A collection of relevant lessons to supplement your units in Algebra I/II. Mix these lessons into your course to show students the algebraic reasoning behind social issues, public health, the environment, business, sports, and more.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Many computer applications use very complex mathematical algorithms. The faster the algorithm, the more smoothly the programs run. The running time of ...

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to understand what the different algebraic forms of a quadratic function reveal about the properties of its graphical representation. In particular, the lesson will help teachers identify and help students who have the following difficulties: understanding how the factored form of the function can identify a graphŐs roots; understanding how the completed square form of the function can identify a graphŐs maximum or minimum point; and understanding how the standard form of the function can identify a graphŐs intercept.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: articulate verbally the relationships between variables arising in everyday contexts; translate between everyday situations and sketch graphs of relationships between variables; interpret algebraic functions in terms of the contexts in which they arise; and reflect on the domains of everyday functions and in particular whether they should be discrete or continuous.

This task requires students to recognize the graphs of different (positive) powers of x. There are several important aspects to these graphs. First, the graphs of even powers of x all open upward as x grows in the positive or negative direction. The larger the even power, the flatter these graphs look near 0 and the more rapidly they increase once the distance of x from 0 excedes 1.

The purpose of this lesson is for students to discover the connection between the algebraic and the graphical structure of polynomial functions. This lesson leads to students being able to sketch a graph by identifying the end behavior, intercepts, and multiplicities from a given polynomial equation. It also leads to students being able to write a possible equation by determining the sign of the leading coefficient, minimum possible degree, x-intercepts and y-intercept from a given polynomial graph. 

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to translate between graphs and algebraic representations of polynomials. In particular, this unit aims to help you identify and assist students who have difficulties in: recognizing the connection between the zeros of polynomials when suitable factorizations are available, and graphs of the functions defined by polynomials; and recognizing the connection between transformations of the graphs and transformations of the functions obtained by replacing f(x) by f(x + k), f(x) + k, -f(x), f(-x).