All good things must come to a pause.

Over the past three years, I have been involved with the Ypsilanti High School outreach efforts coordinated by the Office of Engineering and Outreach Engagement. It has been a very rewarding experience. I had worked with a total of three teachers in a number of Algebra and Geometry classes, as documented initially in the teaching fellows community blog, and more recently on my blog. While everything was not easy, with the problem of discipline in the class being at the top of the list, all in all, it has been something I looked forward to every week.

This year, I had been working with the Algebra Project (AP) classes. There were a total of two classes, which had been since combined to one due to scheduling difficulties. Since this class happens at a specific time everyday, I was not able to work my own class schedule this term to go along with the AP class schedules. I was hoping one of the classes would be moved to a different hour as was being considered initially, but that did not happen. As a result, and unfortunately, I will have to pause my involvement this semester.

It has been great working with the team, including Jill, Joy, Mary Beth, Angela, Abram, Carol, Leigh, Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Tuttle, Mr. Weigel and all the other TF's, past and present, and I hope to continue being involved in other ways. Have a wonderful semester.

Can computers think?

This was a question we discussed recently in class. Can computers think? Who is smarter, computers or humans?
It was interesting to hear the students response and reasoning. We did not agree if computers could think or not (which is okay given not many people agree…but Michigan's Own Claude Shannon seems to think they do). However most of the students agreed that, even if computers can do math and calculations very fast, people are smarter because they program computers, and essentially telling them what to do.

We talked about Deep Blue, the first computer program that beat the world chess champion in 1997 (playing against Garry Kasparov). However, we agreed that this still does not mean the computer was smarter than Garry, but it could calculate many steps ahead in the game.


We finished our discussion of computer and artificial intelligence by talking about robotic arms and how mathematics is used in designing these things. Especially how something as easy as altering the angle of the robotic arm allows it to hold an object.

The social graph

What do you think of the following two graphs?




They represent how people are related to each other in social networking sites like Facebook. We talked about Facebook in class the other day and this was one of the things we tried to analyze.

Early in the semester, there was a warm up question that asked:
If there were 20 people in a room and everybody shook everybody else's hand, then how many handshakes there will be in total? You might recognize it as a pretty elementary permutation and combination problem from precalculus. We looked at an easier, incremental way of solving the problem in class.
We tried to apply the same analysis to the social graph and trying to gauge how many connection there could possibly be when you look at something as big as Facebook.

In addition, we talked about programming languages and how people instruct computers, leading to binary numbers and how everything that we want to tell a computer has to be converted to a series of 0's and 1's for execution by a computer.

Dan Moses

Dan Moses' visit to our classes was a nice addition. He took a back sit most of the class and observed how things were going. A couple of times he sat along student groups that did not have enough people and participated in the activities. When I got to talk to him over the break, he said he was excited about the addition of Ypsilanti High to the program. When I asked him what he thought about the discipline issues in the class room, he told me it was actually about average for his experience at other schools. The students for the most part seem not to have noticed him, and it seemed like that was what he wanted anyways.

We are still working on the first of the five modules that will be covered this year. This module, called the Trip Line, tries to relate numbers, relationships and equations using place names that are lined along a trip line that students took at the beginning of the class. The content is gradually getting to be mathematical an the students are more or less following.

The discipline issues still need to addressed, nonetheless. There are only a few students who pay attention through the entire class. It is also really interesting to see how the seating arrangements affect student behavior. As the class is structured around groups, the dynamics in each group is pretty essential to how productive that group is. I have seen students who have changed behaviors once they were sitting with a different set of people. Mr. Tuttle does a great job of trying different ways to interest the kids without having to yell at them. The fact that we still have not sent (as far as I know) any student to the principals office is a good example for that.

The Algebra Project

Hello everyone,
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.

Looking at students grow

One of the most interesting aspects of working with freshman students is observing how they grow, and essentially shape their identities over the first year. You can see students trying to figure out how they belong an fit in the 'system'. The changes they make can sometimes be dramatic, for better or for worse. I think freshman year is probably the most important time in determining attitude and performance of students for the rest of their high school years, and probably beyond.

I have seen a lot of students grow immensely over the past few months. Some had to learn from their mistakes, for example by being placed out of an accelerated algebra class to algebra. Some had to retake the class etc. But most students have made a lot of progress. With three -four teachers and assistants in the class, we give attention to a lot of students and provide personal assistance which makes a big difference in how students perform.

Mrs. Porter and me were recently discussing the Michigan math assessments that students have to take three times a year, when they come in, in January and at the end of the year, and how many students have done so much better. You can also see that in the class, and through the engagement and questions being asked. Looking at where we started, it is very cool to see students talk about quadratic equations, parabolas, vertices and axes of symmetry. In addition, as students cover more and advanced concepts, the applications and possibilities to tie them to engineering increase as well. In the next couple of weeks, I will be looking at ways to present some applications of quadratic equations and relate them to class, and there should be plenty of those.

Here come the midterms

This week at Ypsi High was mostly reviews. The all important midterms are next week. We have a particularly challenging hour that we are worried about. While many students are trying to catch up with the material (these tests, at in the math classes I am helping with, are comprehensive) over the last semester. The good news is that most of the material has been building on itself, which means the students often had refreshers about material covered early last semester. Nonetheless, it is not easy being tested on an entire semester's worth of material.

So, this week what we did was work on sample exams. We begin class by distributing review questions that students work on individually. This gives them the chance to ask questions about topics they need help about. We also have a new student teacher this semester from the University of Michigan. So, we have been three strong in class, and had most questions covered. It is interesting to see how far some students have come over the semester. However, unfortunately there are also students that started out well, but are not doing as good as early in the semester.

Once the winter semester starts, we will have a chance to once again focus on students that need the extra help to achieve in class. The student population will slightly change as some students would be added from other classes, while a few that do not pass the semester will join other students to take the classes over again. I tried to remind this fact to as many of the students I could talk to this week to make sure they take the reviews seriously, and stay with the rest of their friends in the winter, and not have to take this again.


As a side note, it was interesting to chat with the student teacher who I asked how much they learn in college about handling students and discipline, as it seems almost half the time and energy in Ypsi classes seems to be spent on disciplining and dealing with students in order to cover the material. What she said was that it was not a major part of the curriculum, and they had may be one credit hour of material that pertains to it - which makes me think she might be in for a surprise. On the other hand, the student teaching period is, I believe, meant to teach them about such issues that are not covered in class. It also makes me appreciate the experience I get from being in the classrooms.