Logarithms. Confusing, unintuitive, blasted made-up things! I am teaching my Algebra II classes logs for the first time today, and since I didn’t have much time to do my planning last night (I went to the school dance concert, and by the time I got home, I was too tired to function), I made only a mediocre lesson plan.

I think if I had given myself more time to plan things out, I could have made an interesting lesson — one that made logs seem less like things that pop out of nowhere, and more like these concrete natural things that simply had to exist because them not existing would be even more horrifying.

Sort of like I tried to do when I introduced imaginary numbers.

I didn’t do a terrible job, but I know how confusing logs can be, so I wanted to do a bang up job. Instead I simply took the book’s presentation wholesale and translated that to Smartboard. Next year I’ll try to look what other teachers do.