Talking with AP teachers in other departments (mainly science) at my school and some of their struggles over the last 4 weeks, I realized I was doing a disservice to my kids if I never made them struggle through a word problem as a group. They told me how bad their first tests were because the kids can't pick out what the question is asking. I need to force them to read and comprehend what a problem is asking which is a crucial skill in testing situations, and so often I just answer their questions instead of letting them work through it.
We've been discussing piecewise functions in class, and they have a lot of application. I found a decent word problem
here and had the kids work through it today. We used
Desmos to graph the situation because graphing things like this by hand a) takes a long time, b) never looks as pretty and c) loses some value. The discussions I heard were fantastic and letting the kids play with Desmos has been fun.
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