Jay B.’s “Merge and Purge” Project

By Charlie K.

October 31, 2021

Three days a week, eleven students go to the KLHS Geometry class and learn from the geometry teacher, but with a twist: our geometry teacher is a Junior. This Junior, better known as Jay B., is a prominent and active member of the community. He leads community meetings, has been a member of the leadership team since its founding, and is the Vice-Chair of the Student Council. On top of all that, he is currently teaching the high school Geometry course.  

This project began last year when he was working as a teaching assistant, where Jay explained, “Chris and I ended up teaching it together, so that students could move at their own pace. I taught one group of students, while Chris taught another group.” This gave Jay some experience teaching under the KLHS self-paced model.

He took his learnings from the past geometry course, and started to help redesign and improve the course. For example, he began to restructure the course to work in unison with the Khan Academy modules and re-did many of the practice problems and inquiries. 

Jay worked with the University of Chicago to restructure the course to create what he calls the “merge and purge” program.  That entails having half a year of high school Geometry, and half a year of Algebra 2, so that there is a full year left for Data Science. The reasoning behind this program is to include courses that have more of a real-life application into the high school curriculum, such as data science. 

After restructuring the Geometry course, Jay was ready to start teaching in the Fall. While in the classroom the University of Chicago listened in on a Zoom call, observing and taking notes on Jay's teaching and the student’s retention of the curriculum material. Over the last couple of months, Jay’s students all agree the course is going well and they are glad it will allow them to learn data and statistics in the future. However, there are still some concerns, mainly that shortening the course will cause students to miss out on important information in future math courses but also the all-important SAT, which has Geometry questions.

As KLHS is a lab school, Jay hopes his math curriculum will be used in future years at KLHS. He is also hopeful that he can help the University of Chicago implement his “Merge and Purge” program in other schools around the country.