I just returned from NCTM Boston. What a great week! I got to catch up with a lot of old friends and made several new ones as well. My co-author, Leslie Texas, and I did a session on one of our strategies from our book series What’s My Move: A Kinesthetic Multisensory Approach to Graphing – (although in the book series we call it Walk This Way).
During the session I used the term functionally fluent several times as we were engaging the participants in the activity. Several teachers asked me afterwards what I meant by the phrase. They said they had never heard that before but were intrigued by it. So – here is a start at what being functionally fluent means to me.
How does one talk about fluency in light of secondary mathematics? Students in middle school are beginning their work that will lead to functional fluency as they progress on their mathematical journey. What is functional fluency? Functional fluency is students looking at any representation of a function and moving seamlessly from one form to another. Students also understand the parent function for the function type and the associated transformations.
What is a function? Use this function definition sort to help your students make sense of the different definitions for function.
