180 Blog: Day 3

I've stolen so much stuff (teaching ideas) lately and today I felt like I put it together to make it mine. Hat tip to @mathymeg07 and @MrHonner for help on HW questions.

AP Stats
I tried @gwaddellnvhs sciencedaily.com idea. Students read an article and identified the W's. The conversation was a bit better today. I'm working my butt of on Stats, but I think I need to get out of their way and see what they give me.


Algebra II
I tried out my new procedure for homework questions and it went over pretty well. The idea is students circle the problems that they have questions on in red pen, then, as I stamp HW, I can take a picture of the problem and discuss it as a class. Today was the first day introducing it to the students so the timing was off, and there was a big lag between the end of Estimation 180 and the end of stamping HW. As I was stamping, I noticed that in the first 8 students, there were 7 different answers. In a quick attempt to occupy the students, I told them to talk to their group members and come up with a group solution. They talked to each other about the problem and figured out many of their mistakes. The part that really struck me was that they didn't stop at the first problem. They talked about all the problems! They asked each other questions, they helped each other solve problems. By the time I posted the first HW question, the person who made the mistake shot her hand up and corrected her work. Another student not only identified the error, but also identified the thinking that lead to the error. Here is the work, can you spot it and tell what the student was thinking?

They multiplied 2 times 3 thinking that they were simplifying parentheses rather than doing the exponentiation first. In fact, as I look at it again they also made a mistake with their subtraction. Hmm...

I used the Google Drive app on my phone and I downloaded the Google App on my computer. I could take the picture with my phone and it was waiting for me when I got to the computer. It was pretty slick.

Algebra I
Their HW was to classify some numbers. I had students trade papers with their partner. I put three sections on the board for agree, disagree, not sure, and I then called on students to put their partner's number on the board. We had a good discussion on the square root of 3. They plugged it in their calculators and they got 1.732050808. It stopped and repeated. I turned to the higher power of Wolfram Alpha. I think it got the point across.