Summer Programs

Summer enrichment programs for math and computer science.

Little Known Facts about Florida Bright Futures

Posted on by Kennon McCaa

Here’s a quick true or false quiz for you about Florida Bright Futures….

  1. Bright Futures covers either 75% or 100% of tuition.
  2. Bright Futures covers room and board.
  3. Tuition is the biggest portion of paying for a public university in Florida.

The correct answers are:

  1. True, Bright Futures covers tuition.
  2. False, Bright Futures does NOT cover room and board.
  3. False, tuition is about 25% of the cost of attending a public university in Florida. Looking at my son’s bills (which are very confusing), it breaks down about like this: Housing 40%, Meals 30%, Tuition 25% and Fees 5%.

Bright Futures is Nice, but Benacquisto is Amazing

There’s actually something even better that most families don’t know about, until it is too late.

What is the Benacquisto Scholarship?

The Benacquisto Scholarship covers EVERYTHING for Florida students attending a public Florida university. My son qualified for it, and we literally pay nothing for him to go to school. In fact, he even gets cash back each semester. Currently, USF even pays him an additional $5,000/year and covers one year of post-graduate tuition. This far exceeded our expectations when we were studying together for the PSAT. We always thought Benacquisto was a minor upgrade on Bright Futures, but now that I’ve seen the full breakdown of the costs of college, and what Bright Futures does NOT pay, I can see the extra effort to earn this scholarship saved our family an additional $50,000, and earned him $50,000.

How does a student earn a Benacquisto Scholarship?

The Benacquisto Scholarship is only for Florida students that are National Merit Scholars. Only 1% of students qualify to be National Merit Scholars (“NMS”), so it isn’t easy, but it is worth it! First of all, to qualify as a NMS, students must score extremely high on the PSAT in the fall (October) of their junior year. So, for this reason, I’ve started recommending SAT (or really PSAT) prep to highly motivated sophomores, especially over the summer before their junior year. Please note that NMS scoring is currently calculated using 1/3 math and 2/3 English, so make sure you study especially hard for the English portion.

Duke TIP Talent Search Discontinues Use of SAT/ACT

Posted on by Kennon McCaa

It looks like there will not be any on-campus summer programs in 2021 and will no longer use the SAT or ACT to identify new students. I’ve added bold to the most important parts.

On October 9th, 2020 Duke TIP sent the following email:

Dear Members of the TIP Community,

COVID-19 has disrupted every part of our lives, from our health and education to our mobility and our livelihoods. Nothing has been untouched, and we have all had to make difficult and painful choices.

Today, we are writing to inform you about one of those difficult choices that Duke has had to make. The pandemic-induced closure of Duke TIP’s Summer Studies residential programs on our main campus in Durham and at colleges across the country in 2020 and likely again in 2021 has fundamentally disrupted the business and financial models that have long supported the TIP organization.

At the same time, the pandemic has also led Duke to accelerate a review of all precollege academic programs. A key strength of Duke has been its ongoing ability and willingness to innovate. The pause in operations across a range of precollege academic programs has given us an opportunity to step back and assess how best to serve students in a post-pandemic world. Based on this review, Duke will be creating a new unit in the Office of Academic Affairs to better align the existing important and diverse precollege activities with Duke’s current educational priorities and operational practices. Students served by Duke TIP will be a principal focus of this unit, which will oversee all our precollege programs and ensure they meet the highest standards of quality, reflect the best practices in education and are tightly linked with Duke’s extraordinary academic community.

As a result of this change, Duke TIP will not be offering programming (including the Academic Talent Search) for the remainder of 2020 through spring 2021 as we go through this transition and re-envision how to best serve all precollege learners. We look forward to resuming our activities next summer with a new and exciting slate of online courses on a wide range of topics—including artificial intelligence, coding, financial markets and pandemics, among others—taught by Duke faculty and graduate students and using the latest innovations in online education. As we redesign our precollege and talented offerings, we will not resume the talent search with above-level testing, but will instead be looking at new ways to identify students and facilitate their access to these enrichment programs. We will continue to work with families who participated in prior talent searches to provide the promised programs, research, and resources, which will remain available at https://tip.duke.edu.

We know that the suspension of Summer Studies and Talent Search will come as a disappointment to you, and it is a disappointment to us as well because we know how valued it has been by generations of TIPsters. But we are equally excited about the opportunity to update and modernize our programming, and to build on the innovative, enriching and challenging educational experiences that have made TIP such a transformative resource for more than three million students over the past 40 years. We will provide more information on this transition in the weeks ahead, as well as opportunities for students, parents and alumni to remain engaged.

Thank you for your continued support of Duke University.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Francis

Executive Vice Provost

Top 10 Questions To Do Together

Posted on by Kennon McCaa

In my years of teaching and tutoring, I have helped hundreds of students. Some had small problems they needed help with while others were basically starting from scratch. At Transformative Tutoring, we believe that every parent should spend a little time doing math with their child. Sure, your child gets a grade at the end of each year and perhaps has to pass an EOC exam, but what does that all mean?

Understanding Grades and SAT or ACT Scores

The best way to understand what that letter grade or SAT/ACT score means is to spend a little time actually having your child do some math with you. You might be surprised to find out that your teenager, who got just a B in Algebra 2, Precalculus or Calculus, is still adding and subtracting by counting on their fingers. (I would estimate that over 20% of high school students that have completed Algebra 2 still count on their fingers when not allowed to use a calculator.)

Students Are Growing Up in a Cashless, Digital World

Today’s children, in fact all of us, live in a digital age. Most middle class children rarely use coins and bills the way we did when we grew up. We had to know that four quarters made a dollar, but today’s children cannot buy anything with a quarter, so they don’t really care about quarters. Today’s children might have digital currency such as gift cards, debit cards, prepaid cards or iTunes credits, but they rarely handle cash. As a result, they use math for about 45 minutes a day about 180 days a year, exclusively in math class.

Compounding the problem for this digital generation is that calculators can do all their dirty work. In fact, you don’t even have to have a calculator anymore, just ask your smartphone something like, “Hey Siri, what’s 315 divided by 3.875?” As soon as most children find these error-free paths of least resistance they (ab)use them and shut their brains off entirely to the world of math. Before you know it, math doesn’t make any sense to them and they become incapable of thinking mathematically.

Beware of the Tools for Avoiding Math Homework

When a struggling math student hits high school there is often no easy way out and their struggles worsen. Did you know that every answer to every math textbook problem is available online? Most high school kids do! Now, they can breeze through their homework using sites like Slader, which has used crowd-sourcing to categorize every problem and answer, often with full solutions so students can “show their work.” Textbook publishers have tried to stay one step ahead by creating online homework assignments where the problems insert randomized numbers so that no two students get exactly the same question. However, in the great arms race to avoid doing math homework, once again there was a counter-attack in the form of an app called PhotoMath. Simply take a picture of any math problem and it will solve it for you, no thinking required! I have even heard reports of students using this app in their classroom to cheat on tests!

The SAT has a No Calculator Section

Eventually, the day of reckoning for all college bound students arrives, and that is the day of the SAT or ACT. These tests require students to know what they are doing and to actually understand and apply the math skills, formulas, strategies and concepts that they have, or haven’t, been using all of these years. Sadly, the arrival of that first SAT or ACT score is often the first day that a parent actually becomes aware of the magnitude of their child’s struggles with math. Now, they have a big problem on their hands, not much time to fix it and a jam packed schedule. Yes, there were B’s (many teachers require a student to be completely incompetent AND disrespectful to get a C grade these days, so a B should be considered a serious warning sign, especially if your child is well liked by their teachers) along the way that tried to serve as warning signs. Yes, there were some below average PSAT, PSAT 8/9, or EOC scores that tried to be the harbinger of the peril ahead, but these signs often were not obvious enough to raise enough concern to cause someone to take action.

Spend 5 Minutes Doing Math Together

So, today, and for the next few days, I beg you to sit down and spend a few minutes doing these problems with your child and without a calculator (20 of the 58 SAT math questions do not allow a calculator, while all 60 of the ACT math questions do allow a calculator) and see with your own eyes if your child needs help with arithmetic, Algebra 1, Geometry or Algebra 2.