CTY Math Coordinator's Handbook

Introduction

To help new coordinators manage this uncomfortable situation, this handbook gives a detailed explanation of the activities, responsibilities, and overall role of the CTY math coordinator. It discusses some of the major decisions that a coordinator will have to make, and points out aspects of the job which may vary from site to site. Topics are organized by the time period in which they occur.

The handbook is pretty useful as a checklist for the experienced coordinator, as well. After all, there's a lot of stuff to remember!

Authors

Beginning of summer

Placement testing materials

• Make sure there are enough ADT's, scantrons, pencils, scrap paper, and scoring keys. Get a timer or a watch with a second hand.

Progress checklists, HSST's & keys, textbooks and curriculum spirals

• If any are missing, have them sent from the central office. Make sure there are a reasonable number of each.

Math office

• Find a convenient place to keep testing materials and extra or shared resources. Remember that tests and valuable things (e.g. graphing calculators) need to be kept secure. Suggested places: coordinator's classroom, the math staff's house/dorm, or an office.

Study hall policy

• This is an annual source of confusion. Sometimes the site-wide studyhall format or location just isn't appropriate for pre-calc, and the math coordinator has to point this out to the site director and say "Let's do this differently.". There are several possible ways to conduct the pre-calc study hall: in dorm rooms, in dorm lounges, in classrooms, in lecture halls, etc. I'm not going to make a specific recommendation. Instead, here are pros & cons:
  • General stuff: Seven hours a day in the same classroom is a long time, and the students enjoy a change of scenery (as do the staff!). Unfortunately, holding study hall anywhere but the regular classroom building means everyone -- staff and students -- has to carry their stuff back and forth every day. Of course, if you're at a commuter site, the students are stuck with this scenario anyhow. Also, few places are as well designed for studying as a classroom. Dorm-room desks may come close, but lecture hall desks are often too small and lounges are simply not on: they're generally poorly lit and not furnished with writing surfaces.

  • Dorm rooms: This is the only study-hall location which allows the students to use their computers. However, distractions abound (including those same computers), and there aren't enough math-staffers or teacher's editions to go around. It's a nuisance for the staff to have to trudge from dorm to dorm with a heavy load of books and folders. Finally, there's no good way to handle evening testing: if you allow testing during study hall, then you have to assign a math staffer to proctor the student(s) in an office or dorm lounge, or else impose on the RA to act as a proctor.

  • Dorm lounges: The whole class is in one place, so the instructor & TA don't have to run a marathon each evening. Unfortunately, other classes have discovered these benefits, so there may be contention for lounges. There's probably a TV and a soda machine to act as distractions. Some lounges are so close to student rooms that they cannot be used if the rooms' residents are present. Also, since the lounge is by definition a casual place, the students feel less bound by rules of classroom behavior.

  • Lecture halls: If the lecture hall is big enough, more than one class can share it. This is good because the staff members can split duties & resources and keep an eye on each others' students, but bad because the large number of students is harder to control (and lecture halls tend to echo).

  • Classrooms: Seven hours a day in the same classroom is too much, but this can be adjusted by holding study hall in a different classroom. If it's in the same building, then everyone can leave their stuff in their regular classroom during the afternoon and overnight. This helps the staff be aware of students who are spending all their free time studying -- they're the ones who take their books home.

Post-testing policy

• Another annual source of confusion: do we allow the students to take HSST's and/or finals after classes are officially over? The possible times include: during the last afternoon (when they're supposed to be packing), the dance that night, or the morning they leave. There are pros and cons to every one of these, and they're very site- dependent because each site schedules its end-of-session activities differently. Choose for yourself. (Consult with the other administrative folks, of course.) What's most important is that you choose early, and see that everyone knows the policy so that confusion doesn't arise at the end of the session.

Math staff orientation

• Take some time during staff orientation to make sure that all the math folks get to know each other. Go do something fun together. (Mandatory Fun! ... and it's your last chance to get off campus)
• This schedule is straight from the 1992 job description. Alter the timing as appropriate to your site's orientation schedule.
  • Thursday evening: Meet, explore each other's experience and areas of strength. Decide who will work with whom and what courses they will teach (see below for more on this. It can -- and I think should --be put off until everyone's had a day or two to get familiarized with each other and CTY).

  • Friday afternoon: Discuss the history and philosophy of CTY pre-calc. Share past experiences about students and their abilities, instructors and their attitudes toward math and teaching, and the nature of a CTY class.

  • Saturday morning: Focus on pragmatic issues: how to administer a class, where to start students, flexible pacing, appropriate questioning, appropriate progress, and assessment.

Study skills workshop

• Many students have never needed to develop good study skills, and so have an especially difficult time with a self-paced course. Try to arrange with the academic counsellor to offer math study skills workshops. It's useful to have a completely optional one during the first week and another during the second week which you can require that specific students attend.
• Emphasize to the math staff the importance of paying close attention to the students' study habits, and taking action right away when a problem is noticed.

Mattababy

• The CTY math staff email network. Okay, most of the school-year traffic concerns The Simpsons or sumo, but if you want fast answers from a whole bunch of long-time CTY math staffers, this is the place to ask. During the course of the summer, a lot of useful information goes back and forth.

Before (or at the start of) each session

Math questionnaires

• These may be available several days in advance if you're at a Baltimore site. If not, you probably won't have them in your hands for very long before the kids arrive. In any case, take the time to sort through these -- get other math folks to help! -- and determine how many Regents or other Unified-Math students you have, how many geometry-only requests, and a rough estimate of the counts for each subject. It's hard to tell who needs what with the trig-plus courses, but there aren't generally very many students that advanced so they'll end up in the same classroom anyhow.
• If you're really ambitious, generate a list of pre-calc students for whom you're missing questionnaires (or whose information is unclear). Then flag their registration packets so that you can have them fill out questionnaires when they check in. This requires some coordination with whoever's organizing registration, but it's worth the effort. If you try to get this information after the parents have gone home, your success rate will be much lower.

Who teaches what

• Once you've looked through the questionnaires, you can make a tentative decision about how many sections of each pre-calc course you're going to need. Ask your instructors and TAs what they'd like to teach and who'd like to work together, then try to match up their requests with what you need. You'll probably have to do some shuffling after the placement testing, but with luck most of your tentative plans will hold. Then you can distribute course materials and make up class lists, student folders, etc.
• It's helpful to pair new staff members with experienced ones. Trying for gender balance is good too, since we're supposed to be role models for the students to identify with. Don't put a great deal of effort into this, though. Pairing people with course content is much more important.

RAs and dorms

• Find out who the math RAs are. Introduce yourself to them, and check that they know the plans for study hall. Make sure the instructors (and TA's, if possible) meet at least their own RAs, if not all of them. Find out which dorms the math kids are in. If you're going to be holding study hall in dorms, get keys to those dorms.
• Some math RAs are quite comfortable with math, and are willing or even eager to help their students with their work, answer questions during class visits, etc. This is delightful when it happens, and worth encouraging. On the other hand, be alert to RAs who are not so mathematically inclined. Reassure them that this sort of participation is entirely voluntary, and there will be no negative consequences if they opt not to.

Course materials and progress records

• Make sure that the instructors have progress chart masters, and the appropriate textbooks, curriculum spirals, progress checklists, and supplementary materials. Make sure that they know where the rest of these materials are kept.

Classrooms

• See that the instructors know which classrooms they have and get the keys. Find out which keys open which other classrooms. (The ability to swap keys can come in very handy, especially if the TAs don't have their own keys.) If there are multiple classes using the same resources (e.g., two rooms of Algebra II) try to assign them to nearby rooms. Also, if there's an extra classroom nearby, try to get it for use as a testing room.
• Go to the classrooms (with the other instructors, if possible) and make sure that everything is set up and working. Rearrange furniture, put up posters, try out the overhead projector, etc. There may be restrictions on what you can do to the rooms, so check first. (For example, at Dickinson you can't take extra furniture out of the rooms.)

Parent/student orientation

• Be on hand during as much of orientation as possible, because some parents will be in a hurry and unable to stay until the official question-&-answer time, and since they don't know who's going to be their child's instructor they'll all want to talk to YOU. Keep a notebook handy, since you'll get a lot of placement info from parents. Don't promise a specific placement or instructor, make overly glowing assurances about how much work the student will finish, etc.; if the parents ask these things, explain the placement testing process and repeat the words "self-paced instruction" as necessary. If they ask about residential things, answer what you can but feel free to direct them to the residential dean or someone else who really knows these things.
• At some sites, the math coordinator talks to the pre-calc parents separately after the all-parents welcome speech. This gives you a chance to introduce the math staff, give a little history of the math program, describe day-to-day events and the rigors of the program, explain what we expect from students and from parents, etc. This is a good time to talk some more about the meta-learning that's going on: even if a kid doesn't finish trig, he or she has learned a good deal about how to learn. Try to keep this speech short, especially at residential sites, because the parents are anxious to get back on the road for the many-hour drive home.
• In your conversations with parents, and in your speech if you give one, stress the importance of making plans with schools now, instead of waiting until the student comes home or worse, until September. Emphasize the importance of being supportive, but not overly demanding. Point out that not finishing a year's worth of work does not mean that the student failed.
• Every session, there are a small number of parents who didn't read the course description and are just now discovering that pre-calc is not a group-activity or lecture course. Describe the interactive things we do (extra problems, small-group lectures, students studying together) and if they're still not happy send them to an administrator. There's no need to apologize for providing exactly what was offered.

Placement testing (ADT's)

• When, where, and how the testing happens is really site-dependent. Whether or not there's a Scantron machine to do the scoring is also unpredictable (but "no" is the safer guess). If not, making plastic stencils to go over the Scantron forms speeds things up a lot.
• Once you've got the tests scored, it's time to match scantrons with questionnaires, and assign kids to classes. This is known as "The Party Game", and usually CTY will spring for pizza and sodas, for sustenance while you tackle this administrative nightmare. Pull all the Geometry kids' scantrons right away (this is why you sorted out their questionnaires earlier!) since their class assignments are independent of their ADT scores. Make sure none of them have really atrocious scores. If any do, they're candidates for an algebra review before beginning Geo. Then split up the rest of the bunch based on ADT scores, school history & plans, Regents/Unified, and your innate good judgment. :-)

During each session

Progress records

• Make sure everyone is keeping thorough, detailed records of what the students are doing -- strong areas as well as weak. Checklists can wait, but it wouldn't hurt to update them weekly.

Math staff meetings

• This can be completely informal -- e.g., a chat over lunch -- or you can schedule a time and place. Just make sure that you're not discussing sensitive issues where students might overhear. Try to meet at least twice a week.

Observing the other instructors

• Spend an hour or two in each classroom during the first half of the session. This isn't a real formal thing, but check with the instructor & TA beforehand to see what's a good time. They may have special activities planned. This is a good time to peep at their record-keeping, and to acquire info for staff evaluations. Pay attention to the interactions of staff with students, and of staff with staff (i.e., is the instructor using the TA appropriately?).
• Afterwards, tell them what you thought, and offer any suggestions or praise that apply. If there were any serious problems, check up later to be sure that improvements have been made.

Partner trouble

• Unfortunately, not every instructor-TA pair gets along perfectly. The staff members need to know that it's okay to disagree, as long as the discussions are held out of earshot of the students. Also, make sure they're aware that they should bring any serious problems to the attention of the coordinator or the academic dean quickly, so that they don't drag on unnecessarily.

RA visits to classes

• For self-paced courses, these visits will be quick. Policy says that each RA is to attend classes 2 hrs/wk, but in self-paced classrooms there's little to see or do, and the RA's presence may in fact be a distraction. Also, pre-calc RAs frequently have students in several classes, and they must split their visitation time accordingly.

Student evaluations

• It's Never Too Early to Start Writing Your Evals. Check with an administrator to make sure you know the little quirks of this year's evaluation format -- it changes every year, sometimes between sessions. Encourage new instructors to go to the how-to session that someone (probably the academic dean) will offer. Distribute sample math evals. Get your own done early so you can worry about other things.

Phone calls to families

• In the middle of the second week, ask all the instructors to review their students' progress and identify those kids who are unlikely to reach whatever goal they've set -- e.g., they've signed up for Algebra II in the fall and aren't going to finish Algebra I. Each instructor should call the families of these students and explain the situation, being very careful to emphasize that the purpose of the call is to allow the family to start making plans for the fall ASAP, not a disciplinary action or an indicator of failure.
• Anyone who calls a student's family must keep a record of what was said during the conversation. This is helpful not only if problems come up later, but also in making your evaluations and parent-conference conversations more specific.

Extra Problems sessions

• There are a large number of interesting math problems (and computer science, and physics, and chemistry, and ...) which the students will enjoy tackling in their spare time and discussing in class. To many students, this is the best part of the day, so it's well worth a little of the instructors' time to prepare activities. The workload can be kept to a minimum if the staff take turns writing problems. CTY has a collection of suggested problems, but everyone on the math staff is strongly encouraged to bring their own as well.
• Usually, the problems are handed out one day and discussed the next. The logistics of the discussion group vary from site to site, but the most common set-ups (with pros & cons) are: During the second hour of study hall -- this will require instructor's permission, otherwise kids will go to Extra Problems just to get out of study hall. However, it avoids most of the problems of the other two plans. During an afternoon activity period -- doesn't interfere with class time, but not many kids are going to give up Ultimate to do more math. Even if they're really interested in the problem. On the other hand, kids from other classes might show up. At the end of the afternoon class -- it's tricky to do this in a way that allows kids from different math classrooms to interact. More often, this is done in each classroom separately. Unfortunately, class discussions disrupt those kids who would rather keep working.

Tailoring the CTY curriculum

• Many students in the upper pre-calc classes (those using the Brown Advanced Math book) are trying to place out of a class back home that involves pieces of several CTY courses. If you're lucky, they've brought curricula and/or textbooks from back home so that you'll know what their schools expect. More likely, you'll have to ask them to call home and have information sent (or you may have to make the calls yourself). The best way to handle the curriculum-matching problem is to have the student complete one CTY course (so that he/she will have certified in something), followed by piece-wise study to complete the home-school curriculum.

HSST's, scantrons, scoring keys, and testing procedure

• The tests etc. should be at hand in the coordinator's classroom or some other convenient place. Make sure the instructors and TAs know how and where to administer the tests, and how to score them -- red or green Flair pens only! Also, see that the tests and keys are returned promptly so that they can remain secure.
• The instructions included with the tests pretty much explain what to do. The two most important things for everyone to remember are: keep an eye on the clock, and have someone else double-check your scoring.

End of session

Student program evaluations (SPE's)

• Allow time for these to be filled out on the last or next-to-last day. The last study hall might be a good time. Make sure that the students know this is coming, so that they're not counting on this class time in order to study for or take a final exam.

Student evaluations

• Hassle the other instructors as necessary to get their student evals finished on time. Yes, it's possible to drag out first session evals into second session, but this is a bad idea since there's so much stuff going on for session II. Encourage TA involvement in writing the evals. This doesn't just mean asking the TAs to type up the instructors' scribbled notes, although it's okay to ask for this type of help too. Often the TA gets to know some of the students better than the instructor does, and can give the instructor descriptions of these students' strengths, weaknesses, study habits, etc. This information makes an evaluation more personalized and informative.
• You may be expected to pre-read the other instructors' evals before they go to an administrator. Don't worry about making them perfect, since your style is almost guaranteed to be slightly different from that of the official reader -- but you can filter out the obvious grammatical, punctuation, and content errors.

Staff evaluations

• Write one for your TA. This will be kept on file for him/her in case of later job-reference requests. You may also be expected to write evals of the other instructors and of the other TAs, or of your math staff in general. There may be examples available. The time limits on writing these are a bit looser, but try to have them done before you leave the site.

Progress records, checklists, certification forms

• Make sure everyone fills out the checklists and cert forms according to whatever directions Baltimore has sent out this year. Don't assume it's the same as last year. It rarely is.

Parent conferences

• TAs are not required to attend, but encourage them to do so. It's good practice if they're thinking of being an instructor. Most of them want to go to the conferences anyhow, so this isn't really an issue.
• Parents will ask you what courses their children should take next, in regular school or at CTY. Try to have suggestions in mind. However, recognize that some parents will take what you say as gospel instead of discussing it with anyone else. Emphasize the necessity of talking to their home schools, and of considering the student's interests.
• Most likely, the other instructors can handle all their parents' questions, but let them know that they can send tough ones your way. The same rules apply here as at the beginning of the session: answer what you can, don't make unnecessary promises or apologies, and don't feel compelled to deal with the really far-out cases (send them to an administrator and move along to the next family).

Between sessions

Departing staff

• Make sure that staff members who are leaving or switching jobs after first session get all their paperwork done and approved before they go. Find out where they have left classroom keys and teaching materials. Also, see that they've left an address which is valid for the remainder of the summer.

Incoming staff members

• Try to be on hand to greet math staff members arriving between sessions. If you know during first session that people already on site will be joining the math staff during second session, try to meet them and introduce them to other math staffers before Intersession. They may want to borrow books to brush up on their math during first session; if you have books to spare, fire away. It may also be possible to get in touch with session II staff members who are not already on site, especially if they're at another CTY site for session I. This is rarely necessary, but in some cases (e.g., someone won't be arriving until just before placement testing) it becomes reasonable.

End of summer

Packing up

• Make sure all the textbooks, curriculum spirals, Regents books, etc. make their way back to Baltimore (or wherever they're going to spend the winter). Baltimore needs an inventory of what's staying on site, if anything.

Evals, checklists, cert forms, diskettes, ...

• Don't leave until everyone has handed in all their paperwork.