Category Archives: textbooks

Why Use a Textbook Problem When You Can Create Your Own Problem Live in the Classroom?

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I have a new prep this year, PreCalculus, which has been an absolute joy to teach.  Many days, however, I’m only a step ahead of my students in terms of planning (and reteaching myself) the material.  Yesterday, I was using my 1st period prep to prepare my 3rd period lesson (nothing like living on the edge!).  And I came to this problem in the book:

While I could have just presented and solved this textbook problem, I realized it would be much more fun to actually do this as a mini-experiment in class.  I walked into class with a beaker full of hot water and a thermometer sticking out.  I didn’t tell them what it was for but I told them that while I was teaching other content, every five minutes someone had to come up, check the temperature and record the time and temperature. 

When it came time to learn about Newton’s Law of Cooling, I showed them the formula and told them our task was to plot our data and use Newton’s formula to model the cooling represented by our data.  It was a total risk.  I had no idea if it would work (since I had no time to try this myself) but I believed it should work and went for it. 

Here is our work developing the equation.  We knew the starting temperature from the first read of our data (78 degrees celsius), used the thermostat on the wall to get the room temperature (with having to convert to celsius!) and were left with needing to figure out k, which is the rate of decay or cooling.  The textbook problem provided it in their problem, but we had a real live example and no one was providing us with the cooling rate.  What could we do?  The students expertly realized we could use and plug in one of our data points to solve for k.  We used (29, 46) [By the way, this just means the temperature was 49 degrees celsius 29 minutes after we started recorded] to solve for our missing parameter, k. 

Then came the moment of truth:  Did the equation fit our points?  We plugged it in and (drumroll….):

An awesome fit!  We talked about why some points were a little off from the general trend of the cooling (maybe someone read the thermometer wrong–it wasn’t digital, or maybe the heat went on or there was a breeze that caused the water to cool more quickly or slowly).  Such great rich conversation from our mini-experiment.  And, I hope that they’ll remember Newton’s Law of Cooling much more now having a tangible memory/experience with it, as opposed to just one of the many problems Mrs. Jain explained on the board. 

Publishing on Kindle (Using Whispercast)

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This summer we had great success sending out Kindle books to all the English teachers and Frosh English classes using Whispercast.

I decided to try to take the 2 readers we publish in house and convert them to a format that would allow readers to annotate them in Kindle.

After several failures in getting my Word document to insert Chapter Titles/Auto Table of Contents using styles. I found a guid on the Kindle Self-Publish page that actually made sense and worked!

I was excited to send out the Frosh Reader to Kate and Tiz and all their students. They can open it in their Kindle App (it actually is already there–sent by Whispercast) and highlight, bookmark, and take notes, just like any other Kindle book.

However, it wasn’t a complete success as while the Table of Contents is hyperlinked throughout the book so a reader can navigate to a chapter from the Table of Contents, it does not appear in the Kindle menu bar.

I will keep working on this–by next year–I might have figured it out.