Day 26 - Linear vs. Quadratic Intercepts

Today's lesson involved finding the intercepts of both linear and quadratic functions. The students were surprisingly not as comfortable with finding the linear intercepts as I originally thought. Being that the course is precalculus and it is supposed to be college, I am a bit surprised. Maybe students also tried to "remember" how to do certain problems rather than try to figure out how to do them based on the definitions of certain terms. A student mentioned how to solve math problems which led to a great revelation. In mathematics, the answer lies within the question. I really like thinking about math that way. I feel that having students think about challenges in mathematics that way, they are better apt to find the clues within the challenge that can be used to solve it.