Mensuration section at grade 11

This is a rather simple section if learners have a necessary foundation towards exploring complicated shapes of problems involving Surface Area and Volume. I encountered a huge challenge with my grade 11 today as they seem to have not taken this section seriously from lower grades, now they can't even remember the rectangle, square areas formula. Anyway I tried some basic shapes to make sure that they remember triangle formula as well.

It was really a stumbling block for me to continue to grade 11 complicated sections, however I will persuade them and see to it that they grasp necessary information on this section as it prepares them for careers in quantity surveying and the like.

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Problem areas with calculator usage!

I find it very difficult to explain generally to the whole class on what keys to press when doing some calculations based on functional keys like cube root, index/powers, and even trig ratios or so. The problem is that calculator are designed and programmed by different companies as a result their functional of logic/programming is not the same. I have to first check on what calculator the student is using an then explain relevantly to the order of the logic it follows. Really confusing for some students as they sometimes share or borrow different calculators at a time.

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Graphs in grade 8!

I started general graphs with my math grade 8, they liked the idea of using grids just to get into familiar with the use of co-ordinate systems. The interesting part is that, I took this as a simple exercise, but was a little bit challenging to others. I used numbers for both axes so as not to confuse them when I introduce the Cartesian plane. It worked very well, they are Ok with the terminology of x-axis and y-axis, however some of them still struggle with which number to belongs to x and which one for y.

I will now introduce the negative part of the Cartesian plane.

Is this a good idea?

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