<p>anyone here take IMP or Interactive Mathematics Program? (its at my high school and i've taken if since 8th grade, its just as hard as reg. math if not harder..you have to write and explain everything you do, its supposed to give you a deeper understanding blah blah blah...but i know its not offered everywhere.) </p>
<p>so any IMPers here??</p>
<p>I am not an IMP myself, but many of my friends are. Unfortunately, IMP has a bad reputation at my school. Students receive honors credit for what most traditional-honors students perceive to be a far less challenging course. It does not help that teachers primarily promote the class to students who would not keep up with the traditional-honors class workload. Chemcom in chemistry and BSCS in biology have similar reputations.</p>
<p>ahhh. we have IMP at my school!! I'm currently finishing up year four right now. I know the whole explaining yourself to death and having crazy situations to remember concepts by helps some people, but it doesn't work very well for me. One of the main problems I have is the sequencing. You do a unit of alegbra, then one of trig, then one of geometry, then one on probability, etc. and it just keeps jumping around like that. I honestly cannot say that after four years I have a cohesive understanding of geometry at all. It's pretty sad, and I think it'll hurt me a lot on the ACT, SAT, etc., which I'll be taking next year (junior year). </p>
<p>I was in the first year of IMP at my school (my teacher actually helped write some of the books, lol), and since then the school has stopped offering all other math courses except calculus. So you jump from IMP3 or IMP4 (depending on how prepared the teacher feels you are) into calc. It's scary. I'll be doing that next year and I'm not really sure how I'm going to manage. sigh.</p>
<p>What year of IMP are you in, hilary6? I thought year three was by far the most useful, and year four, my current class, is mostly bs and a total waste of time. hah, way to be positive, i know ;)</p>
<p>My school's core math program is IMP. Everyone has to take it. lol... Here, 9th graders start off with IMP 3-4, and I had already taken Geometry by then so I was just in shock at how easy the class was. Now though (Year 4) I rather like it. I get practical applications more now and it did increase my understanding of math. </p>
<p>If you find that not taking traditional math courses hurts your SAT score, then just go to a local community college and enroll there. For me nowing the formulas/rules beforehand through a class like Alg2 or Trig, then learning the story behind the formula through IMP works better.</p>
<p>Vegangirl - Our school also offers IMP Years 2 to 4, then you go on to Calculus (12th grade). We offer Alg/Trig and PreCal as electives though.</p>
<p>IMP... Interactive Math... people who don't know about it think it's some kind of a special ed course... hahah.</p>
<p>SchoolDuh, have you done the unit on rotating a cube on a calculator screen? OY!!! time consuming and pointless. I spent so much more time working out kinks in my program than actually doing the math behind it. crazy stuff.</p>
<p>I had also finished geo by high school and the first year was kinda slow for me, although I did enjoy deriving the quadratic formula, which I think is normally taught as late as algebra2 in traditional math.
I like to compare learning math with learning language: the best way to learn language is by immersion, just like when you're a baby. If you're learning a second language, memorizing vocabulary and grammar will help you a little but to really become fluent, you have to be immersed. IMP is like immersion learning for math (if it's taught well). Also, it makes sense to jump around because math wasn't all discovered in neat sets called "Algebra," "Geometry," etc.
I think traditional math won't neccessarily help you with standardized tests either because by that thinking, I should have gotten 800 after 8th grade which certainly didn't happen. Priceton Review and other things like that help you with SAT pretty well.</p>
<p>Rotating cube on screen? Hmm... <em>digs memory</em> <em>nothing</em>. Oh no... does that mean it's in the future? It doesn't sound all that fun...</p>
<p>Hi bluephish! lol, see ya in school tomorrow.</p>
<p>AHH we did the cube rotating... what a blast that was... (no).
yeah im totally on the fence about it and ive been taking it since 8th grade (im a junior now and in my last year of imp)
i totally relate to having to defend it to EVERYONE ..."its not a sped class" "its HARD!"
personally i decided to take it in 7th grade because we watched a cool video about how you get to watch someone in a gorilla costume swing from a rope off a firetruck.......................yeah. (at the end of the pendulum unit if you guys remember that)
right know we're doing "the world of functions" ...
i love that imp is like a community (ive had the same teacher for 2 yrs and i love her, and she loves imp and all her "regular math" students are jealous b.c she loves us the most), but i dont love all the extra work we have to do (READ: POW WRITEUPS and PORTFOLIOS)
also i think the book is redic, haha nad i love the random really foreign names in it, like "Arabagunigau and Zenon went down to the apple orchard and decided to measure the distance between a bird and a rock"
oh good times. (im in year4, thats as high as it goes, next year im taking AP Statistics)
oh and also i hate math.
ONE MORE THING: you guys we should totally have like an imp group because sometimes when i cant figure out a pow (slash my whole class cant figure it out becuase once someone knows the answer they tell everyone unless theyre one of the mean people who everyone else ostracizes because they wont share their answers....oh the love of the imp community) i go wildly searching on the internet and theres never ANYHING to help...so we should help eachother since i think all the units are the same haha.
anyways, haha good to vent about that.... woo IMP!</p>
<p>yeah!! we should help each other. that'd be awesome. i know what you mean about the IMP community-ness. at my school people in IMP 4 always help out the people in lower levels, because we've struggled through all their stuff and (hopefully) still understand/remember it. </p>
<p>and also, the names are hilarious!! plus the fact that it's always like a black-hispanic-asian-norwegian kid in a wheelchair. gotta love the over pc-ness of it all. </p>
<p>right now my class is finishing up the know how unit (we did pollster's dilemma- the last unit in the book, at the beginning of the year because of the election, which is why we're not as far into the book yet). what did you do your project in that unit on? mine's on the golden ratio (phi, 1.618) and the fibonacci sequence. it's pretty interesting, but i have to admit i'm kind of taking this time spent "working independently in class" to slack, so i'm going to have a ton to do over spring break next week. lol.</p>
<p>lol it's cool to finally see some people who like IMP :) I get so mad when people from my middle school diss it because they're just memorizing formulas and they don't understand anything really. The names are hilarious but I think people would respect it more if the names were not so...hahaha. Then again, what would we do without such great names like "Frashy"??</p>
<p>hahahah yess gotta love the black-hispanic-asian-norwegian kid in a wheelchair...
we just finished know-how, i did my proj on absolute value (v. easy) and i got stuck with the biggest slacker in the class because i wasnt there when we picked partners ...sooo basically i had to do the whole thing myself which was a blast, but took like a total of 1 hour...
everyones projects were bad and then we had a test which pretty much the whole class failed! so that pretty much summed up know how... haha</p>
<p>yess Frashy. oh and wait til you get to this one unit and the titles of the homeworks are like "And Fred Brings the Lunch" and it gives you like a 5-page story about a fly named fred who brings lunch to 2 spiders named Charlotte and Bonita...</p>
<p>there was a homework in one unit, either year three or four, i can't remember, called "what's your sine?" that i still remember because only IMP makes puns of their homework titles. lol.</p>
<p>oooh haha I just realized the pun! that's funny...haha I'm slow</p>
<p>haha yeah but they dont want to like have to deal with copyrights so they randomly have some little pair of friends in some unit named madie and clyde (bonnie and clyde..)</p>
<p>I JUST FINISHED MY LAST POW EVER FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!</p>
<p>(also the worst pow ever, another one with the damn king...)</p>
<p>but hurray!!
a little sad about imp being over though... after this year i wont ever do it again for the rest of my life...thats a weird thought...</p>
<p>Wow Congrats! I still have 1 more to go. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm finished with portfolios! lol</p>
<p>Imp At My School Is The Gifted Program</p>
<p>haha YES, we are gifted.</p>
<p>we're nto even doing a portfolio for the last unit! so awesome, so all i have left is the assessment</p>
<p>haha we are doing a huge end-of-IMP party in the cape too</p>
<p>I'm eating my words... bad bad jinx. Last week, the teacher had this "great idea" for us to make an "uber" portfolio of sorts, covering everything. Argh...</p>