Tulips from Venus

venus tulips
https://xkcd.com/1519/

I am trying my hardest to stay with the program and I don’t actually intend to start making stuff up. But maybe, just maybe, I am going to go off the common lesson plan and teach exponents. I will also teach converting percentages to decimals to fractions. I hope to review one and two-step equations. When teaching the mathematical order of operations becomes an act of rebellion involving stealth instruction, though, I believe it really has become time to retire.

Eduhonesty: It’s not that people will stop me from teaching these things. A recent post refers to an evaluator’s take on my reducing fractions. I did not get dinged for my content, except implicitly for my lack of rigor. My problem is that I am also supposed to teach everything else in our compendious lesson plan. Only there’s not close to enough time to finish all that material, let alone do remedial work on top of the new material. I spent Saturday morning tutoring a boy on converting fractions to decimals and percentages, and we then moved on to two-step equations. We have been covering this in class. A good one and one-half hours later, though, and this boy remained loose on various details.

Some students learn in one repetition, some in three, some in eleven and some in thirty-three — or whatever the number might be. All kids are different. Any kid who can’t convert fractions to decimals and percentages at thirteen years of age can be counted on to need multiple repetitions, maybe many such repetitions.

I intend to teach the content above. If I have to jettison the lesson plan to find the time, that plan’s about to go straight into the airlock.