“The best teachers are the ones who care about me.”
Math Mondays: Graphing exponential functions worksheet alternative
Wouldn’t it be great if every topic could be highly engaging? Or if you had time and creativity to “play” with topics? It would. In reality, time is scarce. Furthermore, and I hope it's not just me, some topics are just not that inspiring.
Math Mondays: Analytic Geometry in PreCalculus
Analytic geometry (a.k.a. conic sections) used to be my least favorite unit to teach. The formulas are dry and easy to mix up, it's hard to find real world applications where my students might need these equations (or how to find the directrix, vertex, etc.), and they almost seem like a side topic from all the other work we have been doing in PreCalculus. When I find a topic dull, I take it as a personal challenge to make it interesting to my students. Over the past two years, I have fallen in love with conic sections. Here's what I do to keep it interesting:
Math Mondays: Raising the Roof with Trigonometry
Trigonometry is covered over three units in my Precalculus class. In the first unit we work on graphing trigonometry and trigonometric functions. The second trigonometry unit includes such topics of angles of depression and elevation, identities and the law of sines and cosines. The final trigonometry unit works with vectors.