Local Math Teacher Goes For Extra Credit

DHHS teacher and Madison resident David Buller has been doing a ton of homework on the third edition of High School Math Made Simple in his spare time. The book, published by Ryan Duques’ online education company TutaPoint, was just released and is available as a paperback and eBook on Amazon.com.

The project, which took almost a year to complete, enlisted over 100 high school students who edited the book before launch. High School Math Made Simple is popular with both students and their parents who are seeking examples and help.

“The book accompanies a website called TutaPoint, which offers online tutoring,” explained Buller. “There are times when the people being tutored don’t have enough extra resources. The first edition was meant to be a supplement, and it turned out people were buying the book just to have a math resource anyway, whether they were being tutored or not.”

The project was “rewarding,” Buller said adding, “I wasn’t expecting that to happen. It was rewarding to see something you’ve done and you’ve seen on a computer screen – to see it come out as a book is actually a pretty cool thing.”

Because so many were involved in the project, Buller does not take substantial ownership, he admits. “But it’s still cool when you’ve made an example, typed up some words and maybe made a graph or table to explain the problem, and then you see it in this gorgeous typeset format.  It’s kind of rewarding from that point of view.”

Over twenty high school classes throughout Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and New York participated in the assignment. Students who participated had the option of receiving credit in the book.

“Students were asked to pick a chapter. Their job was to do not only a proofreading thing but also validate the problems and give feedback on how they were explaining things,” he said.

Chad Golembeski, a junior at Haddam-Killingworth High School, said the project was offered as an extra credit assignment. "I took the opportunity as my grades in that class are always lacking," he admitted.

"The feedback we gave to the editors were things such as moving example problems into neat, uncluttered columns, removing things such as the word 'Simply', since problems are generally not simple to the struggling math student, and overall commenting on the book's effectiveness to teach," he said and added, "It was a positive experience in my opinion, and it gave a chance for primarily English students to pick up their grades in math classes."

HK junior Ana Tarbetsky said that even if she didn't receive extra credit, she probably would have helped because she's always been interested in math.

"We basically edited on our own and then talked about it as a group," Tarbetsky explains. "I think it's good that everyone had their input so that they could make changes with a lot of different opinions going into it. That way, they could be as well improved as possible," she adds.

"Doing it was a good way to see how, instead of just learning things, how they're taught and try to find an effective way of doing it," Tarbetsky said. "I think that it taught me at the same time in thinking about other people and how they would be seeing it." 

Buller probably won’t use the book in any of the courses he teaches, though. “There are examples in the book and, if I’m teaching a section on precalculus and looking for a problem or two I might, but it’s a few hundred pages. One of our class textbooks is maybe 400 pages, so it really is a very summarized version of pre-algebra up through calculus and it has to be,” Buller explains.

“The purpose it is serving is to very quickly give you the essence of a few key topics for any course you might choose. It can’t be a very in-depth discourse; otherwise it would be a textbook.”

Buller said he might suggest the book to his students “if they wanted to pick up a resource over the summer and brush up on a few skills.”

Of the total time he spent on the project, about 25 percent was “me writing stuff. The other time was either spent creating examples or formatting examples (that is, somebody thought of an example but it needed to be put into a graphic program properly), or me editing and correcting mistakes that had been identified or that I had identified. “

High School Math Made Simple, which includes acknowledgement of those students who participated, was released in June.