Grade 10 Math MCAS Review – A Prezi! April 27, 2013

You can get to the Grade 10 Math MCAS review Prezi here or by clicking the above screenshot.

-

It’s about that time again. No wait, it is that time again: Grade 10 Math MCAS. Forget about grades 11 and 12 as these grades are meaningless. The new Grade 12 is Grade 10. The new SAT is MCAS.

-

I write this with both a migraine and with my tongue in cheek. As a Special Education 10th grade Geometry teacher, I have very mixed feelings about this dreaded test. As a teacher who never had to take MCAS, I think that my students will come out perfectly fine without proving their 10th grade knowledge on some expensive test. I did. All [most] of my friends did. As a person who has taken a boat load of tests and who has become very aware of the unique sense of accomplishment that comes from passing the seemingly-impossible, I want to give my students every tool to show this test who is boss. There is no better feeling than whipping a test’s ass. I want my students to experience this feeling.

-

I learned an important lesson from an unlikely source at UMass: Kids in Mr. Chandler’s inorganic Chemistry class who had internet and could access Chandler’s old exams would do better than me. Why? Because his tests were partially-recycled. Above is a screenshot of a Prezi I made from 2012′s Grade 10 Math MCAS multiple choice questions.  Every kid gets 4 colored index cards with either “A”, “B”, “C”, “D” written on it. My “A” is red, but that part doesn’t matter so much. As we click through the slides, kids do their work on scrap paper then hold up the colored card that corresponds to their answer choice. This does two things: makes the kids feel that they’re playing a game and lets me see the class-wide weaknesses to focus on during explicit cramming. In addition to practicing the concepts exemplified in these multiple-choice questions, we’ve been doing the open response questions in class, being sure to review Statistics. MCAS creators love mean, median, mode, range, box-and-whiskers, stem-and-leaf, line plots. “When will I ever use a box-and-whiskers thing in real Life?” Never kids, just possibly on May 13th.

-

The best of luck to your students!

Difference of Squares (and binomial multiplication) With Pictures! January 12, 2013

We’re starting to see a difference of squares emerge…

Multiplying binomials.  FOILing.  Whatever you call it, and however bad we want it, there’s no real shortcut.  So why does (x + 5)²   ≠   x² + 25?  Let’s take a look:

-

Above is a representation of (x + 5)².  We can see along the top edge “x 1 1 1 1 1”, representing x + 5.  Whenever we square something, we multiply it by itself, so we see the same x + 5 along the left edge.  Since (x + 5)² = (x + 5) times (x + 5), let’s multiply to find the area of each colored region:

-

If we put all the pieces together, we get:

(x + 5)²   =   x² + 10x + 25

-

When we say that (x + 5)²   =  x² + 25, we miss out on all of those little blue 1x’s.  Multiplying two expressions together will always give us an area.  For example, a rectangle with length 5 and width 3 will have an area of 15.  Multiplying two binomials together, like we did above with (x + 5)(x + 5), usually yields a trinomial.  I say usually because there is one case when this is not true…

-

Let’s multiply (x + 5)(x – 5).  A great way to do this is with the Box Method:

-

Above, we see (x + 5) along the top of the Box and (x – 5) along the left.  If we multiply these two binomials together:

-

and then combine like terms, we get:  x² – 25.  Since both x² and 25 are square numbers, and they are being subtracted, we literally have a difference of squares.  There is no middle term because the +5x and the -5x cancel each other out.

-

To see how this problem translates into areas like our first example (x + 5)(x + 5), let’s start at the end and work our way back to the beginning….

-

Here we see two squares: one is green and one is white.  The white one is being subtracted (difference) from the green one.

Since “difference” means subtract in the language of Math, we quite literally have a difference of squares.  Above, we see 5² being subtracted from x².  To make things more interesting, let’s overlap the regions:

Because the green shape is pretty lopsided now, let’s draw some dotted lines to think about the green shape in terms of three nice, regular shapes:

And now let’s multiply to find the areas of each of the nice, regular shapes:

If we simplify each of the white expressions, we get:

5(x – 5)  =  5x – 25

5(x – 5)  =  5x – 25

(x – 5)(x – 5)  =  x² – 5x – 5x + 25   =   x² – 10x + 25

-

And then if we add them up:

(5x – 25)   +   (5x – 25)   +   (x² – 10x + 25)   =   x² – 25   It’s a difference of squares!

-

But can we express this x² – 25 as the product of two expressions, like we did with x² + 10x + 25  –>(x + 5)(x + 5)?  When we ask this question, we’re asking if we can go backwards; we’re asking if we can factor the expression to find out where it originally came from.

-

In the first example, x² + 10x + 25 factored to (x + 5)(x + 5).  Can we do the same with x² – 25?

-

Let’s go back to our overlapped picture to find out:

Maybe if we break up the green region:

And begin to rearrange the pieces, first sliding one rectangle up:

and then chopping that bottom part, rotating it 90° and putting it on the left:

We made a rectangle!  And what are its dimensions?

(x + 5)(x – 5)!

-

So x² – 25 came from (x + 5)(x – 5).  In this situation we didn’t get a middle x term when we multiplied the two binomial expressions together.  Instead, we got a difference of squares, which makes sense since that’s where we started!

-

Here’s a video that shows why (a + b)² ≠ a² + b:

-

-

-

Contact this blog’s author at shanadonohue@gmail.com.

What do you know about Triangles? (Prezi multiple choice) October 31, 2012

-

Clicking the picture below will bring you to the What do you know about Triangles? Prezi.  This Prezi consists of just 11 questions and filled up about 60 minutes of time.  I had my kids put up cards (red:A, orange:B, yellow:C, green:D) to answer each of the multiple choice questions.  I also had them record their answers on an easy answer sheet.  They had a blast and it became a more valuable “fun” activity than I had anticipated.

-

Click the flags to go to the Prezi.

The Pythagorean Theorem Animation

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I had never realized that the Pythagorean Theorem’s a^2 + b^2 = c^2 actually meant “the area of the square made by the side length C is the same as the sum of the areas made by the squares made of the other two sides’ side lengths” until I was in graduate school.  When I saw it for the first time in Professor Oliver Knill’s class, aside from his animation being totally bad ass, I was totally blown away by the realization of what I had never realized.

-

So here are some animations, starting with Oliver’s, that show how awesomely dynamic Pythagoras’s theorem is:

-

-

-

-

 

The Distributive Property (“FOIL”) Through Pictures December 15, 2011

The transitive property was always my favorite as it could be applied to so many situations.  I like chocolate, there is chocolate in those cookies, so I like those cookies.  Totally useful.

- 

But a close runner up to this cookie property has got to be the Distributive Property.  With strange rules of “first, outer, inner, last”, I liked its mystery.  I could multiply two things together with no mention of a multiplication sign and somehow it meant something.  Something big.  I was doing real Algebra now.

It wasn’t until I became a teacher that I really had to think about what was being done.  My students would make mistakes when “F.O.I.L.ing” (I do not like this acronym.  What if one piece is a trinomial?) and I would attempt to explain what was happening.  It’s difficult to explain something that has been taken for granted for 15 years.  But as I made my way through my graduate program where being able to explain math was seen as the most important, I began to rethink this important property.

-

The Example:

I always like to start with a concrete example.  Let’s take the problem “14 x 7”

 -

“14 x 7” is no easy problem for most of us as neither of these numbers is easy to work with.  To begin, let’s look at “14 x 7” as a geometric area in a picture:We can easily count up the small rectangles to find how many there are, though that would take time and leaves a lot of room for error.  Or, we could break the picture down into smaller pictures to make it easier to work with:

Here, we’ve broken “14 x 7” down into (10 + 4) x (5 + 2), or simply (10+4)(5+2).  Is this form familiar?

 -

Now we can see that “14 x 7” = (10 + 4)(5 + 2).  And now we can simply use multiplication to find the areas of the different colored pieces and add them up:

-

10 x 5 = 50

10 x 2 = 20

4 x 5 = 20

4 x 2 = 8

 -

50 + 20 + 20 + 8 = 98!  And in fact, 14 x 7 = 98.

 -

The Generalization:

Now let’s make a generalization that we can apply to other similar problems:

Here, we’ve replaced all of the numbers with letters and we can rewrite the problem as:

- 

(a + b)(c + d)

-

Using the method we used before, we multiply each colored piece to find its area and then add up all the areas to find the total:

 

(a)  x (c) = ac

(a)  x (d) = ad

(b)  x (c) = bc

(b)   x (d) = bd

 -

The area is: ac + ad + bc + bd  !

 -

Not the prettiest of answers, but done correctly.  Using this model, can you multiply (3x + 4)(5x + 2)?

We’ll use the same picture because “x” can stand for any number at all.

-

We have:

 -

(3x + 4)(5x + 2)

(3x)(5x) = 15x²

(3x)(2) = 6x

(4)(5x) = 20x

(4)(2) = 8

 -

Putting the pieces together, we have the trinomial:

 -

15x² + 26x + 8 !

- 

The Error:

The biggest error I have seen with the Distribute Property is forgetting to multiply a piece or two.  Students sometimes will answer:

 -

(3x + 4)(5x + 2) = 15x² + 20x + 8

Can you see what they forgot?  Can you imagine what other mistakes could be made?

 -

If you always remember the area of each piece, you will be The Best Distributor and Master of the Distributive Property!

 

 

 

 

 

Surface Area to Volume Animation September 26, 2011

-

The following [totally awesome] video comes courtesy of Dr. Brian Biswell.

-

The Language of Math Poster August 19, 2011

Below is a poster I hang in my classroom every fall.  Each year it grows longer as more and more terms come up for the different operations of math.  When I was a kid, no one told me to look out for these words, or that math was even a language at all, which made word problems pretty tough.  By clicking on the poster you will be sent to the original Excel file on Google Docs.  Do you have any words to add?

-

Link to Google doc:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Asra4GjkRBNidGhoZlZYcjk4dmhISDlSNHJDbjBPTXc&hl=en_US