Divide By Zero

I’ve been still trying to wrap my head around factoring, and I think I’m approaching a much reasoned presentation. The work I gave out today in both Algebra classes was more successful than it’s been before. In one class I gave them a very much scaffolded set of problems and explanations to help them tie together much of what we’ve learned. I haven’t made an answer key.

Ws Factoring Overview All Techniques

Hoping for a similar effect I used this sheet to introduce factoring ‘s by splitting the middle in a different period. The justification I’m giving for splitting the middle is one I think extends beyond some of the simple type expressions. Anyway, this isn’t a magical topic, but I think my students this year will have a more solid ability to reason about factoring than before. That’s a good thing, I suppose.

This starts on the 3rd page ‘cuz that’s where I kicked off the page with the class.

ws-ax2+bx+c-intro

I’ve got one more to share, which may get used later.

ws-ax2+bx+c-practice

In other news, I thought I’d post a picture of how I get this generated. I write the worksheets in LaTeX using Emacs to write the code, and I use Maxima to help simplify and factor expressions so that I know they’ll be correct on the worksheet. Here’s a snapshot of how that all works.