Last but not least...

I've waited to write a post about my IB HL senior class, hoping that it would start to gel.  This is the class that only had 2 students last year, so I knew it would be quite different with 11 students of varying mathematical abilities and interests.  It has been a struggle for me to figure out how to present the challenging material in a way that will improve their problem solving skills so that they can be successful on the very difficult IB test at the end of the year.  I think that I lost some of them at the beginning of the year and still have not gotten them back.

The other problem is that half of the class had me last year every day, so we know each other quite well.  They are also well-prepared for this class because they were in an IB class that was specifically geared toward success on this test.  The other students, though supposedly more advanced because they took Precalculus as sophomores instead of juniors, are at a bit of a disadvantage because they took AP Calculus last year.  They don't remember Precalc very well and they are not prepared for the IB way of doing things.  Since they don't know me as well, I don't think they trust that I am preparing assignments that will help them be successful.  This leads to increased stress for all of us and at times a very negative atmosphere.

Hopefully things will improve as the year goes along (though I shudder to think what will happen in January when senior-itis sets in!).  And hopefully we can figure out a new course sequence that will ensure that all students have the same skills coming in to this course.

Down to Two

My three person senior IB class has shrunk again - now we are down to two!  In some ways this class is a dream come true - two highly motivated, very gifted students who will tackle any problem that I throw at them.  Unfortunately I'm rather rusty on the advanced math, so trying to find some interesting problems that supplement the curriculum is proving to be a challenge.

We're zipping through the curriculum, so last Friday we took a break and spent the period figuring out winning strategies for various simple games, including Nim and a variation of tic-tac-toe.  (In a simple variation of Nim, two players take turns taking 1 or 2 stones from a pile of 20 stones.  The last person to take a stone wins.)  Unfortunately my students decided that now that they know how to force a win in each of these games, they can start hustling people!  They may be my only students who see how what I teach them actually applies to real life!

The Allure of an Empty Water Jug

Last year one of my students brought one of these empty water cooler jugs to class.  There was no good reason for it - apparently he just found it somewhere and couldn't resist picking it up.  I had to confiscate it because of course it was a major distraction.  Over the course of the day students tried to use it as a drum, a kazoo, a bat, and, my personal favorite, a telescope.  I, on the other hand, saw the tremendous mathematical possibilities in it and since that day have dreamed of my students using geometry and calculus to verify that it really does hold five gallons of water.  Today my dream came true!  After starting with an angled water glass and moving on to a wine goblet, my senior IB students used volumes of rotation to calculate the volume of the container, taking into account the cutout for the handle.  It was a truly beautiful sight!

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.