One Good Thing - MTBoS Post #1

For this week's blog post challenge for the MTBoS challenge, I have chosen the path of "one good thing". The challenge is to: "keep a lookout for the small good moments during your day and blog about them"

At the start of this year I had received money to purchase a year's subscription to pear deck for the use within my classes. Thinking ahead to August, when it expires, I had invited my principal into my classroom to see how it works and what the benefits are for students. I had invited her a couple times and she had been quite busy so she had to cancel. In my head, she was going to be in my class for the first 10 minutes (for the minds-on part) of the lesson - goal: practice identifying the opposite, adjacent and hypotenuse of a right triangle from the day before.

So then I jump into the next part of the lesson. The point at which I expected my principal to leave, the lesson on introducing primary trigonometry ratios. I had done this in the past and it had gone really poorly. I found an "investigation" in the textbook, and I thought, could a geogebra worksheet do this too? I found this:

 ...and I edited it to include more information into this (drag the purple and red sliders to manipulate triangle):

I then tapped my inner science teacher and made a "lab" to guide student inquiry into the primary trig ratios (they were to all pick different values for angle ACB:

Link to pdf of sheet.

Students and my principal went through the investigation. At the very end, students realized that the three last columns were providing the same answered. I then asked students to try pressing "sin (their angle ACB)" then cos and tan for the same angle. The sounds of shock that came out of each student as their calculators matched their values no matter what angle they picked, matched their columns was awesome. Students really felt clear on this initial lesson. That the lesson was not staged for the admin to show-off and that it went so well was a HUGE good thing. Students had a very positive learning experience and understood where the three primary trig ratios came from/what they were based off of. 

And that was a HUGE "One Good Thing"