Some seriously advanced learning is going down in Rob Spohn’s IB Advanced Calculus class at Plantation High School, or at least we thought so. We didn’t quite understand what they’re doing.
"What we're doing a lecture on is lines, planes, and space. Where we're going to take 3-D vectors and apply them and identify the relationships between them," says Mr. Spohn, IB Advanced Calculus Teacher.
Told ya, pretty impressive. Most of these kids are prospective engineers, they are among the best and brightest students at Plantation High. And this curriculum is perfectly suited for them.
"Since they do want to be engineers, this math actually can be applied in the engineering field with the vectors and using the vectors to find directional forces and in today's lesson were actually finding the normal tool to apply that in physics as well as math." says Spohn.
In 2-D or 3-D or across any dimension, it's easy to see Mr. Spohn has had a huge impact on these kids.
"Mr. Spohn is available for us any time we have any questions, he seems to know everything about math and science, computer science. He is always helping someone if they don't understand and he encourages us to keep trying," says Jordan Martino, student.
"Obviously you can see he's extremely intelligent and we offer a lot of different things here at school, International programs, advanced placement classes, gifted academy. He's able to teach across the board but more than being extremely intelligent and passionate about his subject area, he truly cares about our students and he's able to build relationships ... that's really what's important." says Matt Fritzius, Assistant Principal.
And sure there’s a ton of knowledge being dropped but it’s also a fun environment for Mr. Spohn and his students.
"I really enjoy the relationships that I've built with these students. These students I've actually had multiple times throughout their high school career and just taking my mathematical knowledge and passion and passing it onto them. And seeing them have that same passion and applying it into a real world setting, it's pretty fantastic." says Spohn.
We’ve run the numbers and done all the calculations and the results are in. Mr Spohn is this week’s Super Teacher.
