Math Adventures with ORMC, Level 2, Ciphers, Functions, and Geometry of Time, Teacher’s Companion

Math Adventures with ORMC, Level 2 is a year-long enrichment math course for children in grades four to six. ORMC, short for UCLA Olga Radko Endowed Math Circle, is a free Sunday math school for gifted children run by UCLA Department of Mathematics. This book is a teacher’s companion (TC) for the workbook (WB). A TC is most often reduced to an answer key at the end of the main book. It is occasionally a separate brochure having short solutions to harder problem, in addition to an answer key. The format of the brochure is aimed primarily at saving paper and reducing the cost. Our approach is the opposite. We provide an instructor with all the help we possibly can, hoping that the saved preparation time and enhanced quality of instruction outweigh the increased cost of the TC by and large. A left-hand side page of the TC is most often a copy of a page from the WB, with answers and, occasionally, short solutions. The corresponding right-hand side page of the TC is teacher’s notes. In the notes, an instructor will find lesson plans, detailed solutions to harder problems, in-depth explanations of covered concepts, discussions of mistakes students frequently make, historical references, and more. Practice shows that the format saves an instructor a lot of class preparation time and makes it much easier to teach a class. An instructor can literally see what her students see with her left eye and all the supplementary teacher’s info with her right eye. Due to the design, the TC has about twice as many pages as the WB, so it costs almost twice as much. There are two reasons why you are still likely to find the purchase of the TC beneficial. The first reason is that some of the problems in this course are rather hard to solve. The second reason is that many concepts presented in this course require quite a bit of understanding of mathematical background in order to teach them with sufficient depth. The background is given in the TC. The TC enables a homeschooling parent, a Math Circle instructor, and an elementary/middle school teacher to present the material at the level of depth otherwise available only to professional mathematicians with significant experience of teaching college-level courses to young children.