Mason Levens ’25 teaches his new minor course at MFS. Photo by Livia Kam ’26.
In the spring semester of the 2024-2025 school year, a new course, “Analytical Approaches to Teaching Math,” was added to the minor course catalog. Mason Levens ’25 teaches the course, making it one of the few courses at Moorestown Friends School (MFS) in which a student completely teaches the course.
During his speech, “The Importance of Teaching Mathematics Analytically,” at the November 19 TEDxMoorestown Friends School event hosted by Ali Sabir ’26 and Livia Kam ’26, Levens announced that he would teach a course related to his speech topic in the spring.
According to Levens, he wanted to create the course because he has “always been passionate about conceptual understandings of math” and because he wants “students to be able to gain an appreciation for the ‘why’ behind their formulas and concepts.”
The course was an extension of his Capstone Project, “Analytical Approaches to Teaching Mathematics,” in which he wrote a book and created the class now being taught at MFS. To him, the course is a “wider community impact project” that “stems from the principles [he] outlined in [his] book.”
Levens created the course after discussing his ideas with his Capstone advisors, Noah Rachlin, Nicole Weber, and Michael Omillian. He then created an outline for the class that Omillian reviewed for addition to the Minor Course Catalog.
While Omillian is the course advisor, Levens teaches the course entirely independently, with Omilian handling the grading and attendance portion of the class.
In the Spring Minor course catalog, the course is described as an “opportunity to explore math conceptually through discussion, proof, and interactive applications related to physics and economics.”
Levens added that to keep students engaged and interested in such a specific topic, he encourages discussion between students, and stated that his approach to his class is “analogous [to] English class.”
Matthew Conner ’26, a student in the class, agreed with Levens’s statement.
“My favorite aspect of the class is the collaborative environment that we work in. Last class, we did a math-style Harkness, which was really different from anything we do in MFS math classes,” he shared.
Another student, Kyle Merriwether ’26, said the class is “more [on] a friend-to-friend level than a teacher-to-students [level],” which creates “a different dynamic [than other classes].”
In the past, other MFS students have taught minor courses, such as the beekeeping class led by MFS alum Daniel Sorokin ’23. According to Levens, Sorokin was a large component in putting the class together by giving him advice.
Omillian noted that he had a very positive experience working with Levens as his Capstone and minor course advisor.
“I think that [Mason] has some interesting ideas. He did a lot of research and we’ll see if this can be incorporated more into some of the work we do [at MFS].”
According to Levens, his end goals for the class are to “instill a community based off of analytical math,” to possibly have more math minor courses, and to add some of the approaches outlined in his class to official math curricula at MFS.