Sunday, March 9, 2008

BOB Version 2: Transformations

At first, I didn't realize until later that our unit, Transformations, placed a huge emphasis on graphing. From graphing square roots to graphing absolute values to graphing reciprocals to graphing inverses and the like, with an added mix of stretching and compressing the various graphs, I spent hours practicing the art of graphing.

After figuring out how to graph absolute values, I found it easy compared to graphing reciprocals because of the number of things I had to do and remember, but nonetheless, I had acquired the skills needed to do those...I hope. I found the reciprocal functions to be sort of cool though, like, they look like people if you graphed them a certain way... E.g., f(x) = 1/(x^2-4) (Also, the graph on one of March 3rd or 4th's slides looks like a DNA strand unwinding...)

Reminiscing on my progress through this course, I remembered the "STRETCHES BEFORE TRANSLATIONS" rule (as being bold and caps locked by Mr. K on his SMARTBoard during one of his lessons), which eliminated a lot of confusion related to the decision-making part of which parameters of a translated, compressed/stretched function should be thought out first. When I finally understood that rule, and with the help of Mr. K, I felt that this should be included into my BOB and that it should also be merited as one of my EUREKA! moments.

Although I'm not yet comfortable in writing the test as of yet (but I will be later), I feel the need to look over and redo more of my questions in the exercises (because practice makes perfect), as symmetry and reflections are a bit vague in my memory...

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