Sunday Summary: I Love Transformations

3-2-1 Sunday Summary:

3 Resolutions for 2015

1. Blog more. Remind self that I don’t have to type a novel every time, nor does anyone want to read a novel on a blog.  Keep up with short 3-2-1 summaries.

2. Exercise more.  I joined the #500in2015 challenge and did pretty good the first week.  To motivate myself, if I keep my goal of ten miles a week in January, then I get to buy the new Jessica Smith walking workout video set. (Right now I’m using this DVD from her. The Nike+ app seems to record the walk pretty accurately and I’m not going outside when it’s below freezing! 55 degrees!)  If you’re looking for a good indoor workout, check out her website–she has TONS of free full-length workouts posted, with special appearances by her dog, Peanut.

3. Leave school at school. This has been one of the more trying years I’ve had as a teacher and I’ve been bringing a lot of that home with me. I’m going to try to be better about shutting that part of my brain off.

2 good lessons this week!

1. One day this week, I ended up with four out of eighteen students in class. Instead of calling the day a loss, we got together in a group and worked through the notes together. It was so nice to talk with them one-on-one through the lesson and then we all worked together on the homework.  I need to remind myself to sit down with more groups as they are working, instead of just helicoptering around the whole room.  (Side note: I did use the exam study guide days to do this as well: each group got 5 minutes of Mrs Craig time to ask any questions; it worked really well!)

2. We started transformations in Precal this week. Coincidentally, Shelley Carranza (@stcarranza) asked if she could link to a previous post I had made about transformations and of course I said yes. (Here is her post.) As a bonus, she gave me a sneak peek of her desmos graphs which inspired me to change up my introduction graph:

transformation table

(Note: there is no table for the absolute value functions because my coteacher and I wanted them to thinking about those on their own for a bit).

Next year, I think I will use up some extra paper and recopy the table next to each graph.  Because being able to mark it up adds a wonderful visual to what happens when we affect the input, for example, f(x – 2).

transform x minus 2

THIS TOTALLY BLOWS MY MIND EVERY YEAR.  We are “reaching back” 2 to find the output value, which will “pull up” to where we are.  SO THAT’S WHY IT SHIFTS TO THE RIGHT WHEN SUBTRACTING.  We then talked about the “bonus” point of (8, -2) we could get from the original (6, -2).

Ok, are you ready for super mind-blowing?  Check out f(2x) (The green boxes are more “bonus” points.  A good question to determine these was, “where would this -8 output project to?”)

transform 2x
HOLY COW YOU CAN TOTALLY SEE THE GRAPH BEING PULLED IN!! We need to go out twice as far, then pull that answer back in to our x-value.

We spent two days on this, then did some more practice. Monday we’re doing a super-thoughtful-hope-they-all-ate-their-wheaties worksheet combining transformation, average rate of change, and area of the curve.  I will report back as to its success and/or not-there-yet-ness.

Here are the files: Table Worksheet  Table Desmos File

1 Thing I’m Looking Forward to This Week

More transformations!!!  Seriously, I love these.

2 comments on “Sunday Summary: I Love Transformations

  1. oh my gosh, how have I not seen this post before! So much more visual than what I was planning on doing! Totally stealing this 🙂 THANK YOU!

    • Glad it helped! Hope it goes well for your class! 🙂

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