This week was weird. For starters, it is a four-day week given Monday is the day we observe Labor Day. Wednesday I had a funeral to attend and therefore had to produce busy work for my students, Thursday is the start of Rosh Hashanah and had kids absent, and Friday, Muslims celebrate Eid. In other words, there was not much in the way of normalcy this week.
Tuesday 09/07/2010:
Went through the Sailor And The Coconut problem from Friday's worksheet. having students explain at the Promethean board what they knew and why they knew it. The discussion lasted about 35 minutes which then left 15 minutes to (finally) cover the syllabus.
Wednesday 09/08/2010
I was gone this day for a funeral and therefore had to come up with some busy work for the students to do while the sub was here. I found my resources in the Algebra with Pizazz book and gave the students pages A-8 and A-9 to work on in my absence. Both sheets have students practice order of operations and evaluating expressions for given values of the variables. A number of them thought the worksheet was beneath them, but the sub reported that a number of them struggled to find the answers.
Thursday 09/09/2010:
I thought to look at http://www.mathalicious.com/ as a source of inspiration. Since we had recently studied The Order of Operations, I found a unit called "Calories In, Calories Out". I noticed the unit has students use their knowledge of order of operations, unit conversions, evaluating expressions and analysis of functions while discussing the Basal Metabolic Rate, (BMR), to determine the amount of calories needed in a day to maintain ones weight. It looked as if it would take 4 days to go through the activity but the mathematics in the unit seems rich in analysis, computation and disguises the math within an interesting problem. The central problem is this: There are two formulas which are used to determine one's BMR. The students find the two formulas can give different results and are asked to determine for which persons would one formula be better suited than another?
Along the way, I was able to digress and discuss the interconnectedness of the units of length, volume, mass and temperature within the metric system. We only got through the first page of the unit. Clearly, I have to speed things up. I feel we should have been able to get through more material than this during the first day.
Friday, 09/10/2010
We continued with the Calories In, Calories Out unit. On page two the students have to crunch some numbers, analyzing which inputs, (Gender, Weight, Height or Age) have the greatest affect on the BMR. Students also must convert pounds to kilograms and inches to centimeters, determine if there is a difference between the two BMR formulas, determine which formula seems to make the most sense for various types of people. Students are also given the task of error analysis as there are asked to find the error and determine why the computation is wrong. (order of operations).
The last part of this page has students convert the formulas, which are inconveniently written in Kg and Cm, into equivalent formulas using pounds and inches. All-in-all there is a lot of good math buried in this unit.
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