Yikes!
Great idea...but I realize it's in the works.
Today we talked about the learning goal...what and why we needed to learn about slope.
I had some questions ready to go in our online binder (see the slope section)
And we had an interactive website for playing around with slope.
I have to be honest.
The first class did not go as I had envisioned.
We had just gotten finished with Pythagorean's Theorem.
Most of the class started focusing on the red right triangle that formed with the rise/run
And were trying to make a connection to the theorem.
I was worried.
But...
I didn't panic.
I reminded myself this is all part of the journey.
I continued to question them.
How?
How are you seeing slope as the same as Pythagorean's Theorem?
"The slope is the hypotenuse".
True???....
Maybe.
But a hypotenuse is a line segment, slope accounts for an entire line.
Finally by the end of the class, a student had seen a connection,
Although it was still in terms of Pythgorean's Theorem,
I knew he was moving in the right direction.
The legs of the right triangle (or the step) is needed to find the slope.
I left it at that for the time being.
Didn't know how this was going to go.
Needed more think time.
Moving forward is a good thing. If you don't move, you become stagnant. If you become stagnant, you smell. (I'm going with a creek bed analogy here...stay with me). "It Is What It Is" helps us to keep our sanity as we try new things, but at the same time we should never settle for "what it is". We should constantly reflect and learn to move our teaching and our student's learning to higher levels so the classroom doesn't turn stale.
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