A Freshman's First Quarter Experience with High School Math

"High School. It has always been something that I wanted to be in. I was so excited the last week of summer unlike some of my peers who wished that the summer wasn't ending. A few weeks into the first quarter of the grading period progress reports were sent out. My Progress was pretty good except for the last grade on there. I had a D+ in IMP 2, which is the math program for my small school Community Partnership Academy. After seeing this grade my parents were a little mad but weren't furious.

The week after I had received the progress report, I went and talked to all of my teachers. They all basically said the same thing except for math. The math teacher, Mr. Goldman said " Eric, You have a lot of potential and I would like for you to come to my Tuesday and Thursday after school tutoring class." I figured I could go once a week. After going just one time after school and watching Mr. Goldman break down everything that we had learned since the first day of school, I began to understand how to work in his class. Now I am one of the 3 students passing his class. I successfully raised my grade at least by an entire letter grade. This progress makes me, Scholars [BSC II] and my family very happy.

Ending the quarter on a good note lets me start the second quarter by putting my best foot forward, and focusing on improving my grade even more. I am still excited about high school! GO Yellow Jackets!"

By Eric Saddler, 9th grade, BSC II

Scholars Love Dropping Eggs!!!

An essential element of Saturday Academy is the interactivity of the lessons. We try to do primarily hands-on lessons, to keep the three hour Saturday Academy fun, engaging and to relabel academia as an arena where scholars can demonstrate their awesome intellect in a creative way. Two weeks ago, Berkeley Scholars 3, partook in the egg drop. This lesson is a favorite of the older cohorts. Maybe it's the act of dropping an egg, maybe its the unspoken competition or maybe its the physics lessons embedded in the activity; I'm not sure what makes the scholars LOVE this lesson, but Berkeley Scholars 3's affinity for this activity was no different.

The lesson is simple. We begin by discussing simple physic concepts such as:

Acceleration, gravitational pull, impact, force and absorption.

Scholars are amazed that an egg can't crack if force is concentrated evenly all around the shell (i.e. squeezing an egg with your hand) but will crack when tapped upon the edge of a bowl. The scholars engagement is captured and channeled into introduction questions, where as a group of learners we unearth the definition and examples of the above physic concepts. Then the challenge: Scholars must get in pairs and build a device that when dropped from 50 feet won't crack it's passenger (the egg). Pairs strategize, create a blueprint for their device, build then drop the device with the egg.

Check out some of our cool devices and the aftermath

Hector and Malayka's egg survived.

This egg wasn't so fortunate

Before the drop, Erick and Bryant's device is looking GOOD.

Their egg survived and these two ladies worked VERY well together all day.