SAN MARCOS -- At St. Joseph Academy, eighth-grade math students one day last week burst into a song about "y=MX+b" before lining up for ice cream for the next lesson.

Welcome to math teacher Steve Norton's class, where pre-algebra lessons at the San Marcos school also have involved a water balloon contest and cutting pizzas into precise triangles.

"Instead of throwing problems at us, he took us outside and let us throw water balloons at him to see if we could use math to calculate how to hit him again in the same spot," said student Chanel Carter, 14, of Escondido. "He's really cool."

Manny Ramos, 13, of Oceanside is the class maestro, waving two rulers like orchestra batons to conduct a 20-student performance of "Graph a Line" to the tune of "Jingle Bells."

"It allows me to understand what I'm doing through doing something I like," Ramos said.

It's a constructionist approach that engages students in the learning experience, in part, by allowing them to actually construct something.

For Norton, it's also about showing students that algebra can be fun at an age when many otherwise will begin to develop biases against a subject often maligned by older people.

"It doesn't have to be like a root canal without the Novocain," Norton said about teaching math at the Roman Catholic-affiliated K-12 school.

His student Nareg Shakarian, 12, of Vista, explained it another way.

"If you teach math with a bunch of problems, it's boring," Nareg said. "It's more fun when you can see the visuals and what you're learning."

Norton, a 30-year teaching veteran, credits the school's 29-year-old principal, Carol Kewell, as the "visionary" who encourages innovative teaching strategies at the award-winning school.

"Ms. Newell has made me a better teacher," Norton said. "She told me, 'Learn from your students.' She was so right."

Newell, in turn, credits the vision of founders Patricia Hansen and Barbara De La Torre, two San Marcos mothers who founded the school as Sierra Madre Academy in 1995.

"I learned a lot from them," said Kewell, who was a onetime kindergarten teacher at what last year was renamed St. Joseph Academy.

The school's name change came with a move to a bigger campus last summer for the school's 260 students. An open house is scheduled Feb. 21.

The interactive teaching style of Norton and others actually is "very traditional learning," Kewell said.

"We definitely do not teach to the test," she said "They're teaching the child to learn and understand, not to get the scores."

That doesn't mean students are failing to earn high scores. For the third year in a row, St. Joseph Academy in November was named one of the top 50 U.S. Roman Catholic secondary schools by the National Catholic High School Honor Roll.

Visit www.saintjosephacademy.org.

Math put to music

"Graph A Line" compliments of Steve Norton's eighth-grade pre-algebra class at St. Joseph Academy in San Marcos (sung to the tune of "Jingle Bells"):

Graph a line, graph a line, here is what we know: Draw a table, pick an X, plug it in, and go.

Get a list of five or six, and graph your ordered pairs. Connect the dots, a line you've got, if you've graphed with care.

Graph a line, graph a line, from slope-intercept form Y equals MX plus B. Here is what it's for:

At B you cross the Y-axis, and M, it stands for slope. Begin with B and move with M. It makes a line, we hope!