Class 28 – Tuesday December 13, 2011

Last class. We’ll write the final exam.

Term papers are due today for the half the class that didn’t take advantage of my offer of an extra week for turning in a draft last Thursday. I’ll return those drafts today with comments.

Short class – reviewed for the final essentially by listing the table of contents of CSM. I can’t believe we read the whole thing. Well, we didn’t really. We worked on some material from each of the chapters, but not all of any. That’s an important point to make when working with teachers about how to build a course syllabus based on the book. The goal is attitude change, not “coverage”.

The substantive part of the class was a (requested) review of slope, along with a review of unit calculations. We redid the problem from the second exam on the linear equation for the total cost to run a light bulb given the purchase price of the bulb ($9) , the wattage (100w), and the cost of electricity ($0.20/kwh). Working with common sense (not even trying to write the linear equation) you can see that each hour you use the bulb costs an extra 2 cents. That translates to a slope of $0.02/hour.

For some of the class that helped …

Final a week from today.


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