Category Archives: Best New Thing

Highlights from the year so far!

2015-10-02 10.31.04
The Williston Northampton School math department!

At the last math department meeting we collected some of our favorite moments from class from the year so far.

Here they are:

Kathryn Hill: I’ve been so pleased to see the Trigonometry, Probability, and Statistics kids getting the hang of triangle trigonometry. It’s not easy for all of them, but it’s great to know that we are exposing more of our students to the usefulness of trig. The group has been working hard, and while this material does not come easily to all of them, most of the students are finding some significant success.
Kim Evelti: My students are so *intrinsically motivated* to extend their learning and apply their creativity to game design. When I introduce the ability for students to “mod” (modify) the game prescribed by the book (as I did yesterday,) their desire to make an awesome game propels them to ask what’s possible, get productively frustrated with what they don’t know yet and get excited to find the answers either later in the class term or through individual conversation and research.
Josh Seamon: The start to AP Calculus BC is always a challenge. The class has a quick start and there are some very, very big ideas to grasp right from the start. I have been so impressed by how well my students have absorbed, on a deep level, everything that we’ve been working on! Their knowledge and command of sequences and series has been inspiring!
Matt Lapolla: I have loved working with voting theory in the Topics class. We have been working with a variety of methods to determine a group’s decision breakdown. One example is breaking down and analyzing how the polls in college football work and what it really means to be a group’s first choice but to have less overall first place votes.
Carey Baldwin: We were working on a challenging topic in Trigonometry – the ambiguous case for solving oblique triangles with the law of sines. When we started working in groups, several students came to the board and asked to work through the problems there. Students took turns writing and engaging in the process. It was great to see this initiative from them and their comfort level in the classroom.
Martha McCullagh: Yesterday in my calculus class I was able to step aside while a students stepped forward to take on discussing the fundamental idea of calculus. He didn’t know that was what he was doing – he just came forward to show the class another way that we could look at a problem. His suggestion took the class in exactly the right direction to develop the concept of derivatives. I love when things fall into place!
Ted Matthias: In Engineering & Robotics, all students successfully modified their first ROBOTC program. All students were able to program their robots to accurately travel on the Challenge Table to the finish line.
Monique Conroy: Algebra I is an exciting time in the life of math students. After years of studying arithmetic, discovering the world of variables can be intimidating, interesting and fun. Though my 8th graders were familiar with the distributive property, they had no idea the details we covered early Monday morning. What is being distributed, negatives and simplifying by like combining like terms after distributing led to details and fun no one could imagine. Well done friends of algebra.
Mimi King: When working with my Pre-Algebra on subtracting integers it was very rewarding to watch the understanding sink in as I was using real world examples. Hearing “Wow, that makes so much sense!” was wonderful.
Libby Anderson: One of my classes is seminar like as it is dealing with college level mathematics. Every day the students are at the board presenting, or should I say teaching, different approaches to the same problem as we open our minds to knew and different ways of problem-solving, regardless of the content. We are having so much fun!