Rediscovered Diff. Eq. application problems + Seniors’ final days
This has been a very strange week for me. For the first time since 2017, I’ve missed three days of work in a row. Well, besides my maternity leave in 2020. Back in 2017 I took all my personal days at once after the AP Calculus exam to travel with family to visit my sister in West Virginia. This time, my daughter needed adenoid-removal surgery. I planned the surgery to occur during this week of Math MCAS so that I would only miss one day of instructional time on Monday. Tomorrow, I go back to work again, which feels so strange after being in somewhat of a time warp-alternate reality while staying home while my daughter recovered. It’s been so nice to have time during the day with her when normally she would be in preschool and I would be teaching. Tomorrow will also be my FINAL DAY with my seniors. This is honestly so sad to think about because I highly enjoyed this group -they were my first group in-person as sophomores after Covid, and we have so many memories together over these past three years. They are fun, entertaining, close-knit for the most part, and generally motivated. I’ve never laughed so hard with any group of students before!
On our final day together tomorrow, I will need to collect their textbooks and organize them (normally I do this earlier but I haven’t been there), and then I always take my senior groups outside for group photos which I will print out, laminate, and hang on my senior wall. Before Covid, we used to always play kickball too during their final week, but ever since our school and fields were completely rebuilt, it’s been harder to do that. In terms of paperwork, I will need to finish calculating their final grades in my class to submit by Friday morning. Their quarter 4 grades are nearly finalized, but I still need to go through their “final exam” projects, which will be 10% of their overall grade (assignment detailed and shared HERE in a prior blog post). I can see their progress on Desmos and Google Classroom docs, so I’ve been perusing through them this week periodically. They’ve done a great job with this assignment and the responses range from sentimental and heart-felt to hilarious, and I’m excited to print them to hand out to next years’ AP Calculus BC students. These are the Desmos polar crests that they designed:
Seniors will still have one more day of school on Friday, but that is called ‘Senior Day’ and they do not attend any actual classes. They get their cap and gowns, pick up their yearbooks, go to the auditorium for a slideshow and speeches from the administrators, practice graduation line-ups, and go through the presentation of senior awards for excellence (each department chooses a senior(s) for this award). Then they go outside to the stadium and field for a cookout and games.
During these three days out, I was able to get almost fully caught up on my grading, figure out my lesson plans for the next couple of weeks before finals, and organize and store my AP Calculus curriculum (not to be needed until August!). I also rediscovered this resource that I had previously saved but never used: two application problems on ‘Numerical Solutions to Differential Equations.” PDF HERE.
I really like these two problems. They’re unique and a bit different from the free response questions typically seen on the AP Calculus exam. We do a lot of those FRQ’s in class, but this time I am really hoping to actually use these, or variations of these, next year. The second ‘Option B’ problem would be great to use at the end of class right before the AP exam as another review of Taylor series and error. Out of the entire BC Calculus curriculum, I have found (based on student feedback) that ‘error’ and ‘convergence’ are the most difficult topics to master.