Three hours a week of high speed, athletic, rigorous math tutoring by a world class team of algebra champions determined to raise the performance of any group of middle school students (5 to 25) who will work hard to stay on the team.

What you can expect: To learn the most important key that will open the door to success, prestige, scholarships, and family pride: to capture the tricky "X", number of many disguises; to make it into your clever companion and work its magic for you.  Banish algebra anxiety.  Have friends begging for your help.  Be the algebra hero of your neighborhood.

What your school can expect: Raise the SIMS performance of the selected group by one year with 60 hours instruction.

Pedagogic elements:

• Energetic college student coaches (featuring engineers, some ethnic matching).
• Practical, jargon-free approaches:
• dynamic, action filled mechanics (cars, projectiles) especially for boys.
• clever, attention gaining mixtures and blends especially for girls.
• Start with complex, real problems, backing into practical technique (i.e. include air resistance in mechanics; let elementary operations such as "gathering terms" serve as impediments to be overcome).
• Mix age and skill levels; younger should learn from older; encourage (and record) ad hoc techniques and terminology.

Sample module:

A team research project to answer the question: What happens if you shoot a gun up into the air?  The team aims to come up with accurate facts on this controversial custom.  This is an advanced, college-level physics problem normally "sanitized" (and therefore rendered useless) at the high school level by ignoring air resistance.  Our objective is to carry the team of 6th and 8th graders with no algebra background through the problem in a rigorous way.
 
 

Some steps:

1. Velocity.  Various units.  The idea of rate (element of character, spirit).  Experimental determination, walking, running, pitching, ball kicking.  Outdoor, visceral definitions and operations.  Introduce algebra in simple travel-time problems, i.e. 5t = 30

 Notion of equation requiring "equal treatment."

2. Gravity as the enemy of imposed velocity.  Intent, struggle, a little Aristotle here.  Galilean refinements (how to deal with this?  Galileo traditionally championed by Anglo culture as promoting escape from Mediterranean traditions – need to think this through!)  Gravity as fate?

3. Introduce algebra again in context of vacuum ballistics.  (How many seconds to apogee, etc.).  Introduce spreadsheets.  Demonstrate inadequacy of this approach (say from the parachutist's point of view).

4. Other decelerants:  friction (skids) and air resistance.  Experimental determination.  Dependence/independence of decelerants on various factors (velocity, weather, etc.).

5. Instruction style: energetic (like a circus act); ??????, i.e. the "accelerants" can be spirits of a kind.
 

Physics Lies?