literal equations – Infinitely Teaching

This is one lesson that students absolutely HATE. I feel like this year was better than most, and I’m hoping it was the interactive notebooking process that helped. Having said that, students still struggled, and I mean a lot, with rearranging equations. I created my own resources for this lesson (WHAT???) and was pretty excited about teaching it. it wasn’t until I was walking around as students were working in groups until I realized that the lesson had the same result (for some groups) as in previous years. When solving an equation for y, students were “magically” eliminating the x by incorrectly combining like terms. We will just keep practicing…

The notebook looked good though 🙂 and I did have some success. It wasn’t a total failure.

The “Why do we solve literal equations” part is something I always talk about but I think putting it in writing helps. Since students think this process is awful, they should at least know why we do it.