And Then There Were Three...

My new class this year is the Senior IB HL math course. The course is an odd mix of vectors, probability and statistics, and discrete math. Although the past two years I've had some non-IB students in the junior year course who want to get ahead in math, there is no reason to take this course unless you are in the IB program. As a result, we started with a whopping 5 students. Unfortunately two of them dropped out of the IB program after the first week of school, so now we are down to three!

Though this might sound like every teacher's dream, it actually presents a bit of a problem because all of my teaching strategies are designed for more people. It's hard to break up into groups or confer with a partner when there are only 3 people! It doesn't help that two of the students are incredibly gifted in math and whip through the practice problems, while the third student is a typical honors level student who, though intelligent, does need clarification and practice. Somehow I have to figure out how to give harder problems to those two while I help the third student fill in some gaps in his knowledge while still covering a packed curriculum. Once I get this figured out it could be a lot of fun. But for now we're just four introverts in a room quietly doing math problems for an hour and a half every other day.