St. Thomas Whitemarsh Church
Bethlehem Pike & Camp Hill Rd
Whitemarsh, PA 19034
(484) 416-0615
SUPPLEMENTAL CLASSES
This chess class is open to all levels. If there is adequate demand, the class will have a beginner and advanced group.
The chess club is led by Leteef Street. Leteef has taught chess in over 10 schools in the Philadelphia area and is the coach of the local and state champions from the MasterMinds Chess Club. Leteef has a master's degree in education. If we have two groups, Leteef will be assisted by another coach.
Topic: Polyhedra construction and the Euler Characteristic (with a possible exploration of the famous Konisburg Bridge problem).
What does a Math Circle look like?
How did the ancient Egyptians and Greeks measure land accurately enough to assess property taxes when they had no concept of fractions? In addition to using ropes and pegs, they came up with a system of using a compass and straightedge to construct diagrams to scale on “paper.” Our recent Math Circle students attempted some of these “Euclidian constructions.” While facing challenges such as “How can I create a perpendicular bisector of a line segment without a ruler or protractor?” our participants ended up discovering the need for concepts such as circle, diameter, radius, parallel, plane, point, line, tangent, arc, circumference, and so on. To loosely paraphrase Math Circle founders Bob and Ellen Kaplan, “If you want people to learn A, ask them to perform B, which requires knowledge of A to complete the task.”
Math Circles exists all over the country. Talking Stick's Math Circle is the first in the immediate Philadelphia area.
A Math Circle is collaborative inquiry. These are some of its goals:
- Confidence
- Competence
- Increased intuition
- Love of the art and intellectual playfulness of math
- Analytical thinking
- Collaboration in the pursuit of revelations about structure
- Comfort in contributing to class
- Learning what questions to ask so that students can figure relationships and patterns out for themselves
- An understanding of the interaction between history and mathematics
- Exposure to the etiquette of intellectual engagement, in which students learn to work in community to explore interesting questions.
A Math Circle leader acts as a secretary, recording students' conjectures and asking occasional clarifying questions. The Leader does not feed students facts and algorithms to be memorized, but instead facilities invention and discovery by presenting a question in which students find a need to look for structure and meaning themselves.
The Talking Stick Math Circle follows the model used in the Harvard-based program founded by Robert and Ellen Kaplan 18 years ago.Read the Scientific American article on research supporting the Math Circle pedagogy.
Math Circle is led by Leader Rodi Steinig.
We will run more Math Circles for other age groups throughout the spring.
The writing workshop is designed to help each writer develop his/her own writing process. Through language experiments, prompts, and short exercises, we will explore poetry, descriptive and persuasive writing, and short stories. Participants will draft several pieces and then choose one to take through the steps of the writing process from revision to publication. The final class will include a reading, and participants will create an anthology of their work. Participants can join the day program for the afternoon for an additional cost.
The workshop is led by Paige Menton.
Class will meet on 2/28, 3/13, 3/20, 3/27, 4/10, 4/17.
Possible topic: Fractals, the Math Doodling of Vi Hart, and tesselations and geometry proofs (this is more material than a 6-week course has time for, so some of this will be explored in future sessions).
Possible topic: Interesting Numbers: Introduction to the Fibonacci series, triangular numbers, and negative numbers, using a narrative story woven throughout.