understanding

I got the wild idea last night that I would create a new lesson relating the special right triangles (45-45-90 and 30-60-90) triangles to proof of similarity. Wild, I tell you. Microsoft Word drawing tools getting hyphy in ‘07. It’s been a while since I was creating new lessons the night before teaching them, and I am a bit rusty with it. The first class I taught was pretty much a disaster. My lecture was scattered, and the students were too weak with basic triangle similarity concepts to be able to legitimately tackle the questions I set out on the worksheet.

On top of that, a parent came to my door to ask if I had seen the cell phone that her daughter lost during a fistfight last week. No, sorry miss, I haven’t seen it. Like I told your daughter that day. And her friend later. Also, I’m teaching a class right now. Thanks. Then some fancy-pants observers came in to nod sagely over the rest of my lecture. I think they’re making decisions about giving the school money based on popping into classes — God help us all.

Over lunch, I got my thoughts together and did a much better lecture in my next class. Plus this is my stacked class with a whole grip of “smart kids” so they tore right into it. I was much more explicit in putting up the two concepts (similarity and special triangles), and in explicit in telling them that I was asking them to combine the ideas themselves. I’ll post up the worksheet when I get home if anyone is interested. It’s actually a cool concept and lesson, but after the first class today I really thought I had lost it.

[Update: Here’s the PDF if you want to rock this or just check it out.]