First test after starting the classblog

Test today on the material that coincided with the start of our classblog. I am very interested to see if the results are any better....

End of chapter review:

Gave a totally different kind of review last Friday. Instead of me writing out a whole review outline and telling them what's on the test, I just told them

"You already know what's on the test because:

a) You've been writing the review outline since we began the scribe post
b) You've been supplying me with sample test questions too"

So we went through those sample questions, and as we went I tried to get them to come up with harder ones, or ones that were combos from different days. Like instead of "What's the ordered pair for pi/4?", or "What angle is coterminal to 11pi/3", combine them into "What's the ordered pair for 11pi/3?", which is a combo of Jeremy's and Shelley's questions.

Also tried to get them to see their own progress, for example, when we began with converting radians to degrees and vice versa, they had to use that proportion to do it, but now they have angles like pi/4 or 2pi/3 burned into their memories. Now I can ask "What's 3pi/4 in radians?", and it's just right there. That worked sort of well.

I had anticipated that they would have been more involved and active in the review than they were, because they had been more involved than usual thus far, but it was a pretty subdued class.

Maybe I overwhelmed them. They might never have had to do this much thinking from the teacher's end before.  Another factor might have been that lots of them weren't actually there - some areas had school closures due to weather.

Next time:

To show progress:
Use an old screenshot of how they used to have to work it out, before they were familiar with the big picture. Compare to what they're doing now. They will see the progress instead of having to listen to me tell them about it.

To get them to make up combo questions:
I will identify the questions by name, like "Combine Jeremy's question with Shelley's question". Might make it more fun and make it really about ownership, too.

To avoid overwhelming them:
Instead of doing a smorgasbord of every blogger's question at the very end, we'll try generating questions after 2 or 3 days, a la "Improving learning in mathematics", by Malcolm Swan. Even make it part of the discussion at the beginning of class about last night's blogger - now that we all know how to do this, let's crank it up a notch....

Now to my corrections....