Sunday, February 24, 2008

BOB.1 [Circular Functions]

Well now that I'm back from my Kenora basketball trip, and once again have computer access I thought it would be an oppourtune moment to do my BOB post for this unit. Alas, I find myself here doing exactly that. BOBbing!

Well I'll start with the bad, and work my way towards the good, seeing as how it also goes like that in terms of chronological order from the beginning of the unit to the end :)

The hardest part of this unit was definitely the very beginning. Now this had alot to do with the fact that I missed the first two days of class, having been sick with the flu (>_<). So by the time I had returned to the class on Wednesday (that being the third day of class) I had basically no idea of what was going on. However, with some help from my classmates, and a couple nights spent awake much later then I should have been, I managed to figure my way around the first couple days of work, and catch up to everyone else.

On the flip side, the easiest part of the unit, has probably been the memorization, of the patterns in the unit circle (which eventually lead to the memorization of the unit circles basic values for sine, cosine, tangent, etc.) I found this rather easy, because all I had to do, was draw the unit circle over the weekend, without referring to my notes. How simple is that? So after drawing the unit circle, probably 7 or 8 times over the weekend, taking about 3-5 mins each time (with that time frame getting smaller as I went along,) I managed to get a fairly good grasp of basic angles locations on the unit circle, and the trigonometric function values of those said angles.

Overall this unit wasn't very difficult to understand or grasp (at least for me.) I'd say the hardest parts of it all were related to the memorization of certain things (like what A,B,C,D mean in graphing f(x) = AsinB(x-C) + D). I also found it somewhat difficult at times to remember what to do when adding radicals or similar things that we learned in previous grades, and I haven't had to use in awhile. Besides that I found much of what we did within my abilities to understand and put to use in the exercises we've been assigned.

Well I think that about sums it up for this BOB. I hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend and I also hope everyone enjoys the rest of today :) I shall see everyone on Monday!

Ciao!
~Justus

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