Persistence and Creativity

I spent six hours yesterday watching students take final exams. Three two-hour shifts. Sigh…

My last group taking an exam was my AP Calculus BC team. They had 24 multiple-choice questions and four free response questions, so they had to be efficient in their problem-solving. One of my students asked me about a multiple choice question that troubled him. It was an infinite geometric series question. This student joined our school, and our country, last year as a freshman. He place tested so highly that he started in AP Calculus AB. However, it has become apparent that there are a few facts/skills that he does not have at his command. This is rarely a problem since he is so creative. On this question, he did not have the formula in his brain for calculating the sum of an infinite geometric series. He could have listed out a handful of terms to look for convergence. He could have shrugged his shoulders and guessed since it was one of twenty-four questions. Instead, he wrote a short program on his TI-84 that gave him increasingly good approximations until he saw one of the answer choices emerge. He did this in the middle of a two-hour exam! He asked me afterwards and just laughed when I showed him how easy this problem could have been. I am convinced that he will remember this formula forever now, but I am also convinced that I will remember this story forever now. His ability to problem-solve in this situation is SO much more powerful than having a formula at his command. It is interesting that this happened on the same day that I sent our a question on twitter about the use of formula sheets on assessments. I am disinclined to use formula sheets, but I could be convinced otherwise. Here is a story that would have never happened if a formula sheet was present.

I am going to cross post this over at the One Good Thing blog space.