I gave myself the month of June off after a busy year. On July 2 I sat down and started a project that I was stewing about all year long. I am happy about the problem sets I wrote for Geometry, I think that they are a nice set of interesting problems. Many of them have been borrowed from sources all over the internet and I think that my students who took them seriously are more persistent in their problem – solving than they were when the year began. However, I also learned a couple of important things along the way. Not all of my students gained in persistence through these problem sets. In part, I think that the students found them a bit intimidating at times. I also think that they skewed a little long on time needed for thoughtful reflection. I have two solution ideas for the upcoming year. We purchased a license to Kuta’s Infinite Geometry (and their other course options) and I did not use this as often as I should have last year. I do not think that these are terribly thoughtful exercises, but I do know that they are flexible (for me) and supportive (for my students) and I need to use them more often. Since all of our classes in our new schedule are at least 50 minutes, I will be able to carve out comfortable space for in-class practice on basic skills as we are developing them. I also made a commitment to reviewing my problem sets and working on two improvements. I wanted to clean up the language and make sure that problems are a bit clearer in what I want my students to focus on. I got engaged in a great twitter conversation about how important it might be to have students answer y-intercept questions as ordered pairs rather than as a number and how important it is to talk about the graph of a line as an object that is distinct from the equation of a line. I tried to make sure I talked about points on the graph of the line whose equation is 2x + 3y = 12 instead of asking for a point on the line 2x + 3y = 12. Just one example of how I tried to clean up the language I was using. More importantly, I trimmed many of the problem sets by eliminating some questions. I have posted all of my HW problem sets on my dropbox and I am happy to share them with anyone who wants to borrow (or just outright steal!) from them. You can find those problem sets here.
I would love to hear any advice/questions/concerns about these HW assignments. Please reach out by commenting here or through twitter where I am @mrdardy