Applied Algebra!!!

The students in the Algebra class have been learning about systems of equations for a few weeks. I thought that it would be nice to try and do an assignment that showed a practical application to this material. With Mrs. Porter’s permission, I decided to teach half of the class on Thursday using whatever real-world application I could create. Unfortunately, this task was a little more difficult than I thought. Off the top of my head, I could not think of any daily applications of solving linear systems. After a short internet search, however, I was well on my way. The activity that I decided to do involved a worksheet where students had to eat a certain numbers of eggs and drink a certain number of cups of milk. The eggs and milk both had a given number of calories and amount of fat. The idea was to determine how many eggs and how much milk one would need to consume in order to obtain a set number of calories without too much fat.

As I lead the class in the activity, I encountered some of the problems that I’ve seen in my time at the class. First, there was an error in the worksheet that I developed and I had to ask all of the students to cross out one number and replace it with another. This break in the flow of the activity definitely allowed time for the students to get distracted. After everyone was clear on the directions and what we were trying to accomplish, I walked the class through solving the problems. I intentionally, expressed the problems in paragraph form because I wanted the students to become familiar with translating words to equations. The students really had to be nudged to discover how to write the expressions from words.

This was my first time seeing how some students are very uncomfortable attempting problems that look unfamiliar to them. To be more specific, there is a strong attitude of “I can’t” when it comes to new material. Mrs. Porter has mentioned to me the manner in which students initially don’t think they can master new concepts or complain that the new material is too complicated or has too many steps. Eventually the students warm up to the material and are more willing to try the problems as they gain confidence and understanding. I don’t think that my math activity was too successful, more so because in order to gain skills and confidence in dealing with word problems (or real world applications of various concepts), the students would need to go through lots of examples.