Three days into the school year, my students and I are still getting used to each other. Some classes have figured out that I prefer dialogue between teacher, student and other students. Other classes have not started to trust that idea. I’ll continue to encourage them to work together.
AP Statistics:
Today’s goal was to appropriately display quantitative data. Most of the conversation focused on making histograms, stemplots and dotplots. We did collect some interesting data though:
All of the data points were between 52 and 70 seconds. Not too shabby. Today was also the first day of AP Exam prep (even though they didn’t realize it). Once we listed all 20 of the times from the class, I stepped back and said “now describe the data.” They had to work together to get all of the aspects they needed to describe: shape, center, spread, outliers/gaps/clusters. They had some great conversations too!
Precalculus:
We started class connecting what they learned about converting from degrees to radians and how to calculate arc length (with angles in both degrees and radians). Man, the connections that were made and the speed at which they picked it up was impressive. I’m really excited about their potential.
Speaking of their quickness, we defined three new trig functions they hadn’t worked with before: secant, cosecant and tangent. Rather than drill methods to solving problems, I threw this with them without any hints:
The ease in which they figured out to draw a right triangle, and use the Pythagorean Theorem was great! I figured this would challenge them at first, but I was definitely wrong. I definitely need to step up my game.
Algebra II:
We’ve begun to go deep into the world of functions. I’m noticing that some of my students are struggling to see the big picture. In today’s activity the focus was supposed to be on how changes in a function affects its graph:
We ended up so bogged down in the details of the order of operations and plotting points that we lost sight of the big picture. Hopefully their homework tonight can help re-focus them.
Cloud Math 