It's always hard for me to transition from beginning of the year fun stuff and procedures and routines into the first skill in unit 1. Even though I already have stuff I can use, I always feel like I need to change something up or start off with a bang.
One of my goals for the beginning of the year was to use concept attainment as much as possible. I decided to make a year long powerpoint for each course so I could share them at the end of the year.
And then I forgot that that was one of my goals.
I thought of it last minute and hastily threw together two slides to introduce function operations in Algebra II.
Basically I displayed this slide and said I have these two functions on the left and the end result is the function on the right. What happened?
I just made these up and didn't even realize that I got the same answer for the last two examples.
I think I should have made them all positive to make the patterns easier to see. When I first showed this to the class, the bottom answer said 2x - 2 which definitely threw them off.
Should I have done 4 different examples on one slide for each operation? Or four different slides for each operation? I felt like doing addition and subtraction was enough to lead into the fact that we can combine functions in different ways.
They thought both slides were just combining like terms or that they were being set equal to each other and then doing opposite operations.
We got through it but it was definitely not a smashing success. Then I basically went straight into lecturing and then they just worked a bunch of examples.
Not exactly what I was going for.
I learned concept attainment as a column of examples and a column of nonexamples and they look for patterns. I couldn't think of a good way to do that for function operations so that's why I explained it and have no titles at the top.
What could I have done to make this better?
How do you introduce function operations?
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