I had an interesting conversation with some students in my senior elective the other day. These students had taken our PBL algebraic geometry course two years ago as sophomores, and now are in a seminar-based senior elective, and of course, close to graduation. As our department is transitioning our Trigonometry materials into our third-year math course this spring, it is becoming apparent to our school community that this PBL curriculum has now infilitrated another course.

When the seniors in my current class found out that the new course was going in this direction they had a surprising reaction. “No fair,” one girl commented. I was dumbfounded. She was expressing her anger that whe she took this course last year it did not have a PBL curriculum. “How come it wasn’t taught that way last year?” Still in shock, it took me a while to digest the fact that the students were reacting this way. At the time that these students were in our Algebraic Geometry course, I heard many complaints about how difficult it was to work with the PBL curriculum and how much they wished it was more”traditional”, however now in rerospect they seemed jealous that this new class got to use it.

This actually is not surprising. What I have found anecdotally from talking to alumnae from my school who have gone through some of the PBL curriculum, is that once they are out of the moment, they can look back and realize that it was one of the best learning experiences of their high school math time. They realize that the accountability that they were held to was part of what was good for them and the high expectations of accessing their own prior knowledge was empowering. These students validated this idea for me and confirmed what we doing was the right thing.

So far it seems to be going pretty well in our second course. We are finding lots of typos and rewriting will be necessary, of course, this summer. However, overall, it seems to be agreeing with the students who have gone through the experience last year. Hopefully, when they look back, in retrospect, they’ll be able to see the value in it as well.