Brainstorm documentation

Had a brainstorm this morning, while listening to a radio report on an NSF grant that will pay college tuition for education students who commit to two years teaching in CPS. Arne Duncan was talking about how they're trying to steer these future teachers (who have strong math and science backgrounds) into teaching early grades, because "If the teachers don't know the subject, the students won't know it."

So my brainstorm, which I'm writing about only to document it so that I have some chance of remembering it later, is this: use teachers to tutor each other in these high-end, complex subjects. NBPTS, for example, believes that high-quality high school math teachers need to have a sense of the important ideas in both calculus and statistics, even if it isn't part of their curriculum. If we believe that those ideas, that sense of where this is all going, is important, then let's consider having teachers who know that stuff tutor their colleagues in it.

It starts as an in-house project, and if it's successful, we pitch it to the area officers and the board, to try to create a path to certification/endorsement for elementary teachers: take a course given by a local high-school teacher, pass it, and get a math endorsement. Much easier, maybe, than the existing paths?

Pre-calc

Okay, it's about 6 weeks into the new year. Much to report, all of which I'll skip for now. For the purposes of this post, all that's important is that I'm teaching pre-calculus to a group of (mostly) juniors, most of whom I'll have next year again, for calculus.

One of my science teachers asked me a few weeks ago, what I intend to teach in pre-calc. So, here it is:

Function notation / Dependent and Independent variables / Inverse functions / Composite functions
Continuity / Limits
Exponential functions / Logarithms / base-e exponentials and natural logs
Trigonometric functions / Unit circle / Sinusoids: period, amplitude, phase shift / Sine (f(x))


There's obviously a lot that won't get covered there, but this is what will. It's kind of fun, coming at the course from this perspective: I'm the only one teaching this, and I really fully get to choose what my content is, and why, and how to approach each piece of it.

Woot.