The new chapter has to do with finding the surface area of geometric solids. Started with prisms, and that involves finding the area of the polygon at the base.
We had several lessons on finding the area of polygons back in Chapter 5 (this is chapter 10).
I was surprised at how they handled this on the first set of homework. Maybe not so much surprised as disheartened. On so many papers I see the evidence of the same pattern:
* I don't remember how to find the area of a polygon.
* It's too much work to look back in the book or at earlier notes.
* I will just copy the answer out of the back of the book (evident because the entire answer is just a number, with no indication they did any actual calculations).
The first point is a bummer but there you go: for those who approach this as "memorize random facts without really understanding why", I can understand that those facts will atrophy pretty quick.
But the second and third ones are even more discouraging. Rather than do even a little work, I will resort to trickery. This homework problem is worth a tiny tiny portion of my grade, but I'm going to take a shortcut here that guarantees I won't really understand anything.
Grumble grumble.
I am very tempted to give a quiz, just to the ones who clearly did the copying, where I ask them the exact same questions.
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