The fun folks at Texas Region 4 invited me to speak at their math conference. In addition to a talk on Pinterest for Math Teachers, I talked to a group about graphing.
And since I’m a cheeseball, I called it “Grueling Graphs Gone Groovy – Getting Guys and Gals to Graph.”
Yeah, pretty bad, I know.
What’s worse – I get to do it again at the this summer!
The talk was successful!
We managed to talk about some good stuff on graphing polynomials and rational functions. We just started on transformations when we ran out of time.
The best part was a teacher in the audience shared an awesome tip: when finding vertical asymptotes, ask, “Where can the denominator not be zero.”
I have always told students they set it equal to zero and solve for x. This results in the asymptotes. Which is true. But *poofing* away the numerator is even more weird than *poofing* away the denominator (which you do when finding x-intercepts).
So her tip turned the freakish into the (hopefully) intuitive.
Get the notes!
Here are the annotated notes for the session. (And I just recognized that I forgot to include the holes in the graph of the rational function. So weave that in if you use these. :D)
And if you’re heading to Houston in the summer for CAMT 2015, plan to come. The talk will be even better!
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