Triads are Coming!

School has start­ed and we’re all fig­ur­ing out our groove. You’re mov­ing along, under­stand­ing your home­work, ask­ing ques­tions, and enjoy­ing the jour­ney. Some­thing new is men­tioned in class : Tri­ads. Wait?! What is a tri­ad? What does it mean? How does it fit into all of your oth­er math­e­mat­ics home­work? Let’s explore the tri­ad assignment:

Most of the class­es in Math Mas­ters have these tri­ad assign­ments list­ed in each unit on the online course.  Tri­ad assign­ments cre­ate account­abil­i­ty and give Lori some feed­back on how your stu­dent under­stands the mate­r­i­al.  The tri­ad assign­ment is option­al ( not all fam­i­lies require them, please let Lori know if your stu­dent won’t be com­plet­ing tri­ads). It is short — only three ques­tions. It requires think­ing and writ­ing. Quite a few tri­ads con­tain a ques­tion like, “tell what you know about  x + 4 = 10.” In this case, your stu­dent should not sim­ply state that x = 6, for although that is true, it’s only one thing. Rather, your stu­dent should have a list of facts about this state­ment, for example:

• x = 6
• x is even, 4 is even, and 10 is even
• x , 10, and 4 all have fac­tors of 2
• this is an equa­tion, which means we assume it’s true
• to solve for x we can sub­tract 4 from each side

While it is unre­al­is­tic to expect stu­dents to give a huge list of infor­ma­tion, they are being trained to see pat­terns and under­stand more than a sim­ple pro­ce­dure. The goal of the tri­ad is for the stu­dent to show how he thinks and what he knows.

Now that we’ve seen the impor­tance of the tri­ad, let’s talk logistics:

1. Tri­ads are due at the end of each chap­ter — once we fin­ish a chap­ter, the pre­vi­ous chap­ters tri­ad is due. That is to say, the tri­ad for chap­ter 1 is due the week that we fin­ish chap­ter 2 in class. This gives the stu­dent ade­quate time to work on the tri­ad while pro­vid­ing review material.
2. Tri­ads are avail­able on the unit sites, but they’re also attached to the week­ly recap email.
3. Tri­ads are to be com­plet­ed on a sep­a­rate piece of paper and sub­mit­ted dig­i­tal­ly. You can scan the work to a pdf, take a pho­to, or use the apple notes app to take a pic­ture and share as a pdf.
4. Tri­ads are emailed to Lori@ScioAcademy.com directly.
5. Tri­ad feed­back may ask your stu­dent to try some­thing else on the tri­ad, at which point, he should resub­mit the changes, or it may sim­ply con­grat­u­late him on a job well done.
6. Tri­ads are per­fect for a work­ing port­fo­lio to show com­ple­tion of a sub­ject. So save them to show off!
7. Tri­ads are not offi­cial­ly grad­ed by Lori, but par­ents are wel­come to email Lori to ask for advice on assign­ing grades.

Now that we’re in the heart of Sep­tem­ber, your class most like­ly has a tri­ad due in the next week or two. Check your email to find out and have fun show­ing what you’ve learned!