One of the most frequent questions I get about MyLab homework and quizzes is “How many problems do you put in an assignment?” My most frequent answer … It Depends. When I first started my homework assignments had somewhere between 15 and 20 questions. My chapter quizzes, which became semi-chapter quizzes, also had between 15 and 20 questions. As I have aged, I apparently have become a minimalist! I have drastically cut down the length of my assignments, and I…
One of my goals is to be an agile teacher. I also want that for my students. Often students arrive in my class preferring to work with one method that works for every problem of a certain type. I want them to flexible and use the most efficient solution depending on the particular problem. Case in point – quadratic equations. Students who have seen this material before want to use only the quadratic formula, as they know it can be…
In my Intermediate Algebra course, we finished our work with rational equations and their applications this Wednesday. On Monday I plan to get through solving quadratic equations by factoring, by extracting square roots, by completing the square, and by the quadratic formula. I thought I’d walk you through my thoughts for setting up the Flip assignment for that day. Flip Topic 1: Factoring Trinomials and Differences of Squares These are review topics from Elementary Algebra, and students have been factoring…
Today I led a highly structured class that made effective use of technology, and finally got some skeptical students on board. Several students told me when they got to class that they were having a hard time with rationalizing denominators, and fortunately I had my lesson set up to begin there. We started by rationalizing a one-term denominator and then a two-term denominator by hand. I explained how and why we began rationalizing denominators in the first place, and although…
Lately I have been thinking about how great a job we have done in modernizing our intro stats courses, and how we have not done that in our algebra courses. In statistics we have embraced technological changes, such as transitioning from the binomial formula to binomial tables to using technology like StatCrunch/TI to compute probabilities. In algebra, that sort of transition is far from wide spread. When students have more ownership and control, they are more motivated to learn. In…
It’s Flipped Friday, where I update how my flipped classes are going. If you want to see how my Intro Stats course is going, check out the day-by-day posts on my StatBlog. This week I had planned to cover two sections in my intermediate algebra class – multiplication and division of radical expressions, and solving radical equations. I decided to devote half of the two-hour block to the first section, and the rest of the class to the second section….
Last week I came across a Wired article: Wolfram|Alpha (& AI) Is Making It Easier To Cheat, and reading the article brought so many thoughts to mind about teaching mathematics in today’s world. Here goes … 1) We need to make sure that students understand that HW is a learning tool, not just something that earns points. — George Woodbury (@georgewoodbury) August 25, 2017 I feel that we often assume that students know why they do homework and that they…
The cycle of learning that I use with my students is one of Discover – Engage – Reflect, and today I want to focus on Reflect. It is hard to imagine that true learning can happen without some sort of reflection. What have we done? How is it similar to what we have done before? How is it different? What are my key takeaways? What concepts are not as clear as they need to be? On Monday I revisited using…
Last week I made a post about using quizzes in MyLab. Today I will expand on that topic to include personalized homework. In MyLab you can use the results of a quiz to load a personalized homework assignment. These are powerful tools, as they help students to determine which topics will require further study and then generates a homework assignment focused on those topics. Creating Personalized Homework I begin by making the quiz first. In my current algebra classes I…
I tried something new in my intermediate algebra class. Over the last 3 classes we covered absolute value equations, absolute value inequalities, and graphing absolute value functions. I tried to tie these ideas together through the magic of Desmos, and although it started strong, it could have ended better. We began with the equation . Students solved this by hand and we went over the solution. Then I had students use Desmos to graph and determine where it intersected the…