The students at our school rise to the challenges of growing up in working class communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. They represent a wide spectrum of american experiences which enriches their shared experience of education and growth. By coming together to learn and grow our students prepare themselves to lead in their communities and in wider society.
They engage passionately in their education, whether it be traditional classroom based learning in classes like AP Spanish Literature, AP English literature, AP Environmental Science, and AP Calculus, or in the array of electives on offer including dance class, music production, Model UN, Yoga, Surfing, Chess-Lit, and more.
The strong focus on Advisory over four years allows students to form bonds of friendship and community that alumni and parents report last well into adulthood, supporting students as they transition to post-secondary education and beyond.
The tenacity, spirit, resiliency, wit, passion, and potential of our student body is difficult to describe in words alone, but it inspires me everyday even as it challenges me to be my best self for them. Our future leaders would be lucky to include such talented young people in their ranks.
My Project
The AP Calculus AB course description states:
"The use of a graphing calculator is considered an integral part of the AP Calculus courses, and it is required on some portions of the exams.
Professional mathematics organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications have strongly endorsed the use of calculators in mathematics instruction and testing.
Graphing calculators are valuable tools for achieving multiple components of the Mathematical Practices for AP Calculus, including using technology to develop conjectures, connecting concepts to their visual representations, solving problems, and critically interpreting and accurately reporting information. The AP Calculus Program also supports the use of other technologies that are available to students and encourages teachers to incorporate technology into instruction in a variety of ways as a means of facilitating discovery and reflection. Appropriate examples of graphing calculator use in AP Calculus include, but certainly are not limited to, zooming to reveal local linearity, constructing a table of values to conjecture a limit, developing a visual representation of Riemann sums approaching a definite integral, graphing Taylor polynomials to understand intervals of convergence for Taylor series, or drawing a slope field and investigating how the choice of initial condition affects the solution to a differential equation."
As a Title I school, the $100+ dollars cost of a quality graphing calculator is a significant amount of money for many of our students and their families. By purchasing eight TI-84 plus calculators, we will have enough calculators such that each pair of students will be able to share a calculator in class, so that they can translate their skills with other web-based tools, such as Desmos, to the context of a graphing calculator.
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