Coming from the middle school, it was clear where students were struggling. After all, it was basic, applied mathematics. Maybe they had a hard time with the conversion of decimals to fractions or vice versa. Maybe they had a tough time graphing linear functions. Certainly there were some who had trouble with the exponent rules (let's be honest... who didn't?). The problem is that we considered them proficient and moved them along for the high school to worry about (or so the high school teachers believed).
The problem is that this is clearly not true. Students failed. Maybe not many, but there were some who failed. Even worse, there were students who passed because they knew how to do enough extra credit assignments to move to the next grade. Others knew just enough to slide by the dreadful F. So, here we are, staring at the grades of my Geometry classes for Semester 1, and they're atrocious.
We just took a quiz based on parallel and perpendicular lines. This is not a Geometry standard, but its application is. We have spent 5 days reviewing and working on point-slope, slope-intercept, and the slope formula.
The problem is that this is clearly not true. Students failed. Maybe not many, but there were some who failed. Even worse, there were students who passed because they knew how to do enough extra credit assignments to move to the next grade. Others knew just enough to slide by the dreadful F. So, here we are, staring at the grades of my Geometry classes for Semester 1, and they're atrocious.
We just took a quiz based on parallel and perpendicular lines. This is not a Geometry standard, but its application is. We have spent 5 days reviewing and working on point-slope, slope-intercept, and the slope formula.
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