This week we started chapter 7. The first few days I was kind of confused with it, like when we had a sub and were trying to do the worksheet no one knew if they were doing it right or not and neither did I. It seemed like a kind of difficult concept but was possible to understand if I just knew which was right and which was wrong. Then we had a snow day which is always helpful when it comes to math.. Not really, but I wasn't complaining obviously. Then when we came back and learned what was right and what was wrong that we were doing I felt better about it all and felt like I understood it pretty well. Going into the quiz on Friday I was feeling good about it but when I had the quiz in front of me I just kind of ran into a wall in my mind. Like I guess it just wasn't what I was expecting to be on it and I was really lost, we haven't gotten the grades for it but I already know I probably didn't do well on it just based off the answers I got and how much I struggled to figure things out. I feel like if I got a chance to do a Mastery on this quiz I could understand it a lot better because I feel like I did understand it, it was just the quiz that really screwed with my thinking.
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This week just dealt with more of the beginning of chapter 6. Like I said last week the beginning of Chapter 6 was pretty easy for me, the slope field stuff was pretty easy to follow so this week wasn't too bad for me but as chapter 6 went on it just got worse and worse. It was pretty weird because we started off with 6.2 and then went back to 6.1 but both of the sections were pretty easy for me so it didn't bother me too much. The slope field concept was pretty difficult to mess up, it was basically just finding the slope for the lines and marking them down. We took the first quiz of chapter 6 on Friday and it went pretty well for me, I thought it was pretty easy. It made me feel comfortable with chapter 6 and made me think it would be an easy going chapter, but I was wrong.. The rest of chapter 6 was definitely a struggle for me, just doing more with the U substitution and everything really made it difficult for me and I don't know I was just lost. I did okay on the chapter 6 test multiple choice portion because it is always easier since i get choices to choose from, but the free response part of it did not go so hot which wasn't surprising to me.
On Monday we didn't have school and we were supposed to finish the chapter 5 test that day so it gave us an extra day to prepare right? Well that day off didn't really help me too much, it really just made me forget more of what we were doing the week before. So probably like a lot of the other kids in our class I didn't really take advantage of an extra day to study for the second part of the test. In result I did not do as well as I did on the first part of the test which I wasn't happy about but it happens just have to learn from it. The rest of the week was spent learning about chapter 6 which seemed pretty straight forward at first. But as we learned more I started getting more confused on things, there just seemed to be so much to know in chapter 6 it was hard to keep track of it all. I always struggled with the U-Substitution in the beginning of the year when we learned about it so nothing really changed when it came to the chapter 6 part of U-Substitution. I did feel like I under stood it a little better in chapter 6 but it was still difficult for me to comprehend. I thought we were done with it a while ago but when it came back into things I wasn't too excited about it.
This week we started Chapter 5 and after coming out of Chapter 4 it seemed a lot easier and more simplistic. There didn't seem to be too much to it and it was quite straight forward and easy to understand, so far that is. Of course after Chapter 4 and Optimization I think anything would seem easy to me. I just need some more practice with Chapter 5 and I think I will be good to go. Although after this three day weekend and a day off pretty much for the MLK day schedule it may be a little fuzzy for me getting back into it, that tends to happen to me after long weekends or breaks. I Think we have a quiz tomorrow which should be interesting to see if I am fresh on all the stuff in those sections by then, because I know it will be fuzzy coming back into it. It looks like we do have a practice quiz to do today though which will hopefully remind me and help me get back into the swing of things. As much as I love snow days they really do mess me up especially when it comes to math class because that's just one extra day of being away from everything and not working on math so that when I come back it seems like everything is brand new to me when we already learned it last week.
As you can tell by the title this week did not go so well for me in the math department. Optimization did not come easy to me and it still doesn't seem easy to me in any way. I've always struggled with story problems throughout my math career where you have to read the problem and find the certain method that you have to use to solve it. Optimization is story problems with a twist. It is something that back when you looked at these type of problems in previous math classes you'd think something is wrong with them or they're written wrong. I still don't have a great understanding of how to do many of the problems. I think it would help if we went over some more examples as a class so that I can be sure of how each problem should be solved. It is good that we get to have a retake on the quiz over optimization because it was one of the worst quizzes I've ever taken. I don't fail quizzes, and when I rarely do I usually somewhat know that it's going to be bad but never expect that I failed, but that one I wasn't surprised when I got the score back. Although I know I wasn't alone which makes me feel better.
This week was the beginning of the new trimester which I expected things would probably just get harder, and I was partially correct. We started off the week learning about curve sketching which actually wasn't difficult and was easy to understand. Although Chapter 4.1-4.3 quiz was pretty difficult for me, even though I did score well on it I was unsure of a few things on it. I think the long break away from the stuff took a toll on me for the quiz but the review before hand helped a little which helped me get a better grade I believe. I think I got a better understanding of my mistakes after I got my quiz back and was able to talk with my friends about it though. So I felt better about the start of chapter 4. Then we started talking about optimization at the end of the week and I didn't really get a great understanding of what it was until the next week so I didn't have much of an opinion on it.
This week we talked about the last three sections of chapter three, 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9. They were pretty straight forward sections and the assignments to go along with them weren't too difficult either. Although we did have a quiz on Wednesday over U substitution, Chain Rule and Implicit Differentiation which was a bit tough for me and it showed on my score. We haven't gotten them back yet so I haven't been able to really analyze what I got wrong but I got a quick glance at the end of class Friday and it looked like I had a lot of minus halves so a lot of minor mistakes that I'll have to learn from. I think quite a few people in the class struggled on it so I'm not alone on that but I'd definitely like to learn what I did wrong considering we have the Chapter 3 Test coming this upcoming week. Chapter Three has felt like three chapters put into one so I feel like the Chapter Test will be pretty difficult considering all the information we've learned in this chapter. I'm hoping the review will help me prepare for it well enough.
This week we learned more about derivatives and the chain rule. The first couple of days were spent reviewing over the chain rule and learning about U substitution. U substitution was a little confusing for me and it still is, just the whole process of figuring it out is tough for me to understand. Then Wednesday we had class meetings which took up about the whole hour so no math was done that day. Thursday we had a mini quiz over the chain rule which I did pretty well on and thought was an easy quiz. Overall the scores weren't too great so we spent the whole day Friday working more on the chain rule and getting more practice doing it which included a worksheet. I already had a pretty good understanding of it but more practice never hurts. Monday I think we will be learning something new so that should be interesting, hopefully everyone understands the chain rule better by now since we've spent so much time on it.
This week we ventured further into the land of fun and derivatives :). On Monday we learned how to take the derivatives of trig. functions, this wasn't too difficult of a concept to get down. The rules were pretty straight forward and simple just like the trig. identities we learned about last year. Then on Tuesday we got time to work on the assignments and clear up any problems we had. I really do like that part about this class, that we actually have time to work on our assignments in class so we can ask questions and get help from others if we need it. A lot of other math classes are just lessons all hour then hand out the homework and do it all by yourself every night, that gets difficult when you don't completely understand the topic you are working on. This led to Wednesday where we had a quiz over 3.3 and 3.5 which I did pretty well on, just had a few minor mistakes that I could have prevented easily. Then on Thursday and Friday we worked on the composition of functions and more importantly the Chain Rule. The Chain Rule is also a pretty easy concept that came to me easy so I am confident going forward and learning more about different derivatives.
This week I learned that the 4 step process is really not the way to go. Here is an example of what not to do:
1. Find f(x+h) 2. Write f(x+h)-f(x) and simplify 3. Write f(x+h)-f(x) h 4. Take lim f(x+h)-f(x) h→0 h Instead we learned a much easier method where you just apply the many rules of Derivatives to the equation and it gives you the answer much quicker than the 4 step process. For example take the equation 3x^2+5, first you take the exponent of the first part of the equation, which is 2, and you put it out front with the 3 and multiply them together, this will give you 6x^2. Then you have to take the exponent itself and subtract it by 1, so in this case you would get an exponent of 1 which means it would just read 6x. Last you would take the constant of the equation, which is 5, and turn it into zero. So the derivative for this example function would be just 6x. A lot easier than going through the 4 step process and taking up a whole page showing all of your simplifying and calculating. It is still important to know the 4 step process so you can use it as a fall back in case you can't seem to figure an equation out with the rules method. |
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March 2016
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