So it turns out that a great deal of my Honors Precalc students can't factor. Sure, they can do a GCF or a quadratic with a leading coefficient of 1, but throw in a value for a and they're sunk.
Really?!?
We got new books for last year and the Honors Algebra 2 book was supposed to be really tough. It's a college text that the HA2 teachers were excited about teaching out of and thought the kids were really learning a lot more, which excited me as a precalc teacher. That could cut out half of my curriculum! What freedom that gives me!
Until I find out that they can't factor.
I refuse to spend class time re-teaching factoring, but it's something they have to know. Someone at school reminded me the other day of Livebinders, so I collected some resources and put one together for factoring ax^2 + bx + c. Hopefully that'll help me from having to re-teach.
I'm thinking that I'm going to start giving them short factoring quizzes. Once they get 100%, they're done. We'll keep re-doing them until everyone has 100%. Now I just need to find some good factoring practice for them.
To be totally off topic, my precalc kids are currently working on a dot-to-dot puzzle from this site. It's a nice change of pace! And the simplifying logs one is really challenging for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment