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Hello all,
It's been a while since I
wrote. Hope somebody can give some guidance. I am a high school math teacher in
Orleans Parish (we don't have counties), Louisiana. This is consistently one of
the worst states as far as education goes, and Orleans Parish is the worst of
the worst. We just heard the results of the latest LEAP test (LA Educational
Assessment Program), high-stakes testing students must pass to be promoted out
of 4th grade, 8th grade, and high school. Orleans was lowest in the state with
only 16% of eighth graders scoring "Basic" or above on the math test.
The state decided to pass the 20% who had even "approaching basic"
scores, for which they only had to get a 40% on the test. This gave 36% passing,
64% failing. To keep the 8th grade classrooms from overflowing while the 9th
grade sits empty, they have set up emergency "Grade 8.5" programs to
move the students out of the middle school buildings and on to high school.
We teachers have to somehow
bring these children up to speed, or they will never graduate high school. To
summarize: the children of New Orleans are in big trouble!
I made a career change from
computer service tech to teacher 2 years ago fully aware what I was getting
into. Since then, I've been assembling a classroom Linux network from junked
computers. (13 working now, just waiting on a few more pieces and parts to add 4
more.) The math chairperson at my school has taken notice, and has asked me to
design a program to teach at-risk students who either have failed the high
school graduation LEAP or are expected to fail. I am honored at the trust, but
also overwhelmed.
My question: does anybody
have contacts or information about computer-based remedial math programs for
at-risk high school students? We really need a comprehensive curriculum that
starts from the basics such as number sense, counting and so on. Ideally, it
should progress all the way through Algebra 1 and geometry. If it matters, the
network runs Linux but can also access anything on the Internet. I don't have
good enough hardware to run Windows emulation at any decent speed.
Any help will be greatly
appreciated.
Dave Prentice
prentice@instruction.com |