Daily Archives: August 21, 2009
Idea I’ll Never Follow Up On, Though It Is Good
So I have a awesome idea (toot toot)[1], but if I know me when the school year starts, I won’t actually follow through on it. But maybe someone out there in the great Internet cosmos will follow through on it.
Kids like Pizazz sheets. I have a bunch of them for calculus. There is a great payoff because when the kids solve the worksheets, solutions to the world’s corniest riddles are revealed. It is a self-checking homework sheet, because if students mess up, the answer to the joke is garbled.
My idea is to make my own Pizazz worksheet, but the solution will be… well, lemme just whip a sample one up.
Of course this can be done with vimeo or even any url shortner. I had at one point a grand ambition to make a giant internet web puzzle for my students, that we’d spend the year trying to solve. Each unit brings us another clue, which brings us to another page… But you know, grand ambitions get foiled at every turn, by my own laziness and the exigencies of life as a teacher.
And no, I won’t give you the answer to the puzzle. Figure it out!
[1] That’s me tooting my own horn.
Calculus: A New Approach
In my last extended post, I wrote about how I was modifying our Algebra 2 curriculum. In this post, I’m going to briefly outline my ideas for my non-AP calculus course. The course as of right now is only decent. I haven’t put in the really huge amount of time and energy that I need to, so that the course is super fly. Unfortunately, this summer I won’t be able to do that either. I’m just incrementally improving the course (hopefully), instead of doing a wholesale rewriting. At this stage, I’m still okay with that.
So what changes will we see in this upcoming year? There are only two major ones.
First, we’ve finally given up Anton — that huge, dense textbook which is inappropriate for high school students and college students alike. I did a serious looking at a number of other books last year, but decided that all roads led back to Rogawski. The best part is that with Rogawski, there is something called “CalcPortal” which students are going to subscribe to. They will get access to an e-book — which is the textbook, but with interactive applets, and other goodies — but also I will be able to use WebAssign for online homework.
Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen, I will be using online homework at least once a week. It will be graded for correctness, instead of just completion, and will provide immediate feedback for students to know what they get and what they don’t get!
(My fingers are crossed that setting up CalcPortal and administering this online homework will be easy.)
Second, I am going to finally address head on the problem I’ve had with my calculus students for the past two years: they can’t do algebra. So I’ve made a list of all the algebra skills that students need for each unit. Will students need to know their 30-60-90 triangles? Holes of rational functions? Vertical asymptotes? Instead of doing over a month of precalculus review at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of each unit, I am going to put my students through an algebra boot camp which covers only the algebra skills needed for that unit. They will be tested on these skills. Then we’ll transition to calculus, and use these skills to solve problems.
What I’m hoping will come from this is an ability to do serious calculus work, while recognizing that calculus ideas themselves aren’t really difficult. In fact, if you can get past the notation and the algebra anxiety, calculus is actually pretty simple.
And that’s it — the major changes for my calculus class.
My 2009-2010 Course Expectations
Below are working drafts of my course expectations for next year. Most things — in terms of wording and text — haven’t changed, although the grading breakdowns have. In case it wasn’t glaringly obvious, I’m all about having super clear expectations for my students. Anyway, you can see that aspect of my teaching come through in these.
Algebra II Course Expectations, 2009-2010
Feel free to steal anything, if you like anything.
