The topic of rational equations is a doorway to science and engineering. It should be taught with lots of care and interest. Many students find this topic rather difficult and they can not grasp the concept behind it. The main reason for this difficulty is that it brings together difficult topics like fractions, quadratic equations and rates of change. In order to do well in this subject students should master these topics. Students who are not solid strong in these topics would most likely have difficulties.

The first problem that faces the teacher is to find a suitable textbook. It is crucial how the textbook is chosen. This is because students have difficulties even with easy subjects if their textbooks were not well chosen. The syllabus of rational equations constitutes sections in algebra books and there is no book that could be the sole reference of the course. This is why I recommend that the teacher chooses sections from various books and then write his own notes that incorporate the information in these sections.

The teacher should have two major objectives. The first objective is to make the students understand the methods and technologies used to solve rational equations. The second objective is to allow the students to understand how this is useful in our every day lives. This can be achieved by giving them a project where they can used their newly gained equation solving skills to solve areal life problem.

This will increase the students\’ interest in the subject by learning that after all this tedious hard work really pays and at the end of the day they can do something useful with it. In addition, they will learn how numbers and mathematics relations map into our real world.

It is good to let the students do some assignments by remote access from the internet. This will add excitement to the work and make the students at ease with the most advanced modern day technologies. Many people who were not exposed to modern day technologies when they were young are skeptical about it with out reason and tend to refrain from it. This is why I recommend exposing infants to as much modern day technologies as possible.

The course should have assignments that are varying in difficulty and the students who are assessed to be doing well should go to the higher levels and those who have difficulties should solve more problems in the lower levels till they improve. The teacher should give a quiz at the end of each topic to find which students need to work more on the understanding the techniques and which students can go on. The word problems should be the ones that solve real life problems. They should be given to the students who already mastered the techniques of solving equation.

The students that are having trouble with the basics should be gathered and given extra exercises to improve their capabilities.

In order for the students to have difficulties grasping concepts every equation solving technique should be given thorough explanation and then the teacher should conduct several examples on the same technique. The students should be allowed to ask questions in class. The teacher should show strong interest in the questions and that it is very important for him that the students understand. The teacher should set it clear for the students that they should not postpone understanding till they go home and start studying alone. They should understand everything right in class.

To make learning more interesting the teacher should do laboratory experiments using calculators. The teacher would need an algebra calculator and a graphing calculator for this subject. There are also many new innovative software calculators that are available and can do other tasks other than the traditional calculators. Some calculators can even solve equations related to kinematics. The teacher should check these calculators as well in order to create new innovative mathematics laboratory experiments.

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Author Bio: Check out this algebra calculator Check out this kinematics calculator Check out this differential equations calculator

Category: Education
Keywords: calculator,algebra calculator, mathematics education