Teaching a Lesson. Straight up...

Today, from start to finish, I taught one of the Algebra I classes from going over homework, to teaching the lesson, to handing out homework and helping kids get started on it. Although we are continuing to factor polynomials, today they learned how to do that when the leading coefficient is NOT 1.

Mr. Griffin prepared the answers to the homework from the night before. I just had to project it. The students would self-correct and raise their hands for any questions. I would then answer those questions by taking the problem and thinking out loud to the class of what I would do to approach it. Most of these kids see problems that they can't do as daunting and sometimes give up trying. But when I tell them my step-by-step approach, and what exactly is going on in my head, they're like: "oh that was so easy!"

The lesson was probably my most daunting task. I really wanted to make sure that the kids understood what I was talking about, so that they would do the homework and see each problem's approach. Same rules apply for factoring these kinds of polynomials. Make the trinomial look as simple as possible and then factor. I think every kid understood why I was doing what I was doing, but when time came to do homework, he or she was lazy to guess and check or just wanted to get through the problem faster and was not as fast at thinking as I was.

The one part of the lesson that drew confusion was the difference of squares factoring pattern. They had already learned how to expand a difference of squares pattern, I just told them, that reversing it would be factoring it. A key to notice was that the components of the factored form were square roots of the original, which they had to see in order to do any problem after that. Even though I may have explained it using complicated symbols, it was probably the most general and the best way to get them to see the big picture. Substitution method also helped.

Today was also the day Mr. Kahn watched me teach the class. A little daunting at first, but I didn't notice he was watching me later on in the class. :)