by Brian Birk

Created on: January 07, 2009

I'm not employed as a teacher, but I'm good at math and I have helped a few people who were struggling with math skills. My most recent challenge was a young man who wanted to join the National Guard but failed the math portion of the entrance test. He had attention deficit disorder and was easily frustrated with math problems.

We worked on math problems for an hour two days per week for a couple of months. He not only passed the second math test. He scored high enough that they made him retake the test again to verify that he hadn't cheated on the second test.

Even though he was motivated to learn because he wanted to join the guards, he still had trouble concentrating. Purely numerical problems were too boring. He needed problems that interested him and once I discovered some of his interests I came up with appropriate problems.

We live in Northeastern Minnesota, and he had relatives in Chicago. Traveling problems interested him. We figured out how long the trip to Chicago would take averaging 55 mph the entire way. Then we figured out how much time we could save by averaging 90 mph. We worked on several variations of traveling problems.

One day he arrived wanting to know how much something was going to cost that was 25% lower than the listed price. We did a few problems with prices and percentages and then we added the Minnesota sales tax factor.

He did OK adding and subtracting. He did OK multiplying and dividing as long as the numbers were one or two digit numbers. When the numbers got larger it was clear that he didn't have an adequate method to handle the larger numbers. Part of the problem was solved by taking the time to print the numbers neatly and keep the rows and columns straight. I convinced him that some of his mistakes were being made simply because he wasn't being neat and orderly.

He did not know how to handle fractions. We spent quite a bit of time on fractions. It was helpful to us a ruler and measurements. It was helpful to talk about time in fractions of an hour rather than minutes. It was helpful to draw pies and pizzas on the board to help him understand what various fractions meant.

He memorized a step by step process for adding fractions. It started with finding a common denominator and moved to writing down both fractions using the common denominator. He also memorized a process for multiplying and for dividing fractions.

Not having the ability to deal with fractions limited the types of word problems that we could tackle. Once he learned

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