It’s hard to believe it’s almost over!

The morning was spent discussing the reading from Principles to Action on eliciting student thinking.  A sheet with 8 erroneous examples of student were distributed, the participants split into pairs and took turns being the student and teacher and practicing questioning techniques.  This lead into a discussion of funneling versus focusing question-style, and then the exercise was repeated with additional retrospection.

We then moved into a discussion of the homework from Tuesday night on the car-and-van problem and the average speed problem.  Then we began the Pool Membership problem, and sought out connections to the previous discussion of lines.  We found the cost per visit to correspond with the slope while the cost of membership corresponds to the y-intercept.

After lunch (and a digression on the Doomsday rule), we discussed the magic trick from the previous blog recap post and connected that to multi-step processes and inverse processes.  Then we moved into the Hart’s Furniture Problem (and Hart’s Furniture Revisited). Our previous discussions of processes and functions again came into play, as well as graphs of lines to illustrate when one deal was better than another.

Handouts:

• Pool Membership Problem
• Hart’s Furniture Problem and Hart’s Furniture Problem Revisited
• PMI Strategies for Reviewing Math Homework

Homework:

• Principles to Action, section “Professionalism” (p. 99-108)
• Get some ice cream.
• Get some sleep.