Steve Gory is the founder of Onsego, and he’s also an education strategist. In this post, Steve talks about why Onsego has created a new course that works with the TS-30XS GED Scientific Calculator.
With the help of this new course, students learn how to pass the GED® Math subtest without even learning math. With this course, rather than learning Math, they are taught how to use the scientific GED calculator effectively to attain a passing score on the GED Math subject test.
Steve explains: “About a year ago, my sister asked me if I could help one of her friends with preparing for the Math portion of the GED test. My sister has a job in the entertainment industry, and many of her “friends” are artists.
When I first met my sister’s friend, that appeared to be true. Her “friend” was actually an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who was looking to earn her GED diploma.
She was called Nina, and she had already passed three out of the four GED subtests. On the Math test, however, she couldn’t get a passing score though she had already tried four times. I gave Nina access to Onsego’s GED prep course, and over the next months, we had several Zoom meetings.
To be honest, it was quite a challenge to get Nina motivated enough to learn. Nina has a pretty busy life, and she knew that math would have zero relevance or influence when it came to her future life as an artist and success.
Then one day, Nina asked me to show her how she could use the GED scientific calculator to deal with these math topics and problems. She said that learning how to use a machine would be easy!
And at that very moment, I realized that the people at Onsego, including me, were missing something! Why do we try to teach our students math?
There’s no need to teach GED students math if we teach them how to pass the Math subtest by using a legally available tool like the GED scientific calculator, the Texas Instruments TI-30XS.
The use of this calculator is allowed on the GED Math subject test. Students can bring their own hand-held calculator, and if they take the GED test online, GED Testing Service provides an on-screen version of the TI-30XS.
Over the following weeks, our Math instructors analyzed the GED Math section more profoundly and identified which topics appear on the GED Math test most frequently.
Strategically, they selected the most essential Math topics and problems, and we started to design lessons that make clear how to solve math problems and challenges by using the calculator.
Then I showed these lessons to Nina, and she got excited. She realized that she could now finally pass the math test by just learning for two weeks. This was very inspirational to her and gave her hope to finally get onto the track of becoming a nurse and sign up for a nursing program.
For two weeks, she learned for around 1.5 hours each day, after which she took the Math GED Ready® practice test. Nina reached a score in the green (“likely to pass”) zone, so she scheduled her real GED Math test. And guess what? She got 166 points! She could hardly believe that herself.
This was a great success for Nina and for the Onsego team as well. In the following months, we offered this new GED calculator course to many students who, just like Nina, were not able to get a passing score on the Math subtest.”
And now, finally, this ground-breaking course is available to all GED students. A part of these calculator lessons is available for free on the BestGEDClasses website.