Tag: quadratics

  • How another country teaches the Quadratic Formula

    One of the most enjoyable thing I have done over my career is work with teachers from other countries. The university is a host site for the Fulbright Teacher Excellence and Achievement program which brings teachers from other countries to the US, where they spend six weeks in classrooms and university classes. As a teacher,…

  • No more broccoli flavored ice cream

    The struggle to understand why we teach K-12 mathematics in the order we do, and the content we do is real. I have wondered about this for a long time, and really have never found a good answer. I threw out the idea of teaching y=mx+b as the only way to write lines (even though…

  • Rational function rules

    Rational function rules

    Nothing annoys me more in teaching math than a bunch of rules to memorize, and rational function come with their own complete set of rules to memorize. I really find that annoying, and I have been on a personal quest to make sense of algebra through a combined set of understandings that will bring comprehension,…

  • Building & solving polynomials

    This post is a branch of yesterday’s post on polynomials. As were are teaching this year, I am giving them some tough, torturous problems that are about incorporating all the math from previous units into one problem each time. Yes, I want every problem to be a review of the previous year’s materials. And it…

  • Never tell me it can’t be done

    This post is a little personal venting along with some serious math. I am in an Algebra 2 training today, and the instructor is doing some long division for finding slant asymptotes. Okay, nothing wrong with that, but I ask why we aren’t using synthetic division when we just finished using synthetic division in the…

  • A PROOF of the visual representation of imaginary solutions

    Many people ask me why I ride my motorcycle long distances in the summer. This summer I traveled from Reno, NV to St. Louis, MO. It was around 4000 miles, round trip, and brutally hot for a couple of states worth of riding. But, that traveling allows me one single thing I rarely get. Time…

  • A visual representation of Imaginary solutions

    For today’s #myfavfriday I am presenting an idea that has been percolating in my head for a while. If you want to know what a #myfavfriday is, then see Druinok’s blog here. Learners have a devil of a time with quadratics. Afterall, there can be 2 solutions, 1 solution, or no solutions in Algebra 1,…