Home Nugget #1 of the 4th term
Due on Monday March 9, 2009
TWO PARTS
Part 1:
Students were extended the opportunity to make a second attempt at open-response questions 9 and 22 from the 2008 Math MCAS, given the paucity of quality lessons shown on Friday. The concept is to do all work on a separate sheet of paper and provide answers and explanations that are palatable to a fellow classmate, such that they can assess the work according to exemplars that will be shown in class. We ARE NOT intending to blindly solve loads of MCAS problems, rather are trying to diagnose where we should focus our attention in order to perform.
Part 2:
We must continue to invest in our daily class notes as the primary tool for reflecting on content that we grapple with daily. This past Friday we delved into Chapter 8 lesson 1, not by opening the textbook and passively accepting pre-packaged content, but rather reaffirming that we are on the path to exploring exponential and quadratic relationships and acknowledging that we are in need of an expanded skill set in order to do so.
Part of this skill set includes deconstructing much of what we did in Chapter 7, which was taking factored expressions and expanding them. We now seek to do essentially the opposite. The conversation on Friday included an exploration into what the criteria are for prime and composite number and what is meant by the prime factorization of a number. In some classes, we got so far as trying to figure out the prime factorization of a monomial. It cannot be overstated: your class notes should describe all the conversation, debate, observations and connections that were made in class. This forced reflection is an essential skill in the process of learning and we will continue to harp on this theme.
