Teaching Basic Geometry

Our college offers a course that is pretty much the same as high school geometry. I have never before taught it because we only offer it in the summer, and summer semester is squished into 6 weeks. I haven't wanted to teach math on that sort of schedule because it seems like it would be hard for  students to learn well that quickly.

But I'm under load and I love geometry, so I will be teaching this course in a month. I've been preparing ever since January - reading the text, making plans and handouts, doing constructions. Geometry doesn't have the same flow for me that algebra does. I thought that might be because I've been teaching algebra for 30 years. But other math educators have also noticed how much harder geometry can be. Brain teasers everywhere. I like that, but I also need to figure out how to make this doable for the average student. I have gone through the book twice now, thinking about what they'll be learning, and hoping to notice the places they'll get stuck.

We will be doing lots of compass and straightedge constructions. Even though I loved geometry in high school, I hated that compass. I'd press too hard and open it further in the middle of an attempted circle. Or not hard enough, and then the pencil wouldn't draw. Arghh. Computer tools make that a problem of the past. I've mentioned two sites in previous posts, sciencevsmagic.net and euclidea.xyz. But euclidea won't let you unlock a higher level until you succeed at the lower level, and I found that frustrating. Henri Picciotto pointed out that euclidthegame.com is much like euclidea, but doesn't require you to solve one level before doing the next.  After checking it out, I'm not sure I have any reason to go back to euclidea; euclidthegame is much more satisfying.


Translating a Line Segment
So one of the tools I'll be using with my class is euclidthegame. I had a blast working through the levels back in January, and wanted to redo them now to see which sorts of things might be hard for the students. I got stuck on level 7, translating a line segment. I replicated two solutions given in the comments, but I didn't understand why the steps worked.

When I looked up 'translate a line segment', all of the sites I found said to hold your compass at the right size and move it over. That doesn't work on euclidthegame, and wasn't part of the original Greek compass and straightedge protocol. I almost gave up on understanding this construction, and thought about telling students they could skip this one, since our book does it the easy way too.

People say believing you can do something helps you do it, but I often succeed right after giving up. Ornery, I guess. I doodled a bit, and realized that thinking about a parallelogram was the key. After that, I was able to solve it quickly. I want to share my solution here. (Turns out, this idea was in the comments at euclidthegame, I just hadn't seen it.)

The idea is to make a line segment congruent and parallel to AB, with C as one endpoint of the new segment. If you imagine making a parallelogram with the old segment and the new one, and if you know that diagonals of a parallelogram intersect at their midpoints, it becomes relatively straightforward.

1. Sketching parallelogram ABDC, 
2. We know that we can construct the diagonal BC, 
3. And find its midpoint (E). 
4. Then make a ray from A through E, 
5. And a circle centered at E through A. 
6. Where that circle and ray meet will be D.  (Because E is now the midpoint of AD.)
7. CD is the translated line segment we wanted.

 Lovely.

The students won't have enough information when they get to this construction in the book (chapter 1) to do it the right way. We'll have to wait until chapter 4, where they will find out why those diagonals bisect each other. I sure am glad to know that ahead of time.


Planning the Course
We will be meeting from 8 to 11:35 am four days a week. Who is going to get there on time at 8am if they don't have to? So I will start with a quiz every day. If they don't do well, they can retake it (new questions, same topics) outside of class time. [So a real sleepyhead could still ace the quizzes, even if they came late. But that will take some serious dedication. That's cool.]

Then I'll do my usual combination of lecture, pairwork, groupwork, and guided discussion from 8:15 to 9:45. After they take a break they will have lab time. Partly because I don't believe anyone can concentrate for 3 1/2 hours in a regular classroom, and partly because I think they really need to get their hands on some of these tools. I'll have geoboards and dot paper to record their geoboard results. I'll be using most of Henri Picciotto's lovely Geometry Labs book. (Free. Thank you, Henri!) And they'll be using both euclidthegame and geogebra to do their constructions. Lab projects are 20% of their grade. They'll have to do constructions, geoboard activities, proofs, and one activity of their choice.

Anyone teaching geometry who'd like more details, please ask. And anyone who would like to share tips, I'm all ears.