April Fool's Day as a Teacher

IMPORTANT: Schedule Changes for '16-'17 School Year

Hi everyone,

After speaking with the math department, the administration, and other faculty and staff members, I'm excited to have the opportunity to announce some great changes to the math department that we've compiled and are looking to implement for the 2016-2017 school year. With the huge schedule overhaul, we figured we might as well implement our new policies too. Please take a minute to read through this e-mail, and feel free to ask me any questions you might have. Some of these changes may pertain to you or your department as well. Thanks!

The new grading policy for the math department:

Instead of the traditional "A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, ..." structure, we have decided to use the following grading rubric for all math classes starting next year:
90-100%: A+++
80-89: A++
50-79: A+
0-49: A

If you look very carefully, you'll notice that grades of B+ and below have been removed. As surely every math teacher has had conversations with "concerned parents" already, this decision should come as no surprise. After all, our competing schools have recently changed their grading structures to "A++, A+, A, ...", and we want to stay ahead of them in terms of whose students receive more pluses.

Furthermore, if a student's trimester grade is above a 100% (due to extra credit or angry parent e-mails or some other medium), then please be sure to round down to 100%. We don't need our students growing up and thinking that they can literally "give 200% effort" or "agree with people 110%". That just makes no sense mathematically. If you're committed to something 200%, that really just means you're committed 100% (at best) and previously you were only committed 50%. And 50% isn't good at all; it's barely an A+ (see above grading rubric).

The last (and admittedly, peripheral) alteration in this area will be that our math teachers will no longer need to write mid-trimester progress reports for their students. This is because- in an effort to be more interdisciplinary- we are instead going to be required to sing a song and/or perform an interpretive dance every time a student receives less than an A+++ on any math assessment. These songs and dances will occur during weekly morning meetings, in front of the entire upper school.

The individual course changes:

This section will outline some of the class-specific modifications that will be going into effect at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year.

Geometry: In mathematics, one of the most polarizing topics is "formal proof". Many students struggle with the traditional "two-column proof" format, where they need to list statements and reasons in order to prove a mathematical conjecture. In an effort to make proofs more light-hearted and modernized, we're introducing the new three-column proof; students will add a third column called "emoji", where they will be allowed to post any emoticon that describes their emotions during that particular step in the proof. With the addition of a third column, the proof process automatically becomes 50% better. Here is an example of a three-column proof:



Advanced Algebra: In this course, we usually do not cover trigonometry. However, with the recent introduction of 27 additional trigonometric functions into the curriculum, we found the need to start students early. More information on the new trigonometry can be found here: http://www.theonion.com/article/nations-math-teachers-introduce-27-new-trig-functi-33804

Precalculus: Removed. Completely. Too many students were asking questions that were impossible for us to answer, such as "Why do we need to rationalize denominators when calculators exist", "Is there really any purpose to imaginary numbers", and "Do you really think that we need a fourth straight year of parabolas just because you feel like calling them 'conic sections' ". Since trigonometry will be taught in advanced algebra, this course has obviously become obsolete. It also allows for students to start taking calculus a year early, which is really the main objective for all upper school math students.

Calculus: While most other schools in the area have two calculus classes (Calculus AB and Calculus BC), we are proud to announce that starting next year, we will be running four calculus classes: AB, BC, CD, and DE. We highly recommend that our students start their four-year calculus track by ninth grade, so that they complete this series of classes by graduation. Of course, we fully expect most of our students to take at least half of these courses over summer breaks, so we're prepared to continue to create as many additional calculus classes as needed (EF, FG, GH, etc.).

AP Statistics: Removed. Not enough time to teach it (especially with the new calculus courses), and colleges don't care about AP Statistics, regardless of how ubiquitously applicable it is for future college majors, professions, and one's ability to understand and analyze data. As you can see from the following layman-opinion-poll-presented-as-scientifically-factual-information, it really doesn't matter if you have 100% of responses or 120% of responses as long as you get your point across:



Thank you for taking the time to read through these exciting new changes, and I hope that everyone has a happy April Fool's Day!

Sincerely,
Chris Mango