Teach 180: Gallery of Parent Functions (Day 37)

In PreCalculus class today, we took our time with graphing parent functions and as a result, we didn't get through the entire lesson I had planned.  However, I think it was important for us to not rush.  Plowing through content for the sake of "coverage" can lead to shallow understanding by students. The students were engaged the entire time and accurately created what needed to be done for their given functions.  They worked in pairs to graph their given function, made a table of values, identified the domain and range and determined if their function was even or odd. 

Posted above is a picture of one parent functions that we hung in our gallery and the second picture shows the entire gallery.  Having these posted in the back of the room will be a quick reference for us as we start to talk about graphing transformations from the parent functions, or as I like to say graphing "offspring" of the parent functions.  Having all the functions up at once had the added benefit of allowing students to compare and contrast each of the parent functions.  Understanding why certain functions are alike and different helps students to get a better grasp of the structure of the underlying mathematics.  Without this understanding, students see math as a disconnected set of ideas or rules to be memorized.