MATH ENRICHMENT SERVICES
Offering serious and challenging mathematics to intellectually gifted students
1200 Kensington Road, McLean, Virginia 22101
(703) 855-0948
Contact:
Vern Williams
vernwilliams47@gmail.com; vernwilliams@mathreasoning.com
2022 Summer Courses Registration is Now OPEN!
Classes will remain open until filled by qualified students.
The 2022 summer courses will take place at Meridian High School in Falls Church City. Registration is now open and will remain open until all spaces are filled by qualified students.
You may register for summer courses through mail or online. You can securely make payment online. Once your registration is processed, we will email you a Paypal invoice to make payment.
Please click on the individual courses for more information or feel free to contact me at: vernwilliams@mathreasoning.com.
MATH REASONING
Session I : July 11 – July 22 (9 AM – 12 Noon))
Session II : July 25 – August 5 (9 AM – 12 Noon)
Instructor:
Vern Williams Sessions I & II
Class Size:
12-15 students
Place:
Meridian High School
121 Mustang Alley
Falls Church, VA 22043
$750.00
This course is mainly for rising seventh and eighth graders who are able to grasp abstract and complicated mathematical concepts at a very fast pace. Younger students with exceptional mathematical ability and backgrounds may enroll with special permission. Material covered will include topics from number theory, Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries, Picks Theorem, Herons Formula, Mathematical proof, transcendental real numbers such as “e” and “pi” , derivation and use of the square root algorithm, unitary divisors, permutations and combinations, derivation and use of summation formulas, and RSA coding. In addition, students will develop new techniques and short cuts for solving both routine and difficult math problems taken from Mathcounts, AMC8, and other middle and high school contests.
Students who qualify for programs such as CTY (Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth) or EPGY (Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth) should have an excellent experience taking this course. An AMC 8 score of 15 or higher should also serve as an excellent predictor of success in the course. If a student has not taken the AMC 8 contest (40 minutes for 25 problems, no calculator), previously given ones can be found on the Art of Problem Solving website at:
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Wiki/index.php/AMC_8_Problems_and_Solutions
Of course if a student is a strong member of his/her school Mathcounts team, that indeed serves as an excellent predictor of success in the Math Reasoning course.
ADVANCED PROBLEM SOLVING
July 25 – August 5 (1 PM – 4 PM)
Instructor:
Vern Williams and Dr. Ryan Grove
Class Size:
We will have two levels and will assign a maximum of 12 students to each class.
Place:
Meridian High School
121 Mustang Alley
Falls Church, VA 22043
$750
This course is mainly for rising eighth, ninth, and tenth graders who would like to engage in high level problem solving up to the USAMO level. Problems will be selected from a variety of sources and problem solving techniques will be developed and applied. Other topics of interest, such as advanced number theory, combinatorics, and advanced topics from geometry will be discussed. The student should have the ability to reason abstractly and the desire to solve challenging problems in order to be successful in this course. We are planning to have two levels of APS. Dr. Ryan Grove is scheduled to instruct the more experienced students. He currently teaches problem solving versions of Calculus and Post Calculus courses as well as Physics at BASIS Independent Mclean.
Students who were very successful in the Math Reasoning course and/or advanced math courses from CTY (Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth) or Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) should be prepared for this course. Acceptance to programs such as MathPath as well as a score of 90 or above on the AMC10/12 also serve as excellent predictors of success in this course. Even though we will have two levels of APS, the entry level section will be quite rigorous. Students will be assigned to their respective section based on their mathematics course backgrounds and problem solving experience.
ABOUT MATH ENRICHMENT SERVICES
Math Enrichment Services was formed in February of 2006 in order to fill the need for quality math enrichment for gifted upper elementary and middle school students in the metropolitan Washington DC area. In addition to summer courses, we offer mentoring/tutoring for individual students and small groups on a limited basis throughout the school year. We also offer consulting services to individual schools, school systems, and institutions engaged in educational research.All courses are designed by Vern Williams and taught by Vern Williams or other instructors with extensive math backgrounds with the assistance of high school and college students who not only possess and demonstrate mathematical brilliance but are also able to motivate other students to reach their highest intellectual potential.
Other instructors have included Michael Auerbach (Thomas Jefferson High School), Jonathan Osborne (Thomas Jefferson High School), Eugene Huang (Longfellow Middle School), Peter Diao (Stanford), and Ryan Grove (BASIS Independent Mclean).
MISSION STATEMENT
Our mission is to help students appreciate the beauty and power of serious and challenging mathematics. We strive to make the student who never cared about math love it and for those who have always loved math to love it even more.
ABOUT VERN WILLIAMS
I had junior high school teachers who were intellectual and had a passion for their subject. Those great teachers helped me to develop a passion for learning and a respect for hard work that remains with me to this day. At Paul Junior High School in Washington DC, intellectual excellence was the norm and it was celebrated. There was no cooperative learning, fake self esteem, differentiated instruction or ten pound textbooks loaded with pictures and useless content. I decided to become a math teacher during my last year of junior high school because I knew that I wanted to return some day to continue the fun, the learning, and the celebration of excellence that I experienced in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades.
After attending the University of Maryland in the early nineteen seventies, I accepted a math teaching position at Hayfield Secondary School in Fairfax County, Virginia. That experience helped to shape my attitude towards teaching math for the next thirty years. Teachers were forced to individualize 150 students using math booklets written for non-readers. Seventh and eighth grade students were put into the same math classes and teachers were told that this program was “cutting edge”. I would hear that phrase many times over the next thirty years. I quickly decided to find a school where I was allowed to “teach”. After seven great years teaching math at Ellen Glasgow School in Fairfax County, I transferred to H.W. Longfellow Middle School where I remained for over thirty years. At Longfellow, I developed and taught the original Honors Math course to students in the Gifted Talented Center program. I also taught Algebra/Geometry which was a one year course that I developed in which two high school credits were awarded. I also taught an enriched version of Honors Algebra 7 and a special proof based Honors Geometry course enriched with AMC/AIME/USAMO level problem solving.
After retiring from Fairfax County Public Schools in 2016, I taught at BASIS Independent Mclean for five years. I presently teach math at Nysmith School for the Gifted located in Herndon Virginia.
Link of Interest:
http://www.nychold.com/myths-050504.html
Math Reasoning
Offering serious and challenging mathmatics to
intellectually gifted students
Last update: 7/02/2022
