Student Voices Episode 2: Tim_MATH_y

In this episode Timothy came back to school on Friday afternoon to talk about his week attending the miniUniversity program at the University of Winnipeg. He talks about the differences he finds between teaching and learning at high school and university and describes learning in the university classroom using a thought provoking metaphor, listen for it. Also, we have a cameo appearance by two very special people at the very end.

Please feel free to leave Tim_MATH_y your comments here on this post.

(Download File 7.2Mb, 15 min. 3 sec.)

Photo Credit: Shadow singer by flickr user EugeniusD80

Today's Slides: April 25

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Today's Slides: April 23

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The scribe... kinda

Hello there. Van scribing for Monday's class. Not much happened. Substitute teacher gave us a worksheet to hand in for Wednesday's class, and it's worth 100 marks each, 5 questions total.

That's about it.

Next scribe... Dino...

Student Voices Podcast Episode 1: Jessie

I was talking to Jessie, one of my Applied Math students, earlier this week while helping her review over the lunch hour. I found her comments so compelling I asked her (and later her parents) if I could record and publish her comments so other students could hear what she had to say. I've long thought students need to hear from other students how they best learn to help them all learn.

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of podcasts called Student Voices. I'm hoping to have one of these short conversations with a student published each week. If you'd like to volunteer to be featured in one of these just let me know.

In this episode Jessie shares how she uses her class blog to learn and describes her personal "tipping point" from being confused to understanding Statistics very well. She also discusses the value of learning conversations and how sometimes being a "teacher" and sometimes a student helps her learn.

Please feel free to leave Jessie your comments here or on this post on her class blog.

(Download File 5.6Mb, 11 min. 40 sec.)

Photo Credit: Kids of conversation by flickr user Kris Hoet

The Return of the Lost Scribe... whoops

So now we are well into exam review and for good reason. (There are only 6 classes left until the exam).

On Thursday our class consisted of five accumulation problems from the AP exams of five different years.

We completed them in groups and then Mr. K. went over them in class. The questions were not extremely hard, but there were a few tricky parts. I believe after Mr. K. discussed them in full, we understood where we had made our mistakes.

The more important part of the exercise was to notice how the same type of problem changed over the different years. Looking at them, you can see that the graphs are the most noticeable things that change. They become less familiar in behaviour and less points are actually drawn and labeled. The graphs also begin to have a lot of corners which are discrepancies in the second derivative as the are undefined. It then asks if these points are points of inflection, which are usually calculated via the second derivative. That is probably the trickiest part of these questions, but with a little understanding of how the derivatives and their graphs relate to each other, it is easy to get around.
The questions also change fairly drastically, as they go from just understanding how to use the graph and the given functions, to looking past the given graph and fuctions and using it to find characteristics of the parent/derivative functions and their graphs. In the later examples, they begin to ask questions about behaviour of the functions over certain intervals and even ask to draw the graph of the parent function on the axes.
The final example (from 2007) is quite different from the others as there is no graph given, but a table of values is. The table includes two functions (ƒ and g) and their derivatives. It then asks questions about the function h(x) = ƒ(g(x)) - 6 and how it behaves over certain intervals. It also asks a new question that we have not seen yet.
It asks us to find the derivative of the inverse of a function ( g^-1 ). It is a rule that Mr. K. has not yet taught us, but it was explained to me as "the derivative of an inverse of a function is equal to the inverse of its derivative" basically, ∂/∂x(g^-1) = 1/g'. From there just apply it as you would any derivative and solve the question.

Finally, Mr. K. said that this last example is probably the closest example of how it will be presented on our exam, so it would be a good idea to go over this some time in the next two weeks to make sure you have this under your belt, it should be easy marks now.

That is all for my scribe post, remember to start studying "fiendishly" (if you haven't already) there are only 18 days left. O_O

The next scribe is Van I guess...

Enjoy the rest of your weekends!

Today's Slides: April 17

20 Days Until The Exam And Counting ...

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