3/15/07
We've decided to put it into the hands of our lovely school and reorder parts of Moving Straight Ahead. ISATs are approaching, and we need to make sure that we cover as much of the relevant material as humanly possible. I'm feeling a lot of pressure to cover all of the material.
We've decided to do all of Investigation 1 and Investigation 3 before ISATs, and then move on to the rest of the book after the testing. I believe it's important to introduce our students to solving equations before they take the ISATs. However, I'm having a really hard time with rushing through Investigation 1. This book is the most difficult book for a majority of our students. The information covered in Investigation 1 is really what the rest of the book hinges on. Students need to understand y-intercept, steepness of a line, how to graph, and how graphs, equations, and tables relate to each other. I think that it will be useless for students to rush through this investigation and just briefly touch on the information. Yes, they will have been exposed to it all, but they will not have a full understanding of it.
If we spend the time now to make sure that students understand the material, or at least most of it, then we will save time later, when we do the post-ISATs review. I feel confident that my students could reason with themselves to find an answer for a variable within an equation, but I'm not sure that they could answer any question about steepness/slope and y-intercept. Therefore, I've decided that I'll still try to go through the investigation relatively quickly, but if (or when) I find a good "teaching moment," I'm going to take advantage of it. I won't pass those moments up just to make sure that I stay on schedule, if my students aren't retaining anything.
My first math class is doing awesome work with this book. All of the students are volunteering and giving the correct answers/explanations the majority of the time. It's AMAZING! We spent an entire class (60 minutes) summarizing Problem 1.2, because the kids were so into it. (Could this be the reason that I'm behind schedule?) My students were making great connections between the rate of change, unit rate, and scale factor. I was SO excited that my students were making this connection, basically from day one of this book. In fact, the student who first raised the idea of having a constant rate of change was Michael, a special education student. I was so proud of my class that day. It was one of those days when you feel that what you've been working towards all year is finally being realized. Students are now helping each other, are able to explain themselves (at least to a certain extent), and are making connections with the previous math book. Let's be honest — what else can we ask for?
