Mathnasium of Littleton's Top 5 Moments!

1. Our favorite “aha!” moment with a student.

A: Our instructor, Michael, tends to have the most aha moments when working with Aaron. Aaron has been at our center for 6 years and he is now a junior in high school. Since Aaron and Michael work together often on more difficult topics, such as trig currently, Michael gets to give him more in-depth explanations on what is actually going on and not just the formulas. This has led to him having a lot of those "oh that’s what is going on", or "oh that is why that works" moments and it is very rewarding for Michael as an instructor.

2. A time when a student earned a reward.

A: We have a couple of great rewards moments that come to mind! One really cool moment was when Nobuki (a student who had been with us for several years and then moved out of the state) cashed out his rewards cards. He had saved up enough to get a $380 Visa gift card. We were proud of that moment because over the past couple of years, he was really working hard on his math and then he got to have the humble brag moments when the other students heard just how many cards he had saved up over the years. We use his example a lot when talking to new and potential students about the rewards program.

This question also made us think of our junior instructor program. The junior instructor program rewards students who have been with us for a while and have demonstrated responsibility by allowing them to help instructors out with different tasks, such as playing math games with the students. There is one student in particular who comes to mind who was clearly very appreciative of the role and took the role seriously and joyfully. He had been with us for a while, but he had never put much initiative into his work. It was clear that he would much rather be sleeping than be doing math. Gradually, though, we noticed that he was putting more effort in his pages, and we offered him the junior instructor role. Within a very short amount of time, he was enthusiastically volunteering to help us out with tasks, even without us prompting him to do something. This enthusiasm also transferred to his math work; soon he was getting double the pages completed with good accuracy. This shift in attitude has remained to this day, and I think that having the responsibility and recognition of being a junior instructor was a big part of that.

3. Positive parent experience.

A: We get thanked by our parents all the time! Just recently in one of the center director's quarterly parent meetings, the mom told about how happy she was with the effect Mathnasium has had on her son's confidence and how that confidence extended beyond math and even, beyond school. It was spilling over into his sports experience (he plays competitive baseball and travels a lot for tournaments). She even showed us a photograph of her son at his last tournament. The team had earned a trip to Florida in the summer for nationals and each player had received a big championship ring as a result of their placement in this tournament. The photo showed all the boys and most were rather "ho hum" about the whole thing, while her son was proudly showing his ring and grinning ear-to-ear. She said that difference in attitude had come about since he started at Mathnasium!

4. Favorite ways to teach concepts.

A: This really depends on the instructor and their personality. One of our very outgoing instructors likes to make more jokes and be "sassy" with the kids when they face a more daunting-to-them math concept, in an effort break the tension and make it more fun. Our online instructor, Ethan, uses color coding to help his students. The tools available to him are different from those for the in-center team. He said, "I started testing out changing my digital pen color in order to color code my math explanations. For example, for a geometry student I might write out an algebra equation in one color, and then highlight the corresponding side of the shape with that same color. This helps so much when there are multiple moving parts in a problem because it allows the students to instantly recognize where the math falls into the context of the equation. Using different colors can be utilized in so many different contexts, and it is a very fast and easy way to help the concept click in a student's brain. An algebra student I was working with recently had an "aha" moment when I decided to color code the terms in the equation. She was confused about knowing what parts of the equation had to be treated in chunks. After trying multiple different ways of explaining it, I finally tried color coding it, to which she said "Oh, that makes sense" and proceeded to solve it correctly. It was very rewarding!"

5. A time when a student scored well on a test.

A: We regularly see our students earning A's or 100% on their math tests at school and they bring them in to show us so they can get their NERD Awards (and Nerd Rope Candy)! One of our students, Neha, has been bringing in a few A's lately and this has been great because she was super far behind when she started with us. We also see most of our students improve their CMAS and iReady scores over the time they are with us (especially when they stay with the program over the summer). Most students see a fall dip in their standardized test scores (it's called the summer slide) but our students who stick with it over the summer actually see an improvement in their fall test scores! It is awesome to see!