So, another good day of discussion at day2. We touched on the topic of homework--how much, late policies and such.
We also did some more activities that tie to Calculus--I love them and so far everything has been appropriate for even a regular Algebra classroom. I can't say too much how much I appreciate our facilitator and group. It's so nice to be young and lower on the experience ladder myself, and yet still feel that my thoughts and opinions are appreciated and valid. I'm having lots of fun and it's nice to realize I can still remember some of my calculus basics.
Anyways, here's an interesting problem I ran across a few months ago that came back to me today when we were discussing 0 as an exponent and 0 as a divisor.
When we teach rules of exponents in Algebra, we usually give them problems where they are told to simplify and than substitute numbers in for the variables. So here's one of the problems I ran across on a worksheet that stumped me as to what would be technically correct :
Evaluate for x = 0: (3x^5)/(x^2)
Is the answer 0, or undefined?
We've had so much fun discussing technicalities and such. We were talking about "no real solutions" and such and the thought struck me that when one is looking at the graph of a quadratic function that has no real solutions, and you ask for the "zeros"--saying that they don't exist isn't technically correct because they do exist on the imaginary plane. I guess it would be still correct to say that x-intercepts do not exist because the graph does not cross the x-axis....I guess it depends on how you define "zeros" and "roots" then........ I usually see roots equated with solutions, thus you have imaginary roots sometimes, and zeros equated with the x-intercepts--but I think that zeros might be defined the points where y=0. Quadratic Roots/Solutions/Zeros/X-intercepts has been one of the things recently discussed for clarification because solutions don't have to be x-intercepts--but happen to be when we solve by setting an equation equal to 0. I guess I'll finish this post and do a bit of research. I also need to stop and try and think of something that I do that I can share with other teachers that they may not already have thoughts of...
Posted by Anna at July 31, 2007 04:48 PM | TrackBack