Daily Archives: April 23, 2009

Here’s my favorite book title, ever. I always loved the power of the academic colon.

For more information on the author, Wikipedia has some details. (As an aside, if I had stayed in grad school, Silvanus was going to make an appearance in my dissertation.)

But the title is just the tip of the super awesome iceberg. You can read it on Scribd, but some of my favorite part so far is:

Prologue: Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks. Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics–and they are mostly clever fools–seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.

And the first chapter is just two pages. Awesome.

This struck me especially deeply because… well, see some twitter posts I made earlier this week (read it from the bottom upwards): 

After this brief burst of histrionics, I actually did decide that I wanted to change things a lot. In a follow up fit, I whipped up an email to my department head, pretty much begging that she would support my plea for a grant to work on revamping the curriculum in the summer.

(Turns out that revamping the calculus curriculum isn’t an immediate priority, sigh, so I will probably not get it.)

In any case, now that you’ve gone through this stream of consciousness, look back at my favorite book title and see how it all comes full circle.

I just wanted a quick post to share the documents I created to teach function transformations. All documents are in .doc format. They aren’t flashy, but they really got students thinking about everything. (This is a regular Algebra II class.) They nailed the final assessment, and are now doing amazingly on transformations of exponential functions. In other words, I see my work as a success.

Function Transformations 1 BASIC INTRODUCTION (here): HW (here)
Function Transformations 2 UP! DOWN! LEFT! RIGHT! (here): HW1 (here) , HW2 (here & here)
Function Transformations 3 VERTICAL STRETCHING (here): HW (here)/ Solutions (here)
Function Transformations 3.5 PRACTICING THINGS STEP BY STEP (here)
Function Transformations 4 HORIZONTAL STRETCHING (here): HW (here) / Solution (here)

Also I handed this practice sheet out to all students to practice their 8 base functions (here).

Just so you know, I don’t always teach via handouts. But with all this graphing, I decided it made good sense.
I’m happy if you want to critique them, or make suggestions on how to improve them.

Today I had one of those great moments which put an impossibly huge smile on my face. Today I had about a zillion student meetings. I had no free periods the entire day! One of the meetings had to take place while I was on “front hall duty” — manning the table where kids sign out to leave the school building for lunch. 

While I was helping this student — and if I say so myself, doing an amazing job of explaining the really conceptually hard Fundamental Theorem of Calculus Part II — one of the people who works at the school, the mother of one of my former students, passed us and then doubled back to speak to us. She said “Wow! I just had to say that this image is so great. This is such a great thing. A second semester senior and a teacher working so hard. This is amazing. I wish I had a camera.” 

I took stock of the situation, and grinned. I patted my student on the shoulder, made two fists and pumped them in the air, and said “Yeah!” 

Teaching seniors is hard. But if you set clear expectations and help them reach them, you too can be as great a teacher as I am. (Just kidding.) But yeah, my faith in my kids’ is on the upswing.