AP Calculus Bootcamp💪
School didn’t end until Tuesday, June 20 for us, and I spent my first full week of summer, from June 26 - June 30, doing MORE math teaching: an AP Calculus bootcamp! This was a new initiative that I had been planning with a local college for the past year, beginning in September 2022. After many emails, Zoom calls, shared Google Docs, and in-person visits, we had our one-week class ready to go as a pilot program. Neither me nor the college had ever done anything like this before, so we all learned a lot from this experience and have many ideas to make it even more successful next year.
Overall, the program ran very well and it was enjoyable to teach. There was not much grading to do, just lesson planning and teaching, which made it much more relaxed and stress-free for me.
Our target audience was rising seniors at my high school. The college wanted to start small with just my high school, with the intent of building the program to include other high schools in my district in future years. The hardest part was promoting the program and getting teenagers to sign up and commit to spending their first full week of summer doing more math. We considered running this program during the last week or so of summer (mid-August), but decided to keep it right after school ended in hopes of getting students before jobs and big family vacations occurred. There are major pros and cons to both early summer and last summer, but I am glad we stuck with early summer - this way I had my entire summer to look forward to after the bootcamp ended. A major goal, if we continue our partnership, will be to recruit more. Now that we have ‘graduates’ of the program, we can use them this upcoming year to help spread the word and encourage students to sign up. Based on the students’ ending survey comments, everyone enjoyed themselves and had fun, and the post-test showed great improvement in math abilities, so spreading positive publicity shouldn’t be an issue.
My biggest jobs (besides actual teaching each day) were designing the program and curriculum, creating/editing/finding all resources, making copies for all students, and preparing a finished curriculum binder to hand in on the final day of the bootcamp. All electronic files were also uploaded to a shared Google drive that we used to keep everything organized.
I also created an assessment that served as a pre-test and a post-test in order to measure how much student growth occurred over the week. Surprisingly this was one of the most time-consuming things I did! I kept agonizing over how many and what type of questions to use: all multiple choice? Quick data! Should I include open-response to see their notation? More work to check. I ended up trimming my initial draft down a lot to ensure it was 35 minutes only. I kept most of the questions as multiple choice with one side of open-response questions and one side of fill-in-the-blank graphing calculator questions.
Although I had my curriculum binder and my At-A-Glance planner filled out, I found it very helpful to use a good old paper notebook to organize my thoughts, plans, and reflections as we went. Each evening, I spent time writing out my exact plans for the next day. The day of, as we went through activities, I checked them off and left feedback in green on the left-hand side (such as how long it took, whether we got to it or not, how to improve it, etc).
Each morning, students had the option of taking a bus from our high school (pick-up at 8 am) to be transported to the college (arrival at around 8:10). I got there around 7:45 each day to set up my document camera and laptop, get the projector ready, lay out all materials, hand out folders, and get music going. Honestly, having different Spotify music genres playing each morning as students came in made a huge difference in the atmosphere and helped students relax and bit and wake up.
Breakfast was always laid out for students as they came in. The college’s program supervisor stopped at Panera each morning and got fresh bagels, cream cheese, coffee, and drinks, which was a big hit with the students!
At 8:30, we cleaned up breakfast and dove into the math for the day. We spent from 8:30 - 12:05 doing math.
From 12:05 - 1:00 was lunch in the dining hall.
From 1 - 2 was a college panel, led by a different college employee each day and covering various helpful topics related to the college admission process and student life on campus. I learned a lot at these panels!
My biggest goal during my instructional block was to keep things interesting, engaging, and active. Nearly four hours of math can be BOOORRRING if you don’t mix it up and get the students on their feet!
THIS is where my Wipebooks (hung on the walls), individual whiteboards, and graphing transparency ‘whiteboards’ came in very handy.
As you can see in purple, I had a bunch of different instructional and practice strategies that I intermixed each day, and avoided spending more than 45 minutes on any single activity to prevent students from zoning out.
My biggest issue with the room was that the desks were the ‘old-style’ connected seat and mini-writing surface. I couldn’t properly put the desks in groups, so I did my best and just faced them towards each other in clusters to encourage students to collaborate. My area was at the front of the room by the projector, but I did my best to move around and not just stand by my desk. This is the bright window area near my standing desk where I stored my stuff and kept all the copies organized.
The biggest topics that we covered were:
All things FUNCTIONS (including domain, range, increasing/decreasing, concavity, composition, piece-wise, inverse)
Rates of change (average and instantaneous)
Graphing calculator skills
Polynomial functions (with end behavior limits)
Rational functions
Logarithmic functions (they needed a LOT of practice with these, so we started from scratch)
Exponential functions (VERY briefly)
Geometry and signed area
Limits graphically (this was quick since they were good at this)
Trigonometry (they needed the most practice with using inverse trig functions to solve trig equations)
As you can see in the yellow cells in the screen shot of the Google sheet above, there were numerous things I wanted to cover but didn’t have time for. I feel this program could easily be a 2-week bootcamp, maybe two 4-day weeks, but that would make it even harder to get students to commit to. Two weeks is a lot of time to ask rising seniors to give up!
The best part of the day for students, and arguably the thing that kept them coming back each day, was the FOOD! I already mentioned how great the breakfast spread was, but lunch was on another level. These students are trained to shovel down mediocre (at best) school cafeteria food in 20 minutes. They went all out during their nearly one hour lunch block at the college’s beautiful dining hall, where they could order WHATEVER they wanted, for FREE! I HIGHLY enjoyed this part of the day as well. There was a salad and sandwich area, drink area, and burger/fries/pasta area. I got an amazing sandwich or salad each day, and just loved the cute ordering slips we used.
All in all, it was a great week full of learning for everyone. This was a lot of work to put together, but it was a great experience for me professionally, and I enjoyed the challenge of creating something new to build upon.