Search Results for: Modeling

As part of our Teacher Federalism agreement, I now include the reciprocal function as one of my parent functions in Algebra 2. But time constraints don’t allow me to really dig into the function–plus, the kids are on overload by the end of the term, what with exponential functions, logarithms, and inverses. I don’t really have […]

Scott Alexander reviews the research on value-added models measuring teacher quality1. While Scott’s overview is perfectly fine, any such effort is akin to a circa 1692 overview of the research literature on alchemy. Quantifying teacher quality will, I believe, be understood in those terms soon enough. High School VAM is Impossible I have many objections […]

Quadratics have become my new nadir, which is cheerier news than it sounds since it means I’ve kicked linear equations into obedient submission. For the first two and a half years of my teaching career, I felt good about quadratics because if nothing else, most kids remembered how to factor, and remembered that factors had […]

I committed to making a big leap forward in inequalities this year. They’ve always been low priority in my curriculum, nothing more than a subset of equations, even though as a programmer, I can come up with fifteen real-life examples of working with them—much more than I can for linear equations. But once I kicked […]

See Part I and Part II. The success of my linear modeling unit has completely transformed the way I teach algebra. From Part II, which I wrote at the beginning of the second semester at my last school: In Modeling Linear Equations, I described the first weeks of my effort to give my Algebra II […]

This is a lecture class, but I put all the instructions in the handout as well, mostly so I can remember the outlines of the activity. In the lecture, I explain that video games run on probabilities, that balancing probabilities is an essential element for strategy video games. Any games that give the user a […]

After my success (I hope) with linear equations, I started a unit doing the same thing with quadratics. Days 1-3: “A triangle’s height is three feet longer than its base. Create a table linking the height to the area. Graph.” “A rectangle’s length is twice as long as its width. Create a table linking the […]

In Modeling Linear Equations, I described the first weeks of my effort to give my Algebra II students a more (lord save me) organic understanding of linear equations. These students have been through algebra I twice (8th and 9th grade), and then I taught them linear equations for the better part of a month last […]

“I have a certain amount of nickels and dimes that add up to $2.10.” “Sam bought a number of tacos and burritos. The tacos were $2 and the burritos were $3. Sam spent $24.” “Janice joined a gym with a sign-up fee of $40 and a monthly rate of $25.” I put these three statements […]

(with apologies to Rick Hess, who means exactly the opposite of me when he says it.) Matt Yglesias is a liberal I’ve followed for years. He’s become more temperate since his signing the Harper’s letter, now that he’s realized how insane the progressive left has become.  But if you want a representative sample of why […]