“MATH IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT IS CONSTANTLY USED IN EVERYDAY LIFE NO MATTER ONE’S PROFESSION, WHETHER IT IS CALCULATING A TIP OR CALCULATING A RATE TO CHARGE SOMEONE.”
In order to help students retain and build on their math knowledge, each faculty member in the department gives his or her students a set of problems to solve on a biweekly basis in addition to their regular homework. “We recognize that you cannot cover something once and expect students to know it,” said Peter. “You have to keep putting students in situations where they will need to use it.” “It reinforces things we may have learned a month ago or back a chapter or two,” added Dan. “They can work with other students on it, and, hopefully, they will go back and look at their notes.” “I use my set of problems as both review and practice,” said Jill. “I throw in some SAT and ACT problems to help students relate what we are doing in class to the those tests, which may ask the same questions in a different way. The students are welcome to come see me to check their work before it is due, which is great since we can discuss why mistakes were made or why they are going in the wrong direction.” Under the leadership of faculty member Peter Doucette P’16, ’18, the department introduced
Top, Hayden Cathcart ’18 in his AP Calculus BC class; left, Eunice Lee ’16, Hyeonjo Jeong ’17 and Nadira Abdilahi ’16 in their AP Statistics class; below left, Grace Brentano ’16, who is taking an independent study in computer science; and, below right, Miller Guth ’16 and Wonjune Kang ’16 in AP Computer Science.
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Westminster Bulletin