Life is good here in room 510

Life is good here in room 510. Lots of learning, lots of math. How can it get better? How about better class participation grades! Everybody wants those free points each week. Common reasons for missing class participation points:

1) Unexcused absence

2) No dry erase marker

3) No computer (or computer not charged)

What we’re up to this week:

Calculus 3: We’re about to see the word “parallelpiped” for the first time, which I swear is a real word that you can use in Scrabble, and we’re going to see how triple scalar products apply to it. Scalar is a real word, too.

Calculus 2: Definite and indefinite integrals using antiderivatives of common functions! All that good stuff from the first semester of Calc 1, only backwards and with scarier symbols.

Calculus 1: The Squeeze Theorem, which I am not making up and which is really called that. We’ll prove it using geometry and trigonometry, and then see how to apply it to figure out some very tricky limits. Also, a review of logarithms along with a bunch of extra logarithm assignments, because today everybody proved that they’d forgotten all about logarithms.

7th Grade Scholar’s Prep: Negative numbers, only we’re going to make them make sense and feel intuitive. No more memorizing like a dozen different rules for doing arithmetic with negative numbers.

Precalculus: More probability. Now we’re starting to see some histograms, tables, Venn diagrams, and other fun stuff.

Until next time,

Mr. Hermann