Friday, April 3, 2009

Five for Friday: Season Opener Edition

I'm going to start another new series on the site. Every Friday starting this week, I'm going to post five great links I've collected that you might find interesting or useful. Think of it as my own personal mini-Carnival of Education! Here we go:
  1. The Exponential Curve - This blogger shares great high school math lessons. After finding this lesson on factoring trinomials, it inspired me to seek out other similar games that I ended up using in Algebra I. The Exponential Curve is worth a bookmark and a subscription to its feed.
  2. Graphs from the Unit Circle lesson plan - A detailed, challenging lesson plan from the NCTM's Illuminations website (which is worth bookmarking itself).
  3. The Class You Dread - One of my favorite bloggers, Kate of f(t), explains how she used negative reinforcement to turn around a rough class.
  4. Tortured By Testing - They Call Me Teacher's account of overwhelmed students losing it during standardized testing is all too familiar as most of us enter our testing season.
  5. Personal Finance 101 Required for High School Graduation? - My home state of New Jersey is smartly considering making personal finance a graduation requirement so that, as The Consumerist puts it, they'll know "cosine and cosign".
Feel free to share your thoughts on each link in the comments.