The Math Education Blog
Eleven years ago, I wrote a post titled What is All the Fuss About Lines? In it, I discussed the difficulties that students encounter when asked to determine the equation of a line. Faced with formulas for calculating slope, the point-slope form of a line, and the slope-intercept form, students lose their common sense as...
In my previous post, I presented a non-algebraic approach to exploring the slope of the sine function. That method involved placing a secant line on the graph and then dragging the two points that defined the line as close together as possible to approximate the tangent line. By dragging, you were able to bring the...
When I reached calculus in my senior year of high school, it was clear that it sat atop a mountain that I had been ascending ever since my Algebra 1 class. Without the tools and procedures I had amassed from algebra and precalculus, I could never have performed the symbolic manipulations necessary to differentiate and...