Relief At an Easy Problem

By Unknown

Monday, March 7, 2011

Many of the students in my Beginning Algebra course are nervous about their abilities. And I push them to really think about what's happening. So when I asked them to solve a matching problem in the book that felt easy to them, they loved it! Relief washed though the room.

They're just learning to graph linear equations. I've begun to realize how hard it is for many people to see a point as being the equivalent of two pieces of information (the x-coordinate and the y-coordinate). One visual object turns into two numbers. So of course they struggle with graphing lines. The matching problem from the book gave 4 equations, all y = 5x+b, with 4 different numbers for b, along with their graphs. They liked doing that.

Today I'm going to start by asking them to graph 2x+3y = 6. That will take a while. Then I'm going to hand out the sheet I just made with all 8 possible equations like this (� 3y, �6, and swapping the 2 and  3) and all 8 graphs, so they can do another matching problem. That will go quickly take over an hour, but I think they'll really enjoy it, and will begin to think about how the same numbers can make different lines. (Embarrassing how wrong my estimates of difficulty level can be. That sheet was definitely not easy. But they worked hard on it, and I do think it worked out well.)


[How do I show a Google doc file here?]

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