# Blog Archives

## Honing My Skills Instruction

Skills instruction was something that I was not good at when I first started teaching. I found it boring compared to big ideas and didn’t really understand why kids didn’t get things from me doing problems on the board and then them doing practice problems with each other or individually or for homework. For me, it was like “What is there to understand that simple practice wont solve?” Well, I have grown a lot since then. This year, I have implemented a lot of new tools (many whiteboard based) that have really helped out with my skills instruction. I feel like I really had a great sequence this year when doing the skills part of integrating with my regular class – I wanted to share and reflect, especially so it’s written down somewhere for me to use in the future, because some of the ideas will be useful when I teach other topics.

### PREAMBLE:

Just so you know how I lead up to this seminal topic in Calculus… First, I spent a considerable time (about five 45 minute class periods) exploring everything to do with Riemann Sums, both in terms of pure area and what area means in applied situations. I think that feels like a lot of time, but we tackled the conceptual side of integration very throughly and used that to motivate the idea of an antiderivative/integral. Once we motivated the integral, we focused on learning how to find antiderivatives, which is the part I want to talk about.

### 1. Guess and Check With a Partner

With inspiration from a great worksheet from Sam, I wanted students to rely on their intuition at first to find andiderivatives, instead of relying on formulae. I’ve tried things like this previously, but it really helped this time to explicitly explain that this is what we were doing – that maybe eventually we can rely on a rule, but we are going to discover the math first. I paired them up with whiteboards and set them out with the list of functions from Sam’s worksheet. Their goal: find the antiderivative of all the functions. The method: each person had a marker. One person would write down a guess for an antiderivative, and the other person would simply take the derivative of this to see if it went back to the original function. They would keep doing this until they got something correct, then write that answer down on the sheet. Then, after one person has been the “guesser’ four or five times, they switch. Example:

For the kids that actually did what I asked (others just kind of started solving them on their own, which is okay I guess), it was a really nice exercise. They worked together really well, and were so excited to tell me the rule that they had made up for integrating power functions. I had them even doing simple substitution, per great suggestion from Sam. They got good at just getting themselves to try something, and getting in the habit of checking all of their answers. One kid at the end of class told me “My brain hurts from thinking so much.” Then, after the students were done, the next class we started by collecting rules they had noticed, and it made a nice little automatic cheat sheet for them. –> SHEET WITH FUNCTIONS HERE

### 2. Power Rule Folding Game

Next was to tackle more complicated functions with which we could use our rules, mainly negative and fractional powers. I did this same exercise in the fall when learning how to differentiate these functions to much success, and then tried it again with differentiating power functions to much confusion (so I guess the activity has a specific niche). The idea is that everyone starts with a problem, does one step and folds over the sheet so that only their work is visible. Then everyone rotates their problems around. The next person does the next step, and then folds the paper so only their work is visible. The group keeps rotating the papers until they are all done, then they open them up and look for mistakes (if there are any). Example:

This was good for helping them drill some algebraic manipulation and develop the skill of checking their own work for mistakes… all while working very closely collaboratively. –> FOLDABLES HERE

### 4. Flip-Up Answers for Initial Conditions

After learning basic integration skills, we began to talk about how functions have more than one antiderivative, and how sometimes it is useful to find a specific one. After only one or two examples together, we immediately just started practicing this idea with an activity that I stole from Mimi where I placed problems around the room with the answers on the back, the idea being that students would go solve whatever problems they felt like they needed to. Example:

I enjoyed this for many of the same reasons that Mimi cited in her original post. Students could work at their own pace without feeling like they were falling behind, could pick their own problems, and could move around the room to interact with many different people (which are all huge advantages over just doing a worksheet).  (though the formatting is a bit screwy)

### 5. Mistake Game

After two days of a little bit more traditional style instruction just to make the connection between the definite integral and area (a lesson that I need to make more discovery based next year), we then did the Mistake Game, an idea from Kelly, which I have described a few times now. Basically students work out problems on whiteboards and hide a mistake in their solution. They then present their work like as if they didn’t make a mistake and the other students have a discussion to try to find their error. The problems I chose for the mistake game where all functions for which you had to do some sort of simplifying before integrating (like distributing or dividing), which ended up being a great way of pushing them a little bit forward while giving them plenty of opportunity to really go in depth discussing this new mechanical process of a definite integral.

### 6. Substitution Marker

Then the last skills activity I did with integration was a few days later when we started doing substitution. I had them first try a bunch of substitution problems intuitively, and then showed them how to use a u-substitution. Then, we pulled out the whiteboards and I gave them all a sheet of problems and two markers each. They were to do all u-related work in red, and all original-integral related work in blue. What I wanted them to get comfortable with was envisioning the transition between the variables and helping see how the skeleton of the integral becomes the “outside function” of the backwards chain rule. Example: (actual student work)

This was, again, one of those activities where a bunch of students totally ignored my directions and just solved the problems (and again, not the worst thing), but I think some of the students that did it like this really benefited from using the different colors.

So why did I just ramble about all those activities? I guess what I loved about this whole sequence is how ridiculously much of the instruction for a good week and a half or so was collaborative and engaging, and forced them to think about what could have been routine material in different ways instead of just plowing through worksheets and drills. I feel like I never would have been able to pull something like this off even last year, so I am so grateful (especially to the online community) that I now have a toolbox full of sweet teaching methods. My goal is to try to mix these types of activities more often into various units, since most have skills based components. I would love any other modes of instruction that you use in your classroom to add to my toolbox!!

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Side note for the Calculus people: There are a few antiderivative/integral related traps that my students fall into… any ideas on how I can stop these problems before they happen?

1. I always start with the word “antiderivative” to emphasis that it’s the opposite process of a derivative, and then try to transition to “integral” as soon as possible, but it’s really tough for them to keep the vocabulary straight. I always correct them in class (mostly just trying to replace antiderivative with integral). How do you approach that vocabulary? I even had a hard time writing this post with the correct vocabulary.
2. Many of my students had a strange barrier this year (that I have never seen before) when finding the area under a curve because they kept thinking of the function you integrate as “the derivative” and the function that you get out as “the original function.” So when we had a function they wanted to find the area underneath, they would take its derivative and then integrate, or some other strange thing like that. How do you introduce the integral as being the opposite of the derivative without getting that misconception (or rather, what did I do in my sequence to imply that)?
3. I always, always, always have so much trouble convincing some students that u-substitution is only used for specific functions that are “backward chain rules.” But after we learn how to integrate normally, we spend a ton of time on u-substitution, and then some students try to solve EVERYTHING with u-substitutions (like 1/x^6 for example). I spent a lot of time doing activities where we pick out the functions that can be integrated with substitution and those that can’t, but for a lot of students, this obviously did not sink in. Any tips?
4. I cannot for the life of me get students to remember to add a “dx” when differentiating a u to find a du. So if u = 2x, then du=2xdx. Granted we didn’t do differentials, but I still don’t understand why this was so difficult! I need some sort of conceptual trigger so they can understand why it’s so important…

I just taught my AP Calculus class the unit of Volumes of Revolution and Volumes of Known Cross Section. Overall, it went fairly well, mostly because I gave it a little time (I rushed through other topics that I deemed less important like inverse trig functions to be able to have a little extra time for volume). I felt like I did an excellent job with the cross sections, but not quite as good job with revolutions… so let me explain why:

### 1. Visualizing Volumes of Revolution …but struggling with setting up the integrals

The two things that I focused on, and correctly so, were getting students to visualize the solids and to construct the integrals using an understanding of the accumulating process. Luckily, I read this awesome post from square root of negative one teach math about how she approached this. I read it the night before I started so I couldn’t get the awesome tool she used, but there was a great tip in the comments about attaching a pencil to a drill and then revolving a region with that. I used a motor from the science lab and a pencil:

Kind of hard to see in the picture, but it worked okay. Truth be told though, I got frustrated with it and didn’t end up using it, though I think it would work. Instead, I relied on Winplot, which is a computer program that can construct these solids, and some basic physical demonstrations with pencils and pieces of paper (with the same principle as the demo above). These visualizations helped some students (as the visualization above would have), but some students still could not figure the revolution part out, especially when there was a hole in the solid from revolving a more complicated region..

The thing that these visualizations did not particularly help with was going from the visualization of the solid to the integral. I think they had this difficulty because the region that they are focused on in the visualization is still the region being rotated, and it’s not those circular cross sections that they need to add up. I had one girl who could not figure out whether the circles were being added up in the x or the y direction and kept drawing her circles in the wrong direction (even though she had the shape of the solid drawn correctly). Most students got it after a while, but I was not really that sure if it was being able to trudge through that process after seeing a ton of examples or if it was actually deep understanding.

### 2. Visualizing Solids of Revolution … and nailing the integral set up

But the cross-sectional solids were a different story. I did an AP Calculus workshop this past summer and I was far less than impressed at the time. I regret my attitude now though because I am realizing throughout the year that I actually got a lot of really useful things that have helped my teaching this year. This was a simple idea that the facilitator mentioned that I think worked really well. To construct the volumes of known cross-section, print out the base area, lay down some Play-Doh (or I used the sticky reusable poster tack), and then shove cross-sections in there to make the solid. This one is the solid with a base as the region bounded by $y=x^3$, $x=1$ and the x-axis with semicircular cross sections perpendicular to the x-axis:

The idea from the facilitator was to have students construct these themselves, and I think that’s a great one – it would just take a lot of time with a whole class. Instead, I made a few of these (which only took me about 20 minutes) and then had students use the models to write down their idea of a how the solid is constructed FIRST, before ever being given a description. They then compared their descriptions to the textbook/AP problem style descriptions, and were like “duh, that’s what we wrote.” I was really surprised, because I teach all students for whom English is their second language and thus struggle with written descriptions like those of these solids, and also one of my colleagues had ranted last year about how hard this topic was to teach because the students couldn’t visualize the solids. But it seemed like letting them construct meaning directly from a hands-on visual model first was a good key to understanding the lengthy descriptions of these solids.

But unlike solids of revolution, they had no trouble then converting the visualization into an integral (and this is almost definitely because the construction of the solid has more to do with the construction of the integral). I use this notation to set up the integrals:

I focus on the two things highlighted: first, write an integral ignoring the function that just shows the shape you are accumulating with its area equation, the direction it’s being accumulated, and the bounds. Then, go to your function to find out how to fill in the dummy variables in the area equation (like “r”). After that, you can just substitute everything into an integral and can stop thinking. I think the intermediate form made the connection between the integral and the solid and helped them really use the visualization they had in their mind for the math. The results proved it too – they really rocked this question on the Mock AP Exam, but didn’t do as well with the revolution.

So what was different between the two solids? The visualization for revolutions has less to do with the integral than the visualization for cross-sections. I realized that students were forced to try to picture the revolution, understand the accumulation and translate all that into an integral, which is a lot to absorb all at once, especially when not all parts are directly related to each other.

So what that I am going to change next year? When teaching both types of solids, I am going to show them first, have them come up with their own descriptions, and THEN show them how we would mathematically describe the solids. Also, I am going to try teaching the solids of known cross section first, because the construction of these (though often a bit harder to visualize) helps teach the accumulation process that is the important part of a solid of revolution. Then, instead of trying to understand all the new concepts at once, the revolution becomes just a step to create a solid that can be integrated similarly to something they have seen before. Also, I am going to supplement the visualizations I used this year with one that shows the region split into discs too. Perhaps with these changes my students will focus more on the discs/washers than on the revolution itself, and thus be able to set up the integrals more easily. And perhaps my notation like this will make more sense than it did this year:

## Drawing in Math Class

One of my favorite ways to start class is by putting out whiteboards with a problem paper-clipped at the top, and names of random groups.  I love it most  because every single person is engaged in mathematics within 30 seconds of class starting. In fact, students always ask me a minute or two before class starts “can we begin?” They can’t seem to resist the markers and the problem in front of them. Also, I found when I wanted to use whiteboards in the middle of class and put students in random groups that it just ate up a few minutes in each class, so this just feels more efficient (I’m kind of neurotic in terms of efficient use of class time).

Continuing my experiments with different modes of math whiteboarding, a great whiteboard warm up I tried was having them illustrate related rates type situations for objects that are changing in different ways. For example:

A pumpkin grows in a garden…
1. With a constant increase in the radius of the pumpkin
2. With a constant increase in the volume of the pumpkin

Then I had them describe what is happening to the rate of change of the important variables (so if dV/dt is constant, what is happening to dr/dt?). We then had a really good full class discussion where students explained their situation. I think this helped clarify for a lot of students the difference between “V” increasing and “dV/dt” increasing, or how just because “dV/dt” is decreasing it doesn’t mean the volume is decreasing.

This was part of a larger goal of mine to focus on big ideas and deep understanding this year – I’ve always asked students interpretation questions on tests (my final this past term had a crap-ton of writing) but I never felt like I actually directly taught them these sorts of things. For Related Rates, we solve all these problems and come up with all these numbers, but never actually talk about why they are interesting problems – the fact that as one aspect of a situation changes, another may change at a totally different rate, and that there is a relationship between all these rates that explain how things change the way they do. And honestly, I think this little activity made a huge difference – on the interpretation question on the Related Rates quiz, tons of students drew pictures to aid their explanations. 15 minutes well spent!