Difficult Concepts

I have students still struggle with locating points the coordinate plane.

I agree
Many students leave the classroom and did not make the connection.

After teaching for 8 years, one would think I may have different habits or concepts students have difficulty with, but I continue to see students struggle with the same concepts/habits. First, students have a difficult time reading and/or comprehending word problems which leads to them not being able to solve them. I have come across various strategies to help my students breakdown the word problem to make it easier, but there are still so many who struggle.

Second, my students have a difficult time seeing the connection between the various ways to present a function. When I teach students how to write an equation, graph the same equation on a coordinate plane and create a table for the same equation all from a written scenario, they have a hard time connecting that all the different representations represent the same function. In recent years, I have given students four squares representing either an equation, graph, table or written scenario and they have to come up with the missing three pieces.

Third, I still have students who find it difficult to get motivated enough to engage in any assignment given in class. Taking this course, I am hoping to learn how to relate the real world to math through CS and motivate more of my students.

My students struggle to: 1. Take good notes 2. Solve Word Problems and 3. Check their answers for reasonableness. I started using their notes as their exit ticket…“your notes look like mine”. This improved their note taking. We now solve word problems in groups. Students read and decide what information from the statement is needed to solve the problem. They then are responsible as a group to solve the problem 2 ways. They must also show how they checked their work for reasonableness. Each group present their different problems and the other groups are allowed to ask questions about what they don’t understand or explain a third way to solve the problem if any. We summarize with key ideas and key words.

My students struggle with confidence when doing word problems, problem solving, and using notes to come up with a way to complete a problem. they won’t take their time to complete a problem and if it is not multiple choice they have a hard time even getting started with the problem. I work on building confidence with them so they will give problem solving a chance and try to work on the problems.