We started the new semester with Chapter 9 in our textbook, which covers the basic right triangle trigonometry. In my 9 years here at CT, this chapter has always produced great results, and student routinely perform in the high 70s - low 80s as class averages. This years group, not so much. Class averages were 58-61. So I have to wonder, what did I not do this time compared to the others?
I love trig ratios, I think great discussions can happen from working the multitude of problems out there. I even tried to have kids design their own application problem that we could solve using them. It appeared as we went through review and worked on things that they got it. Test scores did not jive with my feeling.
Now, we did have a big discussion upon returning those exams, and to give my students credit, they owned up to not working on homework outside my classroom as hard as they have done in the past. Needless to say, my warm ups are centered on sine, cosine and tangent!
We they proceeded into Chapter 11, our unit on circles, chords, secant and tangent lines. There are a lot of little formulas and equations to recall that set up the algebra behind these problems. However, the algebra requires multiplying or dividing by 2, and of course, my students have them backwards!
I tried more quizzes this time, and went over the graded homework immediately following collecting it. These as I returned them next class, we went over those again to see mistakes. I felt really confident about this exam, students did more work on homework, and test scores were higher, 66-69% overall class averages. May be skewed a little since about 6 students still need to finish it.
New groups again, new material, I am trying to focus on more student sharing out as that has been the one major downfall to SMP for me so far.
