MTT

Completing the square is hard because it has a lot of small steps that have to be put together, and it’s hard to remember what you’re doing unless you understand it well (and you practice). Sam Shah at Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere shared his successful strategy for teaching this. It doesn’t look flashy, but if you read through it, you’ll see that it’s a very careful sequence: starting with easy stuff, and building little by little the completing the square algorithm (and all along the way, the students are doing the work–it’s not him doing a show-and-tell lesson). And hey, it worked!