I have made a big effort to work on this concept of "what the heck does a graph mean?" and I think I'm making headway but it can be frustrating.
And even though we use graphing calculators to quickly look at the data, I still require a lot of graphing by hand using lots of graph paper. I don't believe a student can really learn to graph until they get down-and-dirty and put it all down on paper.
Graphing calculators also don't do a great job with everybody's nemesis, the piecewise-defined function. It can be done, but it takes a lot of work to make it happen. Of course, those don't arise often in chemistry, I imagine.
Obviously, you haven't seen some of the chemistry lab reports that I've seen. Those piecewise-continuous functions may not have shown up when I did the lab, but they are definitely present in the student reports.
For the record, the pennies experiment upthread was definitely piecewise continuous and would be appropriate for the chemistry unit were I to do that one first instead of physics.
