It’s been a slow start to the new year. I suppose that is ok though; my students aren’t in regular classes until next week, so I’ve been doing all the stuff teachers do apart from actually teaching. There has been a lot of professional development (as if that isn’t what I am doing every waking hour of every day given the position I am currently in), there’s been a lot of observing other teachers at other schools, there has been some helping out with electives (the students are exploring algebra & geometry by building mobiles – it’s really quite amazing), and there has been a fair amount of job hunting / bureaucratic hoop jumping.
But my pride and joy for the last three weeks is the unit that I am writing. At the start of the new year I was told that I would be teaching a unit on an intro to calculus (limits and such) in March. This is a standard aspect of my graduate program and a necessary step in obtaining a teaching credential. What is non-standard is that I essentially have no support in this task (besides a few virtual filing cabinets). I read through a couple text books for some ideas, but didn’t want to introduce limits by giving the definition of a derivative, nor did I want to skip directly to integration as was the direction of the two text books I had as references.
So I wrote the curriculum myself and I have to say, I think this will be a lot of fun. In the seven days I’ve currently planned there are twenty documents made (including classwork, homework, warm-ups, exit slips, and every other miscellaneous slip of paper to hand out). We’re starting Zeno’s paradox as a motivation for limits and exploring the infinite with modern mathematical tools. We will get as close as we can to asymptotes and continue to approach the concept of a limit from both the left and the right until the students’ knowledge is a continuous stream.
This will be a fun quarter.
Oh! Are you going to share them here? I’d love to see what you have created.
I’ve been toying with the idea of abandoning (or at least greatly restricting what I do with) limits for my nonAP calculus class… because (a) they’re boring and (b) kinda unnecessary for the larger picture. I feel like we waste a good part of a quarter on it, but we don’t get much out of it. I’d love to find a way to make it more interesting, if I don’t throw ‘em out the window. (Or save them for the end of the course, as one blogger wisely recommended.)
Sam.
If I can get my act together and decide on a good way to easily share a large number of documents I will definitely post them.
Essentially, my plan is to introduce the concept of a limit not as an intermediary step to defining derivatives, but as a way to understand the infinitely large and the infinitely small. I’m hoping it will go well, but one can never know.