Jan 22 Alg 1 4.2b

Reflection

I started class reviewing 4 exit tasks and having students review what went right and what went wrong.  I pointed out with extra emphasis that lines had to be straight and could be good lines of best fit without hitting any of the data points.  We wrote the equations of the lines, and emphasized that there could be several different equations that were right, but they had to be in the ballpark.

I then gave them the problem of the saturated fat vs total fat of different fast food burgers for them to plot, draw a line of best fit, and write an equation of the line.  I told them that it’s not a test, but I wanted a test environment, so I could see what they knew as individuals. Today was a short day, with early release and the assembly, we had 35 minutes.  The kids had 15 minutes to do this task, and many finished early.

The first few minutes were spent walking around to help students get their axes and scales right.  I ended up asking the group, “who knows about nutrition?  Does the amount of saturated fat depend on the amount of total fat or visa versa?” Thankfully, some of the students knew the answer.  But many needed a reminder that the dependent variable goes on the y-axes, and I wrote y and x on the top of the columns for the saturated fat and total fat data.  The test environment gave me a chance to give individual help to lower skilled students.

Usually with tests I tear up the papers of those that talk, but because this was just participation points, I told them that I’d be calling parents of any talkers.  I did end up calling 2 parents.  One didn’t answer, and no voicemail, so I sent an email home.  The other parent and I had a nice conversation, starting with “your son’s not in trouble,” getting the sigh of relief, and then sharing what’s going on.

I know as a parent that if I get a call from school, there is automatic stress.  Somehow, those magic words of “he’s not in trouble” pave the way for bad news in a proactive and preventive way.  We had a good conversation where the dad learned that his son is failing, is a nice kid in class, and has to look through his quizzes and do quiz corrections this weekend.

I’ve contacted the other parent before, with no academic improvement in her son, but his attitude does seem better than it was at the start of the year, so I’m hopeful.  It’s hard when a student misses so much school and it appears to be related to being with one parent or the other.  He’s missed Fridays because his dad was picking him up early, or missed Mondays when his mom was supposed to drop him off.

Jan 21 Alg 1 4.2a

Lesson plan: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXxJ1gaN0eqJZGYzd2M1bV8zN2RwNDR2c2Rz&hl=en

Reflection

For the warm up, I had the students write an equation for a line, given a straight line on a grid.  I needed to know if they knew how to write an equation of a line before I moved on.  I got answers all over the place.  We ended up practicing writing equations with 6 different graphs and spent half the period on this.

I then introduced line of best fit.  I talked about the Olympics coming up, how real life data is often not in a straight line, and how we use the trend of the data to make predictions.  I put up a scatter plot on the document camera and used a thin spaghetti strand to be the line.  The students then told me where the line of best fit was and we made a bullet list of qualities and I had them write these down in their notebooks.

We then talked about the slope of the line of best fit.  We ran out of time to cover much more.

The exit task was very valuable, and I’ll use this again.  I had a scatter plot on a grid and had them draw a line of best fit and write the equation of the line.  What I learned was that most of the students had a good sense of where the line should be, but some of the students drew lines to hit as many points as possible, at the loss of capturing the trend.  Few got the equation right, with errors varying all over the place.