Hundreds of sixth graders are enrolled in an Algebra I class, a high school course Fairfax County Public Schools is expanding access to through a pilot program this year.
After students eagerly entered Amanda Blevins’ classroom at Mosaic Elementary on Thursday afternoon, she returned a graded assignment and then shifted their attention to a series of warmup problems projected in the front of the room.
The sequence tested students’ knowledge of exponents and order of operations. Blevins called on several students to walk her through how to approach each step and determine a final result.
Then, Blevins tasked students with roaming the room, solving problems on neon sheets of printer paper attached to the classroom walls. At the same time, she worked with small groups using white boards and erasable markers.
Blevins has 23 sixth graders enrolled in her Algebra I class, a high school course Fairfax County Public Schools is expanding access to through a pilot program this year. Across the county, there are over 700 sixth graders enrolled.
“They’re taking several years ahead, which is great, because a lot of them have expressed interest in STEM careers later down the line,” Blevins said. “Getting a head start on some of these higher level math concepts sets them on a path to advanced math as they get into middle school and high school.”
The pilot program is available for students who took the sixth grade Virginia Standards of Learning math test while in fifth grade and earned a “Pass Advanced” score, while also earning certain scores on other math tests.
In other school years, about 30 students across all 142 elementary campuses took Algebra I in the sixth grade. It was rare, largely because county middle school campuses largely include only seventh and eighth graders.
Now, over one-third of the district’s elementary schools are a part of the pilot program.
“I was really excited and I was kind of worried,” student Mason Lee said. “Because it’s like a high school program, but I’m only in elementary school. I was worried that maybe I wouldn’t do so well as I’d done before, but I’ve been able to keep up pretty well so far.”
The class, Lee said, “could help me get into maybe a good college.”
Blevins said the biggest obstacle is helping students fill in gaps that could be caused by skipping two levels of math.
“We’ve been front-loading a lot of the seventh and eighth grade concepts, and we’re trying to sprinkle that in as we get into the Algebra units too,” Blevins said.
Yesaswini Perneti Mohan, meanwhile, expressed interest in the class because she found previous math courses to be “really easy.” She said she wants to become a neurosurgeon, and described the class as “what I expected. It’s not that easy or hard. It’s in the middle range.”
Gavin Wang is an aspiring mathematician, and said whenever he can, “I try to do something that involves harder math.”
Offering the course was a “heavy lift,” Principal Mahri Aste said, and some parents were nervous about their kids taking a high school course in sixth grade.
But, Aste said, “it’s been very, very positive. The kids are excited about math. They love it.”
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Scott Gelman
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