I had told my students we'd go over WS1 today and then take a quiz, but we spent 3 days on that friggin' worksheet, so I opted for just the quiz instead. I know, I'm a terrible person. Besides, with SBG, the quiz doesn't have major implications. Instead, it only serves as a benchmark indicator for where they're at today and the later assessments will have more weight to overwrite the quiz results.
As for the Pythagorean Thm. discovery, I'm torn with how best to implement it. I've done it as a teacher-led demo, but students tend to tune out when they hear "you don't have to write this down, just follow along." I tried it with my 2nd hour class today as a student-led investigation, but most ended up with triangles too big for the graph paper I gave out, so they couldn't create the squares off each side. I don't like the idea of putting on too many restrictions in the directions, because then it feels specific to the one triangle in front of a student, not a general model for all right triangles. I might try giving out a full sheet of graph paper (I generally cut the sheets in half to save paper) and see how that goes.
As it stands, I'm confident we'll finish Unit 4 before the holiday break but we only have 9 days of school after break before finals - I'm not sure if that will be enough time for all of Unit 5, but we'll see. Overall, I'm happy with the pace of the class - I had anticipated the class being 10 or 11 Units, and we're almost halfway through.
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