The subject of rational equations is a gateway to precalculus. It should be taught with great care and interest. Many students find this topic quite difficult and cannot understand the concept behind it. The main reason for this difficulty is that it brings together difficult subjects like fractions, quadratic equations, and rates of change. In order to do well in this subject, students should master these topics. Students who are not solid in these subjects would most likely have difficulties.
The first problem that the teacher faces is to find a suitable textbook. The decisive factor is how the textbook is selected. Because even with simple subjects, students have difficulties if their textbooks are not well chosen. The rational equations syllabus forms sections in algebra books, and there is no book that could be the sole reference of the course. For this reason, I recommend that the teacher select sections from different books and then write their own notes containing the information in those sections.
The teacher should have two main goals. The first goal is to make the students understand the methods and technologies for solving rational equations. The second goal is to enable the students to understand how this is useful in our daily life. This can be achieved by giving them a project where they can use their newly acquired equation solving skills to solve real life problems.
This increases students’ interest in the topic by showing them that all the hard work really pays off and that they can do something useful with it at the end of the day. In addition, they learn how numbers and mathematical relationships depict our real world.
It is good to let the students do some tasks remotely over the internet. This will make the work more exciting and make it easier for students to use the most advanced modern technologies. Many people who did not come into contact with modern technologies in their youth are skeptical about it without reason and tend to refrain from it. For this reason, I recommend exposing infants to as much modern technology as possible.
The course should have tasks of varying difficulty, and the students who are judged good should go to the higher levels, and those who are struggling should solve more problems in the lower levels until they improve. The teacher should give a quiz at the end of each topic to find out which students need more work on understanding the techniques and which students can continue. The word problems should be the ones that solve real life problems. They should be given to students who already have mastered the techniques of solving equations.
The students who have trouble with the basics should be collected and given additional practice to improve their skills.
In order for students to have difficulty understanding concepts, each equation solving technique should be thoroughly explained, and then the teacher should perform several examples of the same technique. Students should be allowed to ask questions in class. The teacher should show great interest in the questions and that it is very important to him that the students understand him. The teacher should make it clear to the students that they should not put off understanding until they go home and start studying on their own. They should understand everything in the lesson correctly.
To make learning more interesting, the teacher should do laboratory experiments with calculators. The teacher needs an algebra calculator and a graphing calculator for this subject. There are also many new innovative software calculators that are available that can do different tasks than the traditional calculators. Some calculators can even solve equations related to kinematics. The teacher should also review these calculators to create new innovative math lab experiments.
Thanks to Khaled Omran | #teach #rational #equations #precalculus #students
