Renee Jagodzinski								3/14/07
MED300/Cushman							Journal Week #6

Date:  3/12

	Today we did problems with the students that consisted of them becoming 

familiar with descriptive words like product, quotient, etc.  They had to work with 

problems in sentences and translate them into symbolic form and vice versa.  This is to 

allow the students to look at different things in a matter of different representations and to 

get them prepared for working with word problems.

	While going through the problems in the developmental activity, I learned that 

students need to do examples of problems on their own after being taught the content.  

This allows the students to concentrate and think about different problems.  It allows 

them to create their own strategies to use while working on problems and gets them 

actively engaged.  For example, problems 1c and 1d they did on their own after going 

over the problems before them.  They were concentrating and relating what they did in 

the previous problems to these ones and were making up their own strategies to work 

through the problem.  No student did the same strategy.  Some went from left to right and 

some put symbols in first and then numbers.

	During the lesson, I was mostly engaging the students since they were walking me 

through the problems.  As they were walking me through the problems, I was still guiding 

them on what to do next by giving them questions like, “What important words or 

symbols did we use in the anticipatory set that apply to this particular problem?”.  

Although, I could’ve engaged them more by allowing them to come up to the board to do 

a problem and explain the steps they took to complete the problem.  This would help with 

their communication and explanation skills.

	One thing I found interesting when doing the anticipatory set was that they 

seemed to understand all the descriptive words except quotient.  They had a really hard 

time remembering what quotient means.  I tried to clarify their misunderstandings by 

allowing them to work with different problems that had the word “quotient” in them.

	If I were to modify this lesson, I wouldn’t work on the anticipatory set as long as 

we did.  I would’ve liked to get to more of the problems on the worksheet to give them 

examples of what I expect from them.  This will give them practice on what they will be 

learning that deals with creating equations from paragraphs and then solving for things in 

those equations.       

Date:  3/14

	Today we did a lesson that was on forming equations from word problems.  This 

consisted of highlighting the important information from the problem and using that 

information to create an equation.  Some consisted of solving the equations and some just 

consisted of creating an equation.  They see a lot of these examples on the part II’s of the 

Math A exam.  So, getting practice with these kinds of problems is important.

	While going over the word problems in the developmental activity, I noticed that 

sometimes you have to explain material in many different ways or changing certain words 

in the problem to get them to understand what they have to do.  For example, in the first 

part of the anticipatory set, they had to change that sentence into an equation.  They were 

having trouble with this and so we gave them an example to have them see the problem in 

a different perspective.  We asked them how far would you have driven if you were going 

65 mph and you were driving for 2 hours.  They understood that they had to multiple the 

two numbers together and so all they had to do was replace the hours with x, as it says in 

the problem.

	I also noticed that drawing pictures helps them with completing the problem.  If 

they are able to see it in a real-life form, this helps with their confusion.  For example, 

when looking at the first problem of the developmental activity, we drew pictures of a 

small and large container.  Since “g” was the amount of liquid poured into the large 

container, I put “g” inside the large container in the picture.  Then we let “x” be the 

smaller container.  So, I put “x” in the smaller container and that’s what we were trying to 

find.  

	We tried connecting the material they were learning to real-life situations.  For example, in the second problem of the anticipatory set, it had to do with how much it 

would cost each person to buy a pizza for “p” dollars if there were three people.  They 

had trouble putting this into an equation.  So, we asked them how much it would be for 

each person if the pizza was $15.  They understood that it was $5 for each person.  But, 

they seem to have a misconception of where to put the variable “p” into the equation.  We 

tried to get them to understand it by looking at the problem and reminding them that 

“p” represents how much the pizza costs.

	We mostly engaged the students in the lesson by asking questions and having 

them guide us through the problems.  However, some students didn’t really feel like 

talking so I wasn’t sure if they were understanding the material or not.  So, next time after 

going through some problems with them, I would assign each student a problem to work 

through and then have them put their work on the board to explain to the rest of the 

students the steps they took in solving the problem.  This will save time and also could 

boost their communication skills and comfort when learning the material.