Daily Archives: April 8, 2009

I have a question for you. In a day or two I’m going to be teaching exponential functions, followed by logarithmic functions. These are historically very difficult for our students (and I’m assuming your students too). One idea I had to making things easier is to separate “e” from the lessons totally. I’m thinking that teaching a difficult topic, and then integrating another foreign concept at the same time, has been part of the problem.

(Just like last year I taught quadratics, and when we saw the square root of negative numbers, I taught complex numbers. It arose naturally, but it was too much for my students. This year I taught complex numbers as a short mini unit before embarking on quadratics, and things went amazingly!)

I was going to teach exponential equations and logarithmic equations without “e.” Then when students had done everything, I was going to spend a few days introducing e and applying what we had learned to it.

What do you think? Do you do something similar? 

Also, if you have any good ideas on teaching these topics, or good activities, or good resources, or even good questions/problems, please leave them in the comments. I want my students to really get and appreciate the concepts this year.