High School Math

Mathematics at San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity is as unique as the school itself. Faculty and Staff use an arts-infused curriculum to incorporate all levels of Mathematical comprehension. The teachers understand that artists are attuned to mathematical elements when creating bodies of work. This concept is taught to the students by exposing them to artists like Piet Mondrian, Van Gogh. George Seurat, Alexander Calder, among others.

Some of the more interesting classroom assignments currently being applied include:

Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian contributed to the utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order inventing neoplasticism. For this art integration- students create their own Mondrian art with vertical and horizontal lines, shading in random boxes with primary colors. Students learn to create abstractions on a Cartesian plane as a system of inequalities, where the "solution" to the system is the shaded boxes.

Van Gogh and Seurat
Van Gogh and George Seurat contributed to Impressionism as post- and neo-Impressionists. Impressionists used disciplined networks of dots, lines and brush strokes in their desire to instill a sense of organization and permanence.

Math is also a network of information that needs organized and there is no better way than graphically in order to visualize the information collected. Through Impressionism students learn about scatter plots, in particular through pointillism, the method for creating impressionistic art. Each point and stroke reveals the essence of a subject rather than its details. In the art an "impression" or final image emerges, as do trends and correlations in the mathematical graphs, which students use to form conclusions and make predictions.

George Rickey and Alexander Calder create kinetic sculptures that rely on natural forces and balance for movement. Balance is critical in creating harmony in every part of life, including art, science and math. Students learn about these artists and experiment with balance as they create their own mobile structures. They then transfer this concept to math and science equations, which need balanced in order to determine specific information about a subject or to explain the product of chemical reactions.