Hello. My name is Alex, and I love teaching calculus!
About me:
I’ve taught AP Calculus AB for a decade now. I love my students, and I love a lot of things about teaching. I love when my students go off to top colleges and come back to tell me they are now tutoring calculus to their peers since they actually LEARNED the material and can explain it to their friends. However, this year I decided to take a year off from teaching for personal reasons. In my absence my good teacher friend is taking the reins. I want to create a blog for her, the first year calc teacher. If that is you, just know that I am excited for you and that it is a magical experience because calculus is beautiful.
Disclaimer:
Since I no longer teach, I am starting a TPT store along with this site to share what I've created over the years. The TPT store is called Locus Focus and you can find it here. With this blog I am not trying to sell you anything, but I will make posts about my lessons because that it is how it is organized in my mind. And I will certainly let you know about freebies along the way!
My Weird Order of Lessons:
For the most part I follow the order of lessons as found on AP Classroom, but I do a couple of things differently at the beginning in Unit 1 with my “Summer Assignment”, “What is Calculus?”, and “Guess the Derivative” lessons. “What is Calculus?” introduces students to derivatives of polynomials and “Guess The Derivative” introduces them to the derivative of sine, cosine, and e^x. The reason I do that at the beginning is that 1.) It allows me to do L’Hôpital in the limits unit and 2.) I feel like they get a better understanding of course starting with an overview of some of the more important ideas as the first things they see.
Another thing that I include in the limits unit is the limit definition of a derivative. That's the way our textbook did it, and so that's what I always did. I know there are a few of you out there that would find that strange. But again, I like it. By the time we get to Unit 2 about derivatives, we're ready to get down and dirty with all the rules!
