Polynomial End Behavior and Multiple Roots Video

You just NEVER know where a math lesson is going to go once you bring in the “teenager” element.  After a few very random events in class I decided to make a video to help explain end behavior and multiple roots to my students.  Music included!

I was teaching multiple roots with the help of the fun terms “bounce” (double root) and “wiggle” (triple root) coined by Rachel.  (Thank you again Rachel for sharing your files).  So as I was talking about “bounce” and “wiggle” in class I MAY have said (sang?), “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle” once…or twice.  I have a tendency to sing random song clip-its throughout class, so it just may have happened.  Towards the end of the lesson one of my students, Michael, raised his hand to share how he was thinking of it with the class to help everyone.  He then started taking about Bounce It with Juicy J and Wiggle with Jason Derulo.  EVERYONE in the room was like, “Oh yeah! I get it now.”  Well, everyone but me that is.  You know you are old when you cannot even understand what the teen people are saying.  At least I DID know the Wiggle song, but all of the J names completely threw me.

After class I shared all of the dance fun with my teaching partner Chris.  He talked about how he hi-lights what the roots look like at the graph when explaining multiplicities.  He said he even draws a little frame around the root so the picture inside the frame looks like a line, a parabola, or a cubic function.  I don’t think I’ve thought of roots visually this way, but when I shared it with my students they were like, “Duh, Mrs. Reulbach”.  How do I always miss obvious things?

We also did the “End Behavior” dance to High School Musical (my sophomores are obsessed with High School Musical – it’s adorable).  I threw in a lightening round of Simon Says End Behavior at the end but quickly had to cease all manic dancing when I noticed I was being observed from the door by several other teachers and one of our deans.  Luckily I don’t embarrass easily!  During all of the madness one of my students found an adorable picture of little ghosts doing math graph dances.  I had seen this with stick figures before, but never ghosts!  Adorable.  Thanks Kallie!