Madison, WI Math Enrichment
Besides my more traditional tutoring services, I also offer mathematics enrichment opportunities for students in grade 7 and up. Many students, especially those with special talent in STEM or precocious academic interests, can be underserved by traditional math curricula. When a student quickly grasps the basic concepts and is not given opportunities to engage deeper in the material, she can get bored or jaded, and even develop poor long-term attitudes toward mathematics.
Parents should be on the lookout to see if their student could benefit from additional exploration outside of class. Though the library and the internet offer lots of titillating mathematical content, studying alone can be isolating. Without guidance to put things in perspective, or a community of peers to share their results with, the young lone ranger misses out on a major part of the mathematical experience at a crucial point in their academic development.
Horizontal Enrichment
I focus on horizontal enrichment, trying expose students to topics they likely won’t see in their high school (or even college) syllabi. Despite the picture your guidance counselor may have painted back in the day, mathematics is not a linear progression of ever-more-complex subjects (Calculus I, II, III, IV, V, …, XVII, …, DCXI, …). At every level of mathematical sophistication, there are hundreds of entry points, hundreds of paths leading in different directions. Staying on the trail marked out by the guidance counselors can be hazardous to your creativity and will cause you to miss out on wonderful things like:
- Pick’s Theorem
- Transfinite ordinals
- Continued fractions
- Symmetry groups
- The Euler characteristic
- Quadratic reciprocity
… all of which are accessible to students with no more math background than a semester of algebra.
Vertical enrichment has its benefits, though. If you know you’ll have to take classes x, y, and z anyway, why not get them over with so you can get to the fun stuff? If your child is already involved in an advanced or accelerated curriculum, I can help them make connections to topics yet to come, as well as those in the rear-view mirror.
Contact Me
If I have you interested in an hour or two a week of puzzles, proofs, puns, and play-with-a-purpose, send me an email at my Teaching page. See you soon!