Doomed to Failure?

Thursday afternoon, at 2:00 pm, I approached one of the students in my mentor teacher's last period, ninth grade math class. At this junior high students either take honors level math, or regular math. As you can imagine, by ninth grade, the makeup of a regular math class is pretty diverse. There are a few kids who could handle honors, except that a) they are "behind" because they haven't been in honors, or b) they're math-smart, but don't perform for whatever reason. Then there are the kids who take in what is taught, mostly "get" it, and do okay. Finally there are the kids who just aren't making it. Some don't turn in their work; others are missing so much in terms of background knowledge that there is almost no way for them to succeed.

Today, as is often the case, the kids were working in groups, graphing pairs of points, finding the slope and y-intercept, and writing a slope-intercept equation. The idea of group work time is that the kids can help each other out; they are supposed to work through the problem set together, and to chart their joint progress on a page projected on the white board. Often this system seems to work pretty well, but, as can be imagined, sometimes a couple of kids do the work and just feed the answers to their group members. After all, whatever isn't finished by the end of class goes home as homework.

"Mike," the student I approached at about two o'clock, was in just such a group. His paper superficially looked okay, but a closer inspection revealed something different. I asked if I could help, and his seatmate pleaded, "yes!" She was trying to pull him along with the group, but, instead, his difficulties were holding the group back. Now, this is okay sometimes. In fact, teaching someone else a skill can reinforce learning for the one who is teaching. In this case, however, it turned out that "Mike's" lack of understanding was so profound that there was no way a classmate could teach him what was needed in a matter of minutes. I didn't even realize as I began working with him just how little he knew about related topics. I discovered, over the fifteen minutes or so that I spent with "Mike," that he:
1. Couldn't add or subtract negative numbers
2. Didn't really understand how a coordinate grid worked
3. Consequently didn't know how to plot points on a grid
4. Didn't know which number in a pair of points represents X, and which Y
5. Didn't know how to find slope of a line
6. Couldn't locate a y-intercept
7. Couldn't point to the place whether two lines intercepted, even when I demonstrated intercepting lines with a couple of pencils
8. Didn't know how the form of a slope-intercept equation

Unfortunately, I only gradually realized the extent to which "Mike" was lacking background knowledge. I kept uncovering new layers of confusion. At the end of our time together, I don't think he understood any better than before how to graph a line, given two points.

After class I talked with my mentor teacher about this student. She knew how "low" he was and had referred him for a special ed evaluation earlier this fall, which did not happen because the set of standardized test data did not indicate that he was low enough. I can't imagine how "Mike" will ever pass this class, unless it is simply by turning in enough work. If he does pass, then what? He'll qualify for geometry as a tenth grader and be equally lost. There must be a better way, but I sure as heck don't know what it is.