Mathematics
The Summit High School math department offers a variety of instructional paths allowing students who work hard to accelerate or decelerate their program as their needs change.
The department offers a two-year algebra program as a way to "firmly develop the concepts" of the course; the aim is "establishing a stronger foundation of Algebra 1 concepts (to) increase the potential of the student to reach Honors level courses," according to a letter to parents. School board officials suggested that a two-year algebra sequence will lead to "increased participation and greater success," and was phased in from 2010 through 2012. It is expected that greater numbers of students will complete the sequence in pre-calculus. Instructor David Pease, during back–to–school night, asked parents to solve mathematics questions (click on reference) to impart to parents a sense of what their sophomores experience as students. The school lends graphing calculators to students for their use throughout some courses such as trigonometry, and expects the calculators to be returned in functional condition at the end of the school year. Each teacher has specific grading metrics based on such measures as attendance, quizzes and tests, homework, special assignments, classroom participation, projects, and so forth. Summit mathematics instructor Michael Thayer was a college champion on the TV game show Jeopardy! representing Rutgers University in 1990, and was recognized by a Cornell student as having had a strong academic influence in his life.
Students who progress quickly have an opportunity to take Advanced Placement (AP) courses such as AP Calculus AB or BC and, as a result, possibly qualify for college credit. The highest level course is multivariate calculus. In addition, electives are offered in personal finance, AP statistics, and computer programming.
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Famous quotes containing the word mathematics:
“In mathematics he was greater
Than Tycho Brahe, or Erra Pater:
For he, by geometric scale,
Could take the size of pots of ale;
Resolve, by sines and tangents straight,
If bread and butter wanted weight;
And wisely tell what hour o’ th’ day
The clock doth strike, by algebra.”
—Samuel Butler (1612–1680)
“Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don’t happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data ... and yet we don’t understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)