I wish I'd had a class like this when I was in junior high, er, middle school. And I wish I'd had a math teacher like Trudy Pzynski.
Pzynski, an eighth-grade math teacher at Trinity Episcopal School, has incorporated a golf course design project into her classes. It started early in her teaching career when she became determined not to bore her students with nothing but numbers and lines on a blackboard.
"I was always looking for ways to make math more fun and give the kids hands-on projects where they can use the principles they learn in class," Pzynski said. "It was all about finding ways to show the kids how they can use math in the real world."
Pzynski does not have much of a background in golf, but she recalls riding in a cart and watching other family members play: "I was mostly interested in studying the contours of a course and the slopes and thinking about how physics came into play."
Six years ago, Pzynski came up with the idea of using a golf course design project in which her students take their textbook knowledge to a real-life effort. It's a year-long project in which students work in groups of three of four employing what they have learned of computations, percentages, linear and quadratic functions to design a nine-hole course.
