I have been back at Ypsilanti High with the Office of Engineering Outreach and Engagement from the University of Michigan, where I help out with STEM classes at the high school level. This would be my fourth semester, second year participating in the program, and I am very excited to be back one more time.
This year's program for me is a little different. Instead of taking on two or four big classes every semester and going once or twice a week there, I have been participating in the Algebra Project. This is a joint effort of the Ypsilanti High School and the College of Education at the University of Michigan. It is a national program that is targeted at low income students and students of color that focuses on providing them with the basic mathematical skills in order to help them succeed the college level.
Their short history, at their website algebra.org, reads as follows:
The Algebra Project was founded in 1982 by a Harlem-born and Harvard-educated Civil Rights’ leader, Dr. Robert P. Moses through the use of his MacArthur Fellowship award. Over the past two decades, AP grew from teaching math in one school in Cambridge, MA, to more than 200 middle schools across the country by the late 1990s, developing successful models of whole-school and community change.
AP’s unique approach to school reform intentionally develops sustainable, student-centered models by building coalitions of stakeholders within the local communities, particularly the historically underserved population. Since 2000, we have continued to provide the context in which students, schools, parents and communities maximize local resources and take ownership of their own community building and mathematics education reform efforts, which now include high school as well as middle grade initiatives.
The civil rights work in the 1960s culminated in the national response to protect a fundamental right: the right to vote. Our current work seeks a national response to establish a fundamental right: the right of every child to a quality public school education.
Ypsilanti High is one of a handful of high schools in the country currently participating in this project and I am excited to be part of it. There are two Algebra project classes in the high school and I work with one of them. There are only 20 students in the class, and since they stay for two hours every day, that is also the total number of students I see in at the Ypsilanti.
The students were chosen from the lower 25% of incoming freshman in a drawing, and they will be 'looped' for the next four years, which means they are going to stay together as a class through senior year and study mathematics together in the project.
In my next blog post, I will write about some of the class dynamics, the materials we cover (which at this point is hardly mathematics) and a visit we had from the founder, Bob Moses. Stay tuned.
