please help

[teacher]

I have a student who is really really slow at learning, but studies really hard and does well on tests. He's high school age, but he doesn't know easy things. He cannot round to the nearest hundred, doesnt know any unit measurements, cannot add in his head (like 5+3). I was wondering if this is some sort of disability. He was tested in fourth grade for ld but nothing was found. I help him a lot after class and before class he needs a lot of extra time on tests also. Could this possibly be ld or something else?

[Unregistered]

It's possible that the student you are working with is a slow learner. These students require lots of repetition to retain even the basic things. They also require extra time on task. You are helping this student by allowing him to have extra time and by tutoring him on the side. Keep up the good work, you're doing what you need to do.
If there still seems to be no progress after all this, he may need more testing to find out where the difficulty with his learning lies.
I hope this helps some.

I am a teacher with 30 years of teaching experience.

[Unregistered]

How much time does a student like this need to finish tests? He spends literally 3 times as long than any other does on tests, it takes him also a longer time to finish homework, to answer questions, and he gets really frustrated in middle of class always erasing his answers because there wrong. Is there anything else i should/can do? I am a little nervous to try and teach him basics (like rounding and units) because he should have learned it a long time ago and I dont know what he would think if I taught him stuff like that eventhough i know he should know it.

[Unregistered]

The difference between a slow learner and a student with a disability are sometimes very hard to distinguish. Have you spoken with one of your Special Ed teachers about this student? and/or the school psychologist? 4th grade was a long time ago. Many things may have happened that have to do with the student's physical and emotional ability to learn. In our system, a meeting that includes the parents, general ed teacher(s), special ed teacher, an administrator, maybe the psychologist and the nurse would be scheduled and together they would determine if anything further would be needed or expected. In our system this process is called the Student Success (or Study) Team. The purpose is to get input from all stakeholders and brainstorm about possible interventions so that the teacher is not on a limb alone supporting this student. Good luck. You seem to really care about the success of this student. You are to be applauded.

[Kruegs1982]

I actually had almost the same problem. I teach Algebra and I had a student who was very very good at basic math. I called him my human calculator because he could do problems in his head that I couldn't do in my head, however, when it came to doing algebra and working with letters instead of numbers, he would just get frustrated and quit. It would take him literally 3 class periods to finish a test. This was a problem because he would fall behind with the new material.

This student was actually ESL (English as a Second Language) but I don't believe that was the problem because his English was very good and I made it a point to ask him quite a few times if he understood me in class. The point is that I was given a list of interventions I could use with him (and the other ESL students if needed). The first thing I did was sit him at the front of class. I also put him next to the smartest kid in the class and talked to both, I told the smart kid that he needed to be a peer tutor and I told Rene, the ESL kid, that Danny had an A in class and he could help him just like I could. When I was finished with the lesson, I made it a point to go to Rene first. I made sure he took notes and made sure he got started on his assignment. I would also remind him that Danny could help him. I also usually shortened Rene's assignment down to about 5 or 6 problems. Rene was allowed to use old homework assignments and his notes on any quiz I gave. (I would have let him use them during the test but our tests were given by the district so I wasn't allowed).

The point is that being equal and being fair are two different things. It was truly frustrating for the both of us to have to be constantly in his face but in the end he ended up passing Algebra. Being equal means everyone is offered the same things. Being fair means that everyone is given the opportunity to be successful, whatever you have to do as a teacher for the student to succeed. He was weined off of some of the interventions but not all of them. At the end of the school year he only took 1 class period to take a test.