Decorating With Posters For Calculus

I used to hang up a unit circle poster in my room, but I realized that I need my students to be able to find values on their own quickly, so I stopped being an enabler and took it down. I actually ended up with only two posters last year. One was of the three log properties. I just wanted to be able to point to the property that I was referring to not lose time in class every time a kid forgot something like ln(1/7) = -ln(7), which happened often. The second poster I had hanging was of the limit definition of a derivative. Again, that’s just something that I want to be able to point to on different occasions through the course and especially during review. Since most teachers teach limits first, the limit definition of a derivative just seems like a concept that they forget easily if they don't have a constant reminder of it in front of their face.

Pros and Cons about posters: On one hand, posters should not be eternal crutches for the students. On the other hand,

Student: "How did ln(1/7) become -ln(7)"

Teacher: "THAT" while pointing to the poster

Student: "Oh yeah, thank you."

We don't always have time to explain things from scratch, and students don't always remember concepts by name. Having a poster on the wall that answers your most common questions can definitely save you time. And if you find a student constantly looking at the poster as they do each problem, is it necessarily an eternal crutch? It could be just part of the process for that student to look at the concept over and over to have it sink in. However, in the case of the unit circle poster, it was most definitely a bad thing! You'll just have to make that call if you see it happen.

During Testing: No matter which posters you choose to go with, you would be a nice teacher if you could let them know ahead of time that the posters will not be hanging up during the assessments. At my school, the engineering teacher has one of those massive printers, so I didn't have to go to Office Depot to make a big poster. I designed most posters to be all the same size, printed them in his room, had them laminated, put support cardboard on the back (just a preference I have), and then I hung them up using 3M clips. I had these clips supporting all informational posters in my classroom so that they could easily be switched out and clipped on or off.