Unit Circle

Favourite & Fix: Nov. 11

by Jon Orr

For the Favourite & Fix series each week I’m posting one idea from my lessons that was my favourite and one topic that I need help on. A topic I hope to fix. I’m hoping that in the comments or on Twitter #Fav&Fix you amazing readers can help me out with some hints, tips, and suggestions.

Favourite:

This week I introduced the unit circle to my MHF4U class. I wasn’t happy with the way I introduced the circle in years past so I made a change. I want students to see that our special triangles are just reflected around the circle. Instead of drawing them, or imagining that they are reflected….I wanted them to physically pick them up and flip them and move them. I wanted them to see that the lengths are the same. So I cut out 30-60-90 triangles and 45-45-90 triangle each having a hypotenuse of 10 cm. I created a circle with radius 10. Now each time you place the triangle on the circle we can easily see the principal angle it creates and the coordinates of the point on the circle….It’s the lengths of the triangle….and since the hypotenuse is one the lengths correspond to the Cosine and sine value of that angle. The physicality of this I believe helped allow the students to grasp what the circle shows.

Fix

This week in our MEL3E class used Fry’s Bank from Dan Meyer.

This problem, like many 3-Act Math problems, allowed my class to discuss, question assumptions, and uncover math. The problem helped restore some of our great classroom atmosphere that we’ve been missing lately. I want more! This coming week we’ll keep working through compound interest problems. I’m planning on doing Robert’s Not Cashing the Cheque problem.  After that my resources for compound interest problems are pretty thin. I want to continue posing interesting problems to my students. Can you suggest some? Do you have great compound interest problem that keep students curious and questioning? I’m looking for some!! Share those great problems here or on #fave&Fix on Twitter. I’m looking forward to what you come up with.

[Update]

Thank to all of you who commented through Twitter on great compound interest problems. Here is one from Diana,

Here’s where our class went on Monday:
We started off with Robert Kaplinksy’s How Much Did Patrick Peterson Lose By Not Cashing His Check problem. Go ahead and read his lesson plan.

What made this problem great for our class was the discussion that occurred before any math happened. An amazing argument bubbled up with one side saying “Who cares….what’s the big deal” and the other side saying “That’s just super insensitive…..I could use the interest off that account”. My class from the beginning of the year was back! They had put away the drama that had happened between them and focused on the problem. We guessed at the interest he was losing daily. And then using the info from Robert’s site calculated the interest in the first couple of days. Then broke out the Finance Solver to determine how much was lost for the 27 days.

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The class wanted to know more! They wanted to know what he would lose if he didn’t cash it for the year, 2 years, 5 years!! So we did that too.

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Next, we investigated Robert’s How Much Should Dr. Evil Demand?


Read Robert’s post to see the plan.

Again, with this group, we didn’t use exponential functions…but the Finance Solver to determine what $1000000 would be worth 3o years later with average inflation of 5.33% per year. We also extended to find how long we would have to wait for $1 million to be worth $100 billion.

Thanks for the help!

More on Compound Interest, Financial Literacy and More

If you are interested in finding more ways to bring out financial literacy concepts in your classroom, consider subscribing to my podcast called Invested Teacher on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and other platforms. While we focus on how we as educators can better manage and invest our money, we also have episodes where we chat about how we can share that financial learning with our students, too.