I only have one more night of tutoring before I’m on Winter Break, yay! I’m going to do my best to stay focused though and help my students make it through this Thursday and Friday of tests!!

 

My Advanced Algebra Trig students, both honors and regular, are doing synthetic division to find the factors and zeros of polynomials. Teachers definitely vary when they teach this topic to students. Most of my students however are asked to make a list of p/q’s which tells them the possible rational zeros, and then they are allowed to look at the graph on a calculator to find a few zeros that they then use in synthetic division. At least that way they don’t have to sit there and guess and check every p/q until they find one that gives them a zero remainder, but they are still showing the work and not just writing down all of the answers straight from the graph on the calculator! Whew…it’s still a lot to understand and can for sure be confusing. Here are two examples (one of them even has imaginary zeros):

 

 

Stay tuned for Geometry tomorrow! Even though it’s my Winter Break, I’m still planning to post to my blog!!