Math Advocacy Group Volunteers at Grady High School in Atlanta

Now that we've been living in Atlanta for almost two years, we started looking for an opportunity to get involved in our community.  After correspondence with the organizers of the Math Advocacy Group at Grady High School, we volunteered to tutor for Super Saturday in preparation for the End of Course Tests (EOCT)  administered by the Georgia Department of Education for 9th and 10th grade students.

Grady High School is an urban school with a very diverse student body.  My husband and I volunteered to tutor optional Saturday morning sessions before the test date.  For the first hour, students would attempt to take a practice exam.  And then for the next two hours, we would present our solutions to various problems and try to get the students participation as much as possible.  It was quite a challenge as we had the full spectrum of students and behavioral problems.  But by the end of the session, we hope the students learned something from us.  We wish them all the best on their standarized testing.

It was clear that some students in the session did not understand the problems that were expected of them.  We wish we could spend more time with them to help them understand these problems.  Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if a decent percentage of the students who attended Super Saturday will not pass the EOCT.  We hope that we can help such students pass next year by commiting ourselves to tutor them for a full year and monitoring their progress.  Other ways we would like to get involved with Grady include coaching a math competition team, teaching an SAT course, and making a presentation on our experiences in math related jobs. 

Despite the challenges, we are having a great time with these students and we are very excited to get more involved.  I admire the teachers at Grady that we worked with for their dedication.  They were all so wonderful and really passionate about what they do.  We were really touched by their warmth and trust in welcoming us to their team.  In fact, we got an invite to Prom and it made us feel at home... and like we were in High School again! 

NSF PRISM Fellowship

It's official!  Next year I will be participating in the NSF PRISM (Problems and Research to Integrate Science and Mathematics program) in Atlanta Public Schools through Emory University's Center for Science Education.

As a PRISM fellow, I will work with a local High School Mathematics teacher to bring problem based learning lessons into the classroom curriculum.  I'm excited about this opportunity because rather than teaching Mathematics as a set of facts and formulas, I hope allow students to think critically and creatively while collaborating with their classmates on fun and interesting mathematical problems relevant to the curriculum.  In High School, students are actively considering choices for their future.  Perhaps with our efforts, they will consider studying math or a math-related field!

I have been assigned to work with a teacher at Decatur High School in Accelerated Math 2 for sophomores.  After a 2-week summer institute where we will write our cases together, during the school year we will execute them in the classroom.

Khan Academy and Calculus

This semester I am teaching Calculus II.  My class is small and intimate with a dozen students, half of whom were in my Calculus I course last semester.  The biggest challenge I have as an instructor of Calculus is the variety of knowledge students enter the course with.  Some students have taken Calculus in High School, while other students may not have seen the prerequisite material before.  As an instructor, how can I make Calculus refreshing and enjoyable for all students in the course?



Recently, I came across a great resource to supplement my Calculus lectures when I was searching the internet for ways to enhance tomorrow's lecture on L'Hospital's Rule:  Khan Academy.  Salman Khan, not to be confused with the Bollywood actor, has posted 1800+ self-narrated, self-produced online tutorials on various topics in math, science and humanities.  The collection of Calculus topics spans an introduction of limits to Green's theorem.  He quit his job as a hedge fund manager to fulfill his mission to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere.  Amazing!

Khan Academy's free mini-leactures are a wonderful resource for students who need to brush up on their Algrebra and Pre-Calculus, or those who would like to revise concepts discussed during lectures.  I highly recommend Khan's conversational approach to communicating the ideas of Calculus in a simple, understandable way.   See it for yourself at http://www.khanacademy.org/ and maybe you can find ways to contribute to this fantastic endeavor in making Mathematics and other subjects accessible to all.   

Mathematics Education TED Talk

I'll be teaching Calculus I at Emory University this fall, so I found this TED talk to be particularly interesting and useful. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading. In this TED talk, Dan Meyer, a Math educator, proposes a Mathematics curriculum makeover in America. He breaks down Mathematics into two categories: computation and math reasoning.

He claims while computational methods may be easily forgotten, as educators, we should focus on math reasoning. He outlines successful procedures to promote mathematical intuition and discussion in the classroom to foster math reasoning. This, in turn, will help students get involved in the formulation of the problem, a useful skill for students who continue to study math, and those who don't.

Can't wait to incorporate his suggestions in my classroom! Have a look and get inspired: