher could simply give him 1/2 the test in class and the other half after school.

Kids are weird. They don't realize that everyone else is too busy worrying about how they look to notice what other people are doing.

You guys really ought to watch the movie "The Man Who Knew Infinity"

That movie describes perfectly this issue. G.H. Hardy had the hardest time trying to convince Srinivasa Ramanujan to write down the intermediate steps on how Ramanujan arrived at his results. Ramanujan was simply a genius. Even today, after 1 century from Ramanujan's time, mathematicians are still scratching their heads on how he arrived at some of his results. This, because Ramanujan never wrote down how he derived the results in his manuscripts. His excuse was that paper was expensive, which, actually was true in his case. Ramanujan by no means had an easy time in England, several top mathematicians did not believe in his results. But eventually he managed to put some of his findings into published work, with intermediate results, and earned the respect of others.

Cases like your son and Ramanujan are by no means unique. I had a friend during my PhD program. He was the smartest student in physics and applied physics departments. All other students simply could not catch up with him. Several times I asked him to explain the intermediate steps on how he derived his results. Not only me, other students asked him as well. For some simpler cases, he would tell us. But more often than not, he just shook his head, smiled, and then that was it. There was no way to squeeze out any more information from him. It was very hard to understand him, to understand why he wouldn't explain the intermediate steps to other people. It's only well after I entered the business world that I started to feel like him. Sometimes, it just takes too much time to explain to other people, when their background is so far behind yours. Trust me, it was not like my friend was a jerk. Recently I found out he is still active on Internet, on Math Stack Exchange, where he has helped countless people with some extremely difficult math problems. I look at his solutions there, and guess what? The necessary intermediate steps are all there. Countless people have thanks him for his solutions. He is old now, but he had a mental maturity of an 8 years old when I knew him. I don't expect him to behave any more matured today. Yet, he commands respect, from anyone that has known him.

I also always remember my linear algebra professor. He was a professor at my Engineering School even before he had any PhD. He later got two PhDs, one from Stanford and another one from MIT, in different fields. He was able to invert a 4x4 matrix of real numbers, each number to 5 decimal places, in front of the whole class. It was like watching a magician at work in front of your eyes. He published math books since young.

I am just glad that I've had the opportunity to personally get to know some of the monster geniuses in this world.

Going through all these cases, I think what could help is for your son to somewhat write things down. Perhaps blogs, websites, or join Math Stack Exchange. Make him feel proud about his work, make him feel like he has an influence on other people's lives. Perhaps he could tutor some younger students, too.