Kenny Felder - Advanced Algebra II: Teachers Guide

By: Kenny Felder

• Right now, you read this whole introductiondespite the title, it really does contain useful information about these materials.

• Before beginning each new unit, you read my conceptual explanation of that unit, so you know what Im trying to achieve.

• Each day before class, you carefully read over my lesson plan (in this document), and the in-class assignment and homework (in the student book), so you know what Im doing and why Im doing it.

At the risk of repeating myself, let me emphasizeIm not trying to insult you by suggesting that my way is the only right way to run a class. But it will help you understand these materials if you understand how I use them.

I begin each day by taking questions on last nights homework. I answer any and all questions. This may take five minutes, or it may take the entire class period: I dont stop until everyone is perfectly comfortable with last nights homework.

Why is that so important? Because, very often, the homework introduces new concepts that the students have never seen in class before . For instance, very early in the first unit, I introduce the idea of permuting graphs: for instance, if you add 3 to any function, the graph moves up by three units. This concept never comes up in class, in any formit is developed entirely on a homework. So its vitally important to debrief them the next day and make sure that they got, not only the right answers, but the point.

After the homework is covered, I begin a new topic. This is almost (almost!) never done in a long lecture. Sometimes it happens in a class discussion; sometimes it happens in a TAPPS exercise (more on that when we do our first one); most often, it happens in an in-class assignment . These assignments should almost always be done in pairs or groups of three, very rarely individually. They generally require pretty high-level thinking. On a good day I can hear three or four heated arguments going on in different groups. Most of my class time is spent moving between different groups and helping them when they are stuck. In general, there is some particular point I want them to get from the exercise, and they will need that point to do the homeworkso a lot of my job in class is to make sure that, before they leave, they got the point.