Some days...

...you just feel a bit hopeless.

It's like, if I can't even teach them this, what the heck am I even doing here?

My 6th period averaged a 25% on an area question. Here were the questions:

a) Find the area of a parallelogram with a base of 8 in. and a height of 9 in.

b) Find the area of a kite with diagonals 12 ft and 15 ft long.

c) Find the area of this triangle (they are given a picture of a triangle with a base of 16 m and a height of 7 m).

They have a formula list given to them, but they aren't told which formulas are which. But as long as they choose the correct formula, these are plug and chug problems. There are only 5 area formulas to choose from in the formula list. Only one of them has "d" for diagonals.

The formulas are:

A = bh

A = (1/2)bh

A = d1d2

A = (1/2)h(b1+b2)

A = (1/2) ap

They're all right there.

I don't know how I could possible make this problem any easier unless I told them exactly which formula to use and showed them how to plug it in.