Connections to Prior Learning and Real Life ExperiencesAn Artifact for Standard #2, by Jacob Choi

Unit 6, Day 17: Greatest Monomial FactorsThis lesson comes right after we review Greatest Common Factors, or GCF’s. In

fact, the greatest monomial factor is a GCF in the first place, so the idea is still unchanged, but given a real world problem, it can throw some kids off. Since they have similar problems on homework and the formative tests, I came up with this problem as a fun ending to class. Prior to this slide, all the other ones were left more plain and undecorated to allow the kids to focus on the material instead.

For a couple of observation points, note that this is a closed-ended question. The reasons why I had for them to Activote this in instead of writing an exit pass included:

The problem is phrased with some difficulty—most students will need to reread it a few times to translate the problem into something they can visualize.

It includes a hint of geometry too—students should realize that a runway is a rectangular shape and that the area equals the length multiplied by the width.

The students had already been Activoting in other answers that day, so this result only added to the harvest of Activote data we had collected.

An exit pass would not be as unified a response as the Activoting

Unit 5, Day 24: The Olympic Experience!

Above: To connect the student to real life experiences, I firstly had them revisit the definitions of mean, median, and mode. Since we had also covered the topic of matrices recently, I thought it would be good to refresh their memories of interpreting a matrix. In this example, students were required to find the average of the first quantitative column—hence the gold, bolded words in the question.

Below: Swimming has the same treatment too, but this time we add on one more factor: speed! In this second question, students must discern from the problem that the athletes all cover the 50m by traveling at amazing speeds. Once the speed has been found, we take a moment of inspiration to wonder if any of us could swim 50m in less than thirty, forty, or fifty seconds. Showing the students the actual distance in the room for Ian Thorpe or Michael Phelps’ speed usually draws staggering signs of surprise!

For the Box and Whisker Plot lesson, it was a very boring topic since most of the students understood its basics on the previous day (Day 7 of this unit). To put a real world perspective on it, I consulted the Algebra I textbook, copied the data, and gave the problem new names for the places: District of Virginia, and Fairyland, which don’t sound too far off from where we all reside.

Ultimately, this lesson was highly applicable to the weather, especially since we ended up comparing two boxplots and spent a few minutes discussing what the weather could be like in either place. I shared from my own real life experience that coming from Melbourne, Australia, we get all the four seasons in one day, so that range and interquartile range show a great variation of temperatures. The discussion also inquired of the students whether we could use any two boxplots to compare data, so long as they used the same measures.