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October 15, 2007
Connor Math Work 2007/10/16
(For those of you who are expecting this to be Steph's post, just because it's her blog: Ha! Fooled ya! This is Jeff, and I've decided to post the part of the kids' education that I'm doing here, since my blog tends to have a decidedly different focus.)
We have Connor in the Dolciani, et al. Pre-Algebra book, on section 1-5. This covers association, commutation and distribution, as well as the properties of 1 and 0. Connor did the problems from part C and Self Test A today, and it was pretty obvious that, while he could simplify expressions, he did not really have the concepts down; he was simply doing it his own way. That would have been fine had he been getting them right, but because he wasn't understanding the concepts, Connor was getting the problems wrong (making bad assumptions, or not being careful, or both). I think that what was confusing him was that he could do the problems if they were all numbers, as these are, but could not figure out how to do them if a variable was thrown in, since it was not then entirely calculable.
So I've made up some problems for him to do tomorrow to drill in the concepts, and show some subtleties, and here they are if you want to use them:
Simplify each of the following expressions, showing each simplification step.
- 3(a + 12) + b(4 + 3)
- 7(5 - a) + 2a +1
- 2(2 + a) - (a • 3)
- 5a - 3a • 6
- 3 + 2 • 4 + 25 / 5
- 3 - 2 • 4 + 25 / 5
- 3 + 2 • 4 - 25 / 5
- 3b + 2a + 5
- 7 + b - (5 - b) + (5 - b) - 2b + 2(b + 1)
- a • b - 2b + 2(a + b) - b - 2a - b(a + 2) - b
Update: Not so good. Connor got 2 right.
Posted by jeff at October 15, 2007 10:29 PM
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Comments
i hate this math
Posted by: ronnie at October 29, 2007 5:49 PM
I feel that math is alot of things that you can do with it
Posted by: ronnie at October 29, 2007 5:50 PM
I feel that math is alot of things that you can do with.Math is realy fun until it gets harder and hader.Kids can realy have fun with math
Posted by: ronnie at October 29, 2007 5:53 PM