Thursday, February 6, 2014

Prime numbers and other things

One of my seniors had a breakthrough today.  We were doing a compare and contrast between primes and composite numbers. He said a prime cannot be divided any smaller but it can be divided into other numbers which are composites.  I felt like my students are really starting to develop the vocabulary to discuss mathematics.  Hurray.
I had several classes try some practice problems using Exit Ticket.  I discovered something that I hadn't realized.  When I put input answers I need to list the multiple possibilities or it will mark something as wrong.  For instance, one answer was x < 2 which is how I put it in.  Several of my students put in x<2 without the spaces and the program did not recognize it as correct.  On the other hand, I like the way it shows the different answers and tells me which student put in which answer.  It gives the results in a variety of forms so that I can use it.  None of my students in period 6 got any of the inequalities right so we'll go over the problems tomorrow.
Since many of my students are classified ELL, I think they were scared of making mistakes.  I tried to get them to understand that I was not grading based on the percent results but on having done the practice.  I will give them the practice again early next week after going over the problems to see if they improve at all.

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