Representations of Relations

This is going to be my fifth year teaching Algebra 2, this year I am changing schools so it will be called Advanced Algebra. I was doing some curriculum writing with my new team of teachers and the first section we are going to cover as a class is Representing Relations my first reaction was...



At this point with just coming back to school students may not remember what relations are, what functions are, or domain and range.

I thought back to Dan Meyer's talk of headaches and aspirin and why do students need to know there are different ways to represent relations: ordered pairs, tables, graphs, and mapping.

I took the second graph from New York Times: What's Going on in this Graph?  and re-organized the information differently.

Give the students the following information:
This data is organized from by: country (guns per 100 people , mass shooters per 100 million people).
United States (85, 28)
Canada (26, 9)
Afghanistan (2, 20)
Iraq (37, 4)
France (35, 15)
Yemen (55, 40)

Ask the students what they notice? what do they wonder? As the teacher write down everything they say. One question I have is what is the data saying? Is there a different way to represent the data?

Give the students the following information:



What do they notice and wonder now? What has changed? You can show them mapping as well, but eventually you will need to introduce other things, but the last one is the graph from The New York Times.




How do the three representations differ, do they all tell the same story? Do some tell the story better? I'm not sure if this is the way to start the year out, but nothing is perfect. I want students to feel that there is some context to mathematics other than its day 1 therefore we do lesson 1.