Fraction Club at Eastwood was terrific, though I wish more Du Bois Priority children had participated. My coaches were fully trained and did pretty much everything as I had hoped. And the result was an amazingly smooth operation, the mathletes were engaged start to finish.
One innovation that we started this week was having the mathletes come to me, ideally running, to get their challenges. We had been doing this with Fraction Circle Challenges, but now we extended this to include Fraction Pie Puzzles and Chocolate Fix. This allowed me to control which mathletes got to do the popular Fraction Pie Puzzles. Few college students have the ability to say "No" to a child. Hence asking them to limit a mathletes time on Fraction Pie Puzzles so that others can participate did not work. By taking charge of the challenge cards, I was able to make sure that all mathletes got a chance to enjoy a Fraction Pie Puzzle.
An earlier innovation had a wonderful side effect that I was not entirely anticipating. A month or so ago I instituted a policy that mathletes had to complete their Fraction Circle Challenges entirely independently in order to earn the right to move up a level. My main motivation for this was to make sure that mathletes were not getting ahead of themselves. But, it has had two wonderful side effects. It allows a single coach to help more mathletes. And, it makes leveling up more of a prize and hence increases interest.
Fraction Circle Challenges is something that I have been tweaking for over a year now. And it is now working better than it is ever has before.
No doubt part of what made Fraction Club at Eastwood go so well is that we had several non-priority (i.e. progeny of white/asian middle class intact families) mathletes and relatively few Du Bois Priority families.
Hence one of my goals for this week is to increase the number of Du Bois Priority children attending. The mom of one young AA mathlete does not answer her cell phone. Leaving a message on a cold call has never worked so I was stymied. Then I thought to ask my friend, a retired AA teacher, Mrs. Grant, if she knew the mom. I then asked Mrs. Grant to help me reach the mom to enroll her son. She said that the mom did not go to the same church that she did, but she knew which church she attended and that she would go over and talk to her. If this connection happens and I still don't get her son to attend, nothing would have.
Fraction Club at Prospect had the right mathletes, almost all of whom were Du Bois Priority But it did not go as smoothly. We set up outdoors for the first time this spring. Wednesday it was only 40° F, so we went inside quickly. Thursday it was gorgeous, but one of my special projects, an AA boy, Jonyl, who usually loves Fractions on the Run, simply wasn't into it today. Unfortunately, his lack of enthusiasm rubbed off on his friend, another AA boy who who had been begging to attend Fraction Club for weeks, to some extent. I told them that they did not have to participate, but my frustration with their decision to sit out was pretty obvious. Matt, another AA boy, stretched his snack out and never came back after snack. He pushed the limits on snack repeatedly. Taking his snack with him away from the table on several occasions. This reminds me of the need to state the rules clearly at the beginning. They don't listen to the rules. But, if you state them you can refer back to them with some authority.
My big thrill this week was learning that my 7th grade protégé, an AA boy, MJ, earned the second highest score in our school and tenth in the region in the regional Math Counts competition. Several participants at the workshop on "How to Run a Math Camp" talked about the need for an existence proof - i.e. an under represented minority who excels at math. It annoyed me slightly that they did not consider theDu Bois Project as a candidate for producing this existence proof. But, even then I was thinking that MJ might be just that.
I am quite proud of the racial diversity in our Math Counts team. Several times last year, I offered to create a math club centered around MJ. This year we made it happen. The first ten weeks of the math club, I did not show them anything that looked like a math problem. Focusing instead on logic puzzles and spirograph. The first time I offered them a math challenge, I gave them just one, and it was as a prize for completing a logic puzzle. Another day I had them run to get math challenges. And, of course, I recruited Du Bois Priority students. The math teacher was initially baffled, but he understood and accepted what I was trying to do. MJ did OK on the AMC 8 contest, but nothing special. But, he continued to attend math club more regularly than anyone else - in part because I always made sure that the meeting time worked for him. His interest in attacking math challenges grew and well, he rather aced the Math Counts competition. Now we have an entire year to get him ready to lead next year's Math Counts team. I have arranged to meet with MJ's dad this week to talk about where we go from here.
One last random note: I am proud of the amount of time I put into innovations that I end up throwing away. OK, so it would be better if I could figure out which innovations are going to work and which ones won't. For every innovation that we keep, I probably try two or three that don't stick. Sometimes you have to get those out of the way to make way for new innovations that work.
Some of the failed innovations seem so good on the surface. Particularly my use of red reveal for secret Fractions on the Run challenges. I had high hopes for that one. The problem was that we were never able to make the underlying mechanism, having mathletes be inspectors work. Perhaps I could have figured out that having mathletes as inspectors didn't work before going to all of the trouble to create red reveal confirmation panels. But, part of the thrill of being an inspector was the red reveal "secret decoder card". I still hope to find a way to make the red reveal work. But, for now that is back to the back burner.
Note: Names have been changed. Anyone who knows these individuals will be able to decipher the names. But, at least they won't show up in a google search.
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