One view of a "hook".

I know I am not supposed to do this but I delivered a lesson on Friday.  I showed the class how to calculate residuals and root mean square error.  I did it at my cooperating teacher’s request and we both knew for the sake of the class I could turn to him at any point.  Basically the department had a worksheet that the Algebra 2 classes were going to work on during class and I was going to walk them through it augmenting it with the residuals and RMSE.  Between periods my CT gave me pointers and the lesson got better and better but the real lesson for me was when my CT gave the exact same lesson to the AP stats class (weird coincidence but a gift for me).  He was able to walk the seniors through it in 20 minutes with a super smooth delivery.  He admitted that it would have taken him a whole period with Algebra 2.  The beauty of his delivery was that he wasn’t really talking about residuals and errors rather he related how lazy he was and how he just wanted some way to calculate some values and know how accurate they would be.  This was his hook, I did not have a hook; I just gave the facts to the students.  His hook was not some inviting, senior in high school approved hook but it put the whole concept in such straight forward language I think it just eased everyone into the lesson.  This is a skill I need to be aware of and develop.