I don't know if it's a coincidence, or if there are other forces at play. But today, during class, I noticed that all of my 11th-graders are solving all kinds of log and exponential equations fluidly without accepting any help from me. They were even completely comfortable finding inverse equations given a function like f(x) = a*b^(cx - d) all by themselves.
Amazeballs. This is the first time that I think my students as a whole really understand logs!
I still believe that the credit goes to this. Sometimes, it just pays to slooow theeem dooowwwn.
Hi. When I get to a topic like logarithms, which seems quite different to anything we've done before, I invite my students to do some research on kinds of real problems that use logarithms. One application is the scale for measuring earthquakes. Students are surprised that one earthquake can be a 6.6 and another can be a 9.6, and the second is 1000 times more powerful than the first.
ReplyDeleteJerry Tuttle
onlinecollegemathteacher.blogspot.com
I really appreciated reading your follow up. Its nice to get feedback that your insights struck a chord with your students.
ReplyDeleteDo you think in what you observed that it was focusing in on the definition of the concept over the nomenclature that made the difference. I always thought that the usage of many technical terms often eludes students where as inverse operation is perfectly descriptive and easy to grasp