This week, we reviewed factoring. I haven’t always been the best at factoring in grade 10 so it was a little tough for me to do the review because of how I couldn’t remember my method and also, I wasn’t the best at it in the first place.

I learned something new this week which made factoring less scary and difficult for me: the box method. It’s basically just a visual way to factor a trinomial.

Let’s use as an example

So first you would insert the first term () and the last term () into the first and last spaces in a four square box 

Next, we need to find the product of these two terms which ALSO is the sum of the middle term of the equation (). What I do is just make a list like this:

(we have to find the product of -3)

and

Now we have to decide which one of these multiplication questions adds to 2 (the middle term)

and 

So now, we are going to use these two terms and insert them into the box

Now, we for each row, we find what the numbers have in common

Now we use the numbers on the outside of the box and put them into brackets and we have our final answer: