Mathematics: Tribal Taxes

In this lesson, students will learn essential information about taxes and how they impact enrolledmembers of federally recognized Native American Tribes. Many people believe that Native Americans do not pay taxes and therefore should not benefit from federal and state tax-supported programs. This lesson debunks that myth and helps students understand the complex interrelation between state, federal, and Tribal governments and tax systems. Students will also complete a math exercise using piecewise functions to analyze and calculate federal and Oregon state income taxes. The lesson can stand on its own or serve as a complement to or extension of other math lessons. 

Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan

Authors: Aujalee Moore, April Campbell

Lesson 28: Federal Income Tax

This real-life descriptive modeling lesson (see page 61 of the CCLS or page 71 of the CCSS) is about using inequalities and graphs to understand the progressive federal tax system. Like the last lesson, this lesson again runs through the problem, formulate, compute, interpret, validate, report modeling cycle, but unlike the difficult modeling lesson on the Double and Add 5 game, more autonomy can be given to students in this lesson.

Material Type: Lesson

Author: NYS Math

Applying Angle Theorems

This lesson unit is intended to help you assess how well students are able to use geometric properties to solve problems. In particular, it will support you in identifying and helping students who have the following difficulties: Solving problems relating to using the measures of the interior angles of polygons; and solving problems relating to using the measures of the exterior angles of polygons.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Calculating Volumes of Compound Objects

This lesson unit is intended to help teahcers assess how well students solve problems involving measurement, and in particular, to identify and help students who have the following difficulties; computing measurements using formulas; decomposing compound shapes into simpler ones; using right triangles and their properties to solve real-world problems.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Evaluating Statements About Length and Area

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students can: Understand the concepts of length and area; use the concept of area in proving why two areas are or are not equal; and construct their own examples and counterexamples to help justify or refute conjectures.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Evaluating Statements About Probability

This lesson unit addresses common misconceptions relating to probability of simple and compound events. The lesson will help you assess how well students understand concepts of: Equally likely events; randomness; and sample sizes.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Using Dimensions: Designing a Sports Bag

This lesson unit is intended to help you assess how well students are able to: recognize and use common 2D representations of 3D objects and identify and use the appropriate formula for finding the circumference of a circle.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Author: http://map.mathshell.org/

Modeling: Having Kittens

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: interpret a situation and represent the constraints and variables mathematically; select appropriate mathematical methods to use; make sensible estimates and assumptions; investigate an exponentially increasing sequence; and communicate their reasoning clearly.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Maximizing Area: Gold Rush

This lesson unit is intended to help you assess how well students are able to: Interpret a situation and represent the variables mathematically; select appropriate mathematical methods to use; explore the effects on the area of a rectangle of systematically varying the dimensions whilst keeping the perimeter constant; interpret and evaluate the data generated and identify the optimum case; and communicate their reasoning clearly.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Interpreting Statistics: A Case of Muddying the Waters

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: interpret data and evaluate statistical summaries; and critique someone elseŐs interpretations of data and evaluations of statistical summaries. The lesson also introduces students to the dangers of misapplying simple statistics in real-world contexts, and illustrates some of the common abuses of statistics and charts found in the media.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Animal Populations

In this task students have to interpret expressions involving two variables in the context of a real world situation. All given expressions can be interpreted as quantities that one might study when looking at two animal populations.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Delivery Trucks

The primary purpose of this task is to illustrate certain aspects of the mathematics described in the A.SSE.1. The task has students look for structure in algebraic expressions related to a context, and asks them to relate that structure to the context. In particular, it is worth emphasizing that the task requires no algebraic manipulation from the students.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Exponential Parameters

The task provides a reasonably straight-forward introduction to interpreting the parameters of an exponential function in terms of a modeling context. In general, an exponential function f(t)=ab^t has two parameters. The parameter a is interpreted as the starting value (when t represents time), and b represents the growth rate -- the amount the quantity is multiplied by each time the value of t is incremented by 1.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Kitchen Floor Tiles

The purpose of this task is to give students practice in reading, analyzing, and constructing algebraic expressions, attending to the relationship between the form of an expression and the context from which it arises. The context here is intentionally thin; the point is not to provide a practical application to kitchen floors, but to give a framework that imbues the expressions with an external meaning.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Mixing Candies

This task assumes students are familiar with mixing problems. This approach brings out different issues than simply asking students to solve a mixing problem, which they can often set up using patterns rather than thinking about the meaning of each part of the equations.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Mixing Fertilizer

The problem deals with a rational expression which is built up from operations arising naturally in a context: adding the volumes of the fertilizer and the water, and dividing the volume of the fertilizer by the resulting sum. Thus it encourages students to see the expression as having meaning in terms of numbers and operations, rather than as an abstract arrangement of symbols.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

F-IF A-SSE Modeling London's Population

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: The table below shows historical estimates for the population of London. Year18011821 18411861 18811901 1921 1939 1961 London population 1,100,000 1,60...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Quadrupling Leads to Halving

This question provides students with an opportunity to see expressions as constructed out of a sequence of operations: first taking the square root of n, then dividing the result of that operation into s. Students studying statistics encounter the expression in this question as the standard deviation of a sampling distribution with samples of size n when the distribution from which the sample is taken has standard deviation s.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

A-SSE Radius of a Cylinder

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: Given the height $h$ and volume $V$ of a certain cylinder, Jill uses the formula r=\sqrt{\frac{V}{\pi h}} to compute its radius to be 20 meters. If a s...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Seeing Dots

The purpose of this task is to identify the structure in the two algebraic expressions by interpreting them in terms of a geometric context. Students will have likely seen this type of process before, so the principal source of challenge in this task is to encourage a multitude and variety of approaches, both in terms of the geometric argument and in terms of the algebraic manipulation.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics