This fall, I’ll be teaching a group of very strong students in the highest of three levels of math my school offers. The goal is to give students an intense “Honors Precalculus+” treatment and get them started on calculus (up through the product rule or so) by the end of the school year so that they can jump right into BC Calculus the following fall.
I’m working on developing the standards for the course, and I’m using the model of “performance indicators” and “learning targets” I grew familiar with when I worked at a mastery-based learning school in New Haven. (For background, see the Great Schools Partnership’s document Proficiency-Based Learning Simplified)
- APC Performance Indicators Draft (short and long versions)
- APC Planning (course overview)
I would welcome your thoughts on these learning goals. Do any of them feel too easy? Too difficult? How is the balance? If you had to write an essential question capturing these standards, would would it be?
Finally, here’s some additional background on where I’m coming from.
Source Materials
I’m building this course based on a few sources of problems and materials:
- Precalculus and Discrete Mathematics (University of Chicago School Mathematics Project)
- Advanced Mathematics (Richard Brown)
- Precalculus (Ricard Rusczyk, Art of Problem Solving)
Influential Books
Here are a few books I keep thinking about as I plan this course:
- Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins
- Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading by Robert Marzano
- On Your Mark (Thomas Guskey)
- Faster Isn’t Smarter (Cathy Seeley)