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Inside The Classroom:
Mastering the Angles with
Chip Rollinson

Chip Rollinson expounds on a geometry question.

Asymptotes, absolute values, quadratics and common ratios. They’re all in a day’s work for the students in Chip Rollinson’s Honors Geometry class.

“My question for you is: why? Why are we doing this?” Rollinson asks at the start of a lesson – a question his students, from the looks on their faces, are still not accustomed to hearing in math class. “One thing you’re going to be doing tonight is figuring out a problem where it says E times as big… Let’s figure out why some of this is working, and why it’s doing what it’s doing.”

Figuring out the why is crucial to both teaching and understanding math, Rollinson says. At least, it’s always been that way for him. 

“I'm not going to be a teacher that just tells them how to do a problem,” he says. “What I want is for the students to understand why it's done, not just how it's done. That’s my big thing. It’s very easy to do rote learning—to just do these steps to get to the answer. I think I’m doing them an injustice if I teach problem solving that way.”

Born and raised in a rural area of New Jersey, Rollinson grew up with a passion for math and enjoyed his summers working with kids as a camp counselor in his hometown. After graduating from Cornell, he decided to start teaching while figuring out his “real” career path.

“I liked school, I liked being in school, so one thing that came across my mind was teaching,” he says. “I thought it was something that I’d do for a couple years.”

His first job was at a private middle school in New Jersey. But after four years, he was lured to Wall Street by the dot-com boom of the mid-90s.

“I was watching my friends working in finance for dot-coms, and they were all enjoying the financial booms happening around that time,” he remembers.

After six months of selling bonds on Wall Street, though, Rollinson realized how much he missed the classroom. He found a new teaching job at Beaver Country Day, then returned to graduate school at Harvard University for a Master’s in Education. He arrived at BB&N in 2005, where he now teaches "a little bit of everything" in the math department, including Honors Algebra II, Pre-calculus, and Honors Geometry.

“The kids are strong,” he says. “It’s always a balance for me to give them a good challenge but also give them the support they need. I want to push them hard but not so hard that they don’t appreciate what they’re learning. It’s a fine line.”

One of the ways Rollinson balances his lessons is through group tests and quizzes. First introduced into the curriculum by math teacher Mark Fidler, group testing allows students to solve high level problems by working together in a cohesive group.

“When you give students group quizzes that are challenging and usually way beyond what you would give a (single) student, it pushes them to another level and they end up understanding much more complex work,” Rollinson says. “It challenges them to learn from each other and really push each other and question each other, and those are things that are really important. When you get into real life a lot of things are done in groups and working well together is paramount.”

Indeed, Rollinson knows that perpendicular bisectors and p-values probably won’t mean much to his students after they graduate. But if they can remember to ask why when faced with a complex challenge, he’ll have done his job.

“What I want is for them is to leave my class as good problem solvers, confident in their abilities, and to be good thinkers,” he says. “I want them to be ready to come across a problem they might not have seen before and figure out ways of attacking it. That will help them to figure it out.”