Differentiation in the Classroom - Help Please!

In My Humble Opinion
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A great big thank you to all who responded - both with helpful suggestions and witty jokes!

This week has been a tough one and I apologize for not responding sooner.

Throughout the course of this week, 2 of the 3 honors students decided to drop down to the “regular” level. They’re still in the same class, just not in the honors subsection. This leaves me with only one student in honors (referred to as “Honors”). I do not know much about this student, not having taught him before.

After much thought, a bit of experience teaching the class, and having read over everyone’s suggestions, I have developed a new plan of action.

I will teach the class as I normally would but assign two sets of homework. The honors level problems will typically require Honors to learn a small part of the section on his own. This way, he is able to cover a greater amount of material at a greater depth, and do more difficult problems. If I feel that he is doing well enough on the independent study portion, I may switch over to amaranth’s suggestion and let him go entirely at his own pace with certain qualifications, of course.

As a side note… Now I’m discovering another problem in my Algebra II classes. For many of the students their Algebra 1 skills are severely lacking. From the best I can tell, they never fully mastered Pre-Algebra before being placed in Algebra 1. As a result, the Algebra 1 class they had was actually more of a combination of Pre-Algebra and Algebra 1. This means that they never even got to see many of the concepts they should have mastered before stepping foot in an Algebra II class. This is going to be one heck of a year…

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I agree with the independent study, the question is what. Since I took algebra 2 in 1952, I imagine the curriculum has changed. So I can suggest only that you find something interesting for them to read and be prepared to meet with them or at least be able to answer their email questions. Someone suggested simple number theory puzzles and that certainly would have appealed a lot to me.

If you feel that they are capable of doing the routine homework without raising a sweat, then by all means waive it for them, provided they are doing their independent study. Don’t penalize them for being capable. I still recall the so-called math teacher I had in 7th and 8th grade who systematicaly marked me down because I didn’t do her make-work homework.

For nearly a year I have supervised an extremely bright student in a reading course (well, it started as a course for credit, but continued through the summer). He is now in graduate school and tells me that he seems to have covered in the reading course, a lot of what is his algebra course. (This wasn’t anticipated since he was originally in computer science and, maybe as a result of the reading course, is now in math.) At any rate, this kind of experience can be extremely rewarding.

There is a HS math club journal that I have seen but I don’t recall the name of. That would be a good place to start.