Perhaps we'll spend some time going over the vocabulary. Then, I'll have her graph a line and take different points on the line and plug in the x and y. I think she may see all those letters in the equation and just freaks out.

She really had a tough time with integers, negative integers. She kept saying you can't have less that nothing. I finally made a fake checkbook ledger and showed how an account can have less than zero dollars, a negative balance.

What is a real world application for y = mx + b?

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein