Update on Pre-Calculus Course

So the meeting was super informative and helpful this weekend. It gave me a really good idea about what to cover. We met with a retired Chinese math teacher who works for the publishing arm of our company. He went over how the Chinese math curriculum was organized and designed. This helped show the areas in which are students were strong and others in which they were weak. We went through our current textbook and looked over what section was needed for AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC, AP Statistics, SAT II subject tests, and the Chinese graduation exams. So I will focus on the topics they will need for the AP tests. The Chinese math teachers prepare them for the SAT II subject test and I have a feeling my students don't take the Chinese graduation exam.

We are still discussing which chapter is important prep for some of those classes, but I have a basic idea about where to start.

I will still be flipping the classroom and got the resources from the other teacher who is currently doing that. This will make it so I don't have to use the 90 minutes I see the students each week on lecture. I will use this series of pre-calculus videos to support my teaching. He does not have videos for every chapter so that may guide me in what I teach and what I don't.

I will start with chapter 4 which is over trig. The Chinese math curriculum focuses a lot on trig, but does not focus on all six trig functions. They do not spend much time with cotangent, cosecant, and secant. The students easily understand and pick up those functions, but they need to be discussed. The Chinese math curriculum also does not spend any time on inverse trig functions. So starting with the trig chapter will help ease them into the class so that some of the stuff they are seeing they understand and some is new. This chapter comes with notes to take as the students are watching the videos. However does not come with worksheets to do in class. I will have to pull problems from the book or elsewhere.

I will then move onto chapter 3 which is over exponential functions and logarithms. The Chinese curriculum does not talk about these functions a lot or rather uses different notation than we do for these functions. So I will spend some time on that. This chapter does not come with any handouts. I will have to make my own following his format. I may make a very simple one for these videos just to check that they watched it. Then have them hand those in and grade them pretty easily.

Now I may pick and chose what I do in the beginning chapters. I know students are really strong in those beginning chapters. I don't think it will hurt to go over earlier stuff just because a lot of them know the math, but don't know it in English. I will make sure to put emphasis on the early stuff in lots of different ways as well. The students need to understand everything graphically, algebraically, and numerically. So I will make sure to include a lesson based on this video.

My colleagues say that the students are really weak in statistics. The Chinese math system does not do much with probability and statistics. The students are also not asked to explain, describe, analyze, or justify their answer in the Chinese math system. So statistics is about doing just that analyzing and describing data. So I will include a stats unit. I am afraid to do it, but it will help me get over my fear of teaching statistics. My colleague at the meeting was really trying to encourage me and give me advice about how to advance my career. So I will include a unit on Chapter 9 which is an overview of stats and probability. This unit has worksheets and notes which will help immensely since I don't know much about stats. I am thinking of having the students design or complete an experiment. I think I will work with the 10th grade science teacher to see if we can take that on together.

Now that content will probably only take me a semester and maybe just a little bit over. I doubt I can stretch that into a year. I will look at what other chapters are suggested, but the problem is I won't have pre-made videos to use. I think it would be weird to switch back into a normal class and I don't want to make the videos. I will look around to see if there are other videos I can use or at least good power points I can use. The text book came with a set of power points to use. They look like pretty good ones with examples and things. So I can make the videos my self using those power points. It will probably not be as good as the other videos since I won't have the nice set up that he does and I will probably be making them must faster. But then I won't have to spend my time in class going through the power points and just focus on the students understanding of the concepts.

If I make it so that I have 6 or 7 groups that have to present then I can stretch this small part out. I want to keep the group size small and want to make one person from each group present. So I think I will still have it so first period students work in groups to solve a problem and then work on how to present the solution. I will have as many groups present in the second period. I will have a minimum of four groups present in a period. Then have 3 or 4 groups present the following week. Then have some time to review or ask questions. Then have a quiz over the content that was just presented on. We may not get through as much content, but it will help their English abilites and presentation abilities so much more.

I think each week I will give them a handout to fill out while watching the video. We may not talk about the content in the video each week, but that gets them working ahead. It allows them two weeks to watch the video, rewatch the video, and ask questions about the video.

So the break down of the class will look like this:

Final: 20%
Tests/Midterms: 20% (Tests every month)
Quizzes: 15% (One every other week)
Presentations: 15% (Each student will present every two months graded on these rubrics)
In-class: 15% (presentation exit slips, class dojo, any other activities)
Homework: 15% (filling out notes worksheet on video every week)

If you want more resources/information going to this post about my pre-calculus course or this post about my calculus course.