Some day, one of my students will write a book entitled, Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Math I learned in Chemistry Class.
Somehow, in The Emperor’s New Frameworks the post MCAS world, being able to read a graph and extract data from it is important enough to still be taught, but being able to create a graph by hand to represent your own data is not.
Today’s chemistry lesson was on graphing. My students learned some novel concepts, such as:
- Scale your graph so that it uses as much of the plot area as is practical.
- Make sure your steps always increment by the same amount.
- Use a straightedge to draw straight lines.
- Make sure the straight line that connects your two data points actually goes through both points.
- If your goal is to find the x-intercept graphically, then the y-axis needs to start at zero.
Keep in mind that these kids are high school juniors, not sixth-graders. Evidently, most of the graphing they do in math class is done on a graphing calculator.
*shudder*
