15 more wake ups!

Have you started your end-of-the-year countdown yet?  I always get confused if it says "x more days"... does that include today? So I used the number of days left that I have to drag myself out of bed at 5:30 am wishing that I'd gone to bed earlier.

In my precalc class we're learning a little about limits. It's actually a nice way to end the year; it's something that these kids will see next year (but have some familiarity with) and what we're doing with limits isn't super complicated. We've spent a lot of time looking at graphs, creating tables, and talking about why a limit may not exist. Tomorrow's quiz is my all-time favorite because it has the cool scratch-off question (ala the fabulous Sam Shah).

There are kids missing all kinds of days because of AP Testing and being counselors for the district's 5th graders (who are at a local camp for a few days) and I got tired of worrying about who would be here when.  So I gave my precalc kids a calendar of what's coming up in May. To that I stapled any paper that I would have given them, and also attached a list of all of the book work that I would be assigning.  Not here? You know the schedule!  Of course my goofy sophomores come in and ask every day what we're doing.

And then they ask if we can have a free day. No way! It'll mess up my calendar!

In Math 3 I'm staying consistent with what I've done all year:  underestimate how long it will take to get through something. I originally thought I could get through graphing sine and cosine in one week (including a quiz). Instead, we'll quiz on day 10. But I'm ok with that! I detoured this week and had the kids write equations based on graphs (thank you Desmos!) and also did a couple days of real-world data that was sinusoidal. So we'll quiz on Friday and start a few days of logarithms next week. Hopefully next year I'll be able to get through logs because I won't have to spend as much time on quadratics (ha ha ha).

My Math 1 class is a whole different situation. These guys took the AIR test a few weeks ago and since then we've been wandering through polynomials. It's a Math 2 topic but it definitely won't hurt them to get a preview! We spent several days adding, subtracting, and multiplying (using the box/area method) and this week started factoring by GCF. Things would be much simpler if all of the kids knew their multiplication facts, but a girl can only dream.  My plan is to start factoring quadratics (with a = 1) tomorrow... we played with product/sum puzzles a few days ago so we'll use that idea paired with un-doing the multiplication box.

I don't have to give them a final exam (because of the AIR) so I'm trying to find something fun to do that last week. Something project-y without being a major production.  We'll see!