Thoughts of an eighth grade math teacher

In-N-Out Burger

Today, for the first time, I taught the In-N-Out Burger lesson by Robert Kaplinsky. I won’t spend a long time talking about how the lesson works or the strategies I used to present it, because Robert Kaplinsky and Hedge have already done such a fabulous job of spelling out this lesson and how awesome it is. I pretty much followed Hedge’s format and questioning strategies word for word and it was amazing, so you really should go check out her post. My students were so excited they were jumping out of their seats to tell me all the questions they had about the 100X100 burger:

How many calories?
Did they build it vertically or horizontally?
How many cows died to make that sandwich?
How many people could it feed?
How many years would it take off your life expectancy?

You get the idea. It was by far the most excited my students have been about any lesson I’ve taught this year. There are two things, however, that I added to the lesson that I do want to share. First, I took the pictures from Robert Kaplinsky’s blog and made them into a powerpoint, just to make it easier to present. Here’s a link to that file.

Secondly, I created a multiple representations template.

Click on the image to download the Word Doc of this template

I’m really focusing a lot on independent/dependent variables and interpreting the meaning of the slope and y-intercept in context, so I added questions for those. Also, I’m really focusing on multiple representations of a function, so I wanted my students to create a table, graph, equation and verbal description of the pattern. The nice thing about this is that it can be easily edited to use with other problems. In fact, I’ve already got a few in mind, and will share the templates and my feedback after I’ve run the lessons. Hope you find it useful.