Practised trial and improvement with one of my classes today – with a twist.
Using the attached worksheet which I had put together we worked through questions where the range of the solution is given, to ones where there is no range given and also from equations with single value of x to ones including squares and cubes.
Trial and Improvement is a topic that is useful in everyday life, granted it is probably never used in such a formal way, but does appear quite often in exams. Having taught this before I know that the students’ perception is that once they’ve done a couple of questions they “know how to do it” as they don’t always understand the subtleties in the different type of equation, so I think this worked really well.
In summary the Maths teacher killed the English teacher on the playing fields on a Wednesday … what a day!