Reply To: Lesson 8-1: Revealing Proportional Relationships Through a Composed Unit – Discussion

[Brent Sturtevant]

The one thing is that I need to edit my lessons to include such problems to combine them with the DESMOS lesson. I state this because DESMOS is good but kids are not as interested and are not exploring as much as if given a more open problem such as these. Don’t get me wrong DESMOS is great but kids are growing weary of having to be on it and when I do different activity outside of that platform – they are much more engaged. Basically I need to find that equal balance.

As for another thing I learned about proportional thinking came in play today during class. Students were ask to find the slope of stack of books on a desk. Using two points on the graph we were able to find the slope to be 7/5. Then a student asked wouldn’t that mean for every 5 books the rise increases by 7 inches. Of course that would be the case if the situation was a proportional one. This then allowed for why we need to find the unit rate and what it means. It was at this point were the difference made more of a connection with me especially due to this class. My discussion today would not have gone the way it did if I had not taken this class.