Twenty-five youngsters watch and listen as a smiling Anthony Yom takes his pre-calculus class on a right-angle trigonometry thrill ride through a maze of sines and cosines, out to prove that three squared plus five squared is going to equal H squared, or the world is off its axis.
“I am done teaching,” Yom finally says before starting students on their own problem-solving missions. “You need to get to work now.”
As they dig pencils into paper, Alexis Pong, a sophomore, tells me it’s challenging work, but fun, too. And she has this to say about Yom’s way:
“He challenges us to the max, so we do better on tests.”