Math Club at Harbor Secondary School

One of the pleasures of teaching math is being able to extend the subject on occasion, beyond the curriculum, in order to demonstrate a few of its myriad applications. Currently, perhaps nowhere is this more easily done than through the math club, an after-school activity that meets once a week and appears to be bringing together a polyglot of students, boys and girls, 6th - 12th grade. At one practice a few weeks back, we had a record 16 students show and, so far this year, we've been averaging about a dozen students per session. Three were Saudi girls from our school's all-girls program, the first time more than one from the girls' program had ever shown up for practice. Even though these girls attend our school, most of their classes are held in an isolated part of the building, and I so far have taught only co-ed or all-boys classes, so they might as well have been from a different campus.

As the practice session began and I saw the students - Saudi, Palestinian, Finn, Indian, American, Jordanian, German (with occasional guest appearances of Chinese and American graduate students from the university!) - tackle the first few problems, it suddenly grew clear to me that there were a few transcending themes evident. One, naturally, was the use of the English language. For many of the students before me, if you were to go back just slightly more than a year, and sometimes less, you'd find them in schools where instruction wasn't in English. Yet here they were, mixed and matched, using English to not just communicate, but to communicate often complicated ideas to each other efficiently, which is to say rapidly and accurately - the mainstays of a good math club member! The second theme was the language they were perfecting: math. If English is the lingua franca of instruction at our school, then math is arguably its subject analog. Like all knowledge today, math as a subject and technical language is profoundly and increasingly international in its scope, and so here I was watching a rich soup of nationalities hone analytic skills, tackling problems in much the same way they'd be approached in a classroom in Accra, Manila, or Frankfurt, say.

It's a quick 50 minutes each week, but in that time I've seen kids' eyes light up with new ideas, approaches, techniques, often evoking a quick smile or "aha!" moment, the kind that makes every teacher's day and keeps us, students and teacher, coming back for more. And so we will, me with a few more problems meant to provoke and stretch, (and with homemade banana bread or shortbread in hand to fire up those young minds!), and they with their boundless energy and enthusiasm, continuing a journey of inquiry possibly without limit... to use a math term!

Thanks for reading,

David