On Friday, I presented at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics‘ (NCTM) Regional Conference in New Orleans, LA. Despite the less than ideal weather, the conference was great (full disclosure, I’m biased since I am on NCTM’s Board of Directors). I had the pleasure of presenting a 30-minute burst session called Substitution and Elimination: More Interesting than you Think (or as my friend Amber remembers is, Less Boring than you Think). In that session I talked about some things I learned about solving systems of linear equations since my time as a high school teacher. I think the attendees found something new out of this presentation and I hope you do as well!
I have linked the slides below and I also have two blog posts that go deeper into these ideas and a video I made with my collaborator Sam Otten related to his excellent article from the Mathematics Teacher journal titled Choosing Systems of Linear Equations.
Here is a link to the slides I used for my NCTM presentation. I don’t tend to put a lot of text in my slides, so you may want to read the blog posts below for a bit more information.
In the post, Why does elimination work? I went a bit deeper into the idea of elimination.
A prior blog post, Solve for y and substitute? In this post I reexamined how we teach substitution and how to make this strategy even more powerful.
I co-create videos for teachers with Sam Otten under the Two-Minute Teacher’s Guide. We made a video about a way to engage students in solving systems of linear equations. This video was based on an article Sam wrote with his brother for the Mathematics Teacher (NCTM membership required for access). You can watch our video below.
If you try any of these ideas out, let me know how it goes!