Week 2 - Still getting the feel of the group

This is my second full week of teaching my Advanced Algebra class.  The first week I (tried) using exclusively Harkness style of teaching.  It didn't go well.  I also tried being really explicit with content in interactive notebooks.  Students were insulted that I thought they didn't know order of operations... however, when it came to practicing, many mistakes were made by students.

SO, this week I decided to move on.  I am not leaving Harkness behind or problem solving behind, but I needed to give students some thing that they felt was more worth their time.  This is what it looked like.

1. We did the "How much money have I spent at Target" problem based on how much I have "saved" with 5% off with the red card.  It was a good discussion and helped continue what we did last week with solving problems with proportions.  We took the whole hour to sort it out.  At the end of class, I gave some students the option to estimate how much I WILL spend at target this whole year and several students took me up on that option.  I've gotta say, I love this problem - it is real-world and students get into it more.
   
2. From there we started a new unit on functions.  I was going to do the definition of a function after doing the Desmos Polygraph task on functions.  BUT while students were playing the game, a TON of vocabulary came out.  Watching students play the game made me realize my students know a little about a lot of math.  When I assume we need to start at square one, they get frustrated and shut down.  SO, my new strategy is to move forward with linear functions and fill in the gaps as needed.  When a student doesn't know something, we will cover it "just in time".  I am hoping this will make students feel more respected intellectual beings. 
3. The last few days this week I told students about my own "a-ha" moment.  I mentioned that we are going to continue doing problems together for the next few weeks and then start quadratics.  I gave students some of Johnothon Sauer's problems to do.   Here was one of them:
4. 
   Watching students work on this was interesting, many students read "Fill in the table to the right with a value for x and y" and then just wrote in random numbers in the table.   SO... we clearly need to do some practice with reading directions and also understanding how x's and y's are related.   My goal is to alternate between doing some Desmos Activities and then do some "Partner Exercises" with some notebook additions and end-of-the-hour recaps. 

We will see how week 3 goes!