NOT BASEBALL

I hope this session by Roland is directly applicable to my teaching in Winter 2014.

Roland began by discussing the demographics of MLA students. His introduction was brief.

The Duchess Quantitative Literacy course was briefly discussed. They use a customized version of Bennett/Briggs. Roland only uses the My Math Lab component and supplements with his projects.

The class opens with a survey put on the College CMS in a threaded discussion.

The first cooperative assignment is geometry based. It really wasn’t all that deep. It was to find the area of a triangle using the Pythagorean Theorem and unit conversion.

The second project is spending a billion dollars. Basically it is the movie Brewster’s Millions. The project incorporates Excel. I will use a version of this.

As part of the first test students have to find articles about change. The students have a rubric.

The students do statistics and probability using Excel. They make graphs from data. They make one graph of each type in the course. They also find internet data and use Excel’s stat features in a project. They also have to find roulette probabilities and expected values.

They do a stock project. Again it is tied to Excel.

They use an online calculator to to do financial calculations. A URL was given, but I trust my colleagues to Google. They do a retirement calculation project. They discuss amortization.

The students “buy” a house and create various scenarios about refinancing and selling the house. The final project counts as the exam.

You can email Roland for materials and the Power Point. I will do so and I will recommend review of the materials for future teachers of Math 131.