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Bosque School
Bosque School

Bobcat Stories

GEEK OUT

GEEK OUT

"Bosque students don't simply learn how to do some math; they become mathematicians."

“How’s your GEEK?” is one of those lines you hear in halls of the upper school classroom building throughout the year, and T.J. Middleton, Math Department Leader, translated it for the Buzz. “The GEEK began as a problem to work on when students completed a test and had some extra time,” he explained, “and at the time, I called it post-exam exploration—a problem related to the unit we just finished, but which also asked them to extend the topic and pull some things together in a new way.” Gradually, the problems became more refined and complex, and together with former math department colleague Tricia Phaneuf, Mr. Middleton “realized we wanted to give it more time and space, so we changed the name to the acronym GEEK =  Grappling with Extended Exploration for Knowledge.”

For example, in Precalculus, a GEEK is a single problem with multiple steps and multiple concepts built into it that the students work on entirely outside of class. It still pulls in topics and skills they may have seen before, but now they must dig in to understand and synthesize them more deeply. They collaborate, they research, they come in for help during and beyond office hours, and throughout the process, there is an expectation that they will hit roadblocks and restart and learn why they need a particular skill to solve the problem.  

The students love the challenge: “We spend so much time thinking about and working on it, the concepts stick better,” said Isabelle ‘25. “Choices and bonus opportunities like coding allow you to expand and explore the topic as much as you want to,” added Max ‘25.

The students look at the problem with graphing software and online sources like Wolfram Alpha to check their mathematical steps. Over a three-week period, they spend many hours solving the problem and writing what is essentially a mathematical essay similar to what a mathematician in a graduate program would produce. In a typical math class, a teacher might ask a student to give an answer and show the work, but in a GEEK, the students explain their reasoning and the mathematical principles behind their solution. The write-up of their solution includes their scratch work, descriptions of their deadends and restarts, questions they asked, and documentation of their attempts to answer those questions. Real mathematicians don’t have answers at the back of the book; they must make mistakes, ask questions, and collaborate with others. 

Presenting all this electronically is an additional challenge, as the students learn to use an equation editor and appropriate software to present a final paper. For extra credit, some students go beyond solving the problem and learn the coding involved with the professional mathematical document production software program LaTex. In one class, 16 of the 19 students took on this huge additional task. Preparing a single document might require at least 250 lines of code. These students get help from older students who pass on their expertise, a cascading effect of students mentoring other students with this challenging skill. The skillset may be to format graphs and equations and write mathematically correctly and clearly, but the spirit is how engaged the kids are, how driven they are to do excellent work, and how proud they are once they are done.