In my opinion, I am slowly understanding the basics of polynomials. For example, I am good at identifying monomials, binomials and trinomials. I also learned how to simplify polynomial expressions. An example of this is doing (5a-9b-2c) + (c – 7b – 3a). Before I do anything, I add a 1 to the C to make it easier for myself and make sure I don’t forget to add a 1. First, I look at adding all the a’s, b’s and c’s. Then, once I have added up all the variables, I make sure that all the negatives and positives are in their respective spots. After that, it is rather easy, as I just add all the numbers as it is a regular addition or subtraction question. Another question that came up was to arrange the variables in descending order. The question was 6W²+ 9w + 2w³ –  5. The answer is, , 2w³ + 6w² + 9w – 5. The answer for us is not important, rather is it more important why the answer is what it is. I found this answer because i put all the variables in order, then just followed it by putting the base with it. In other words, if you can identify the exponents on the numbers, you will be able to do this question pretty easily.

This week was a little bit different than the other weeks. We completed our test and started our new unit in trigonometry. I am doing pretty well and feeling good with my confidence. When my teacher is explaining the latest concepts, it is pretty easy for me to understand them, at least easier than exponents. I feel that when I am not in a rush to get it done and take my time with my work, I can usually get it done. Even though I’m slow with it now, my goal is to get a little bit better at it every day, leading up to the unit test in a couple of weeks. I think my strengths in this unit are labelling all the sides of a triangle, and using my calculator to find the “sin”, cosine and tangent. I think I need to work on finding the nearest tenth on an indicated side of an individual triangle. But, like with everything, I will only get better with practice. SOH COH TOA is something that has helped me a lot also.

This week was a good week for me, in my opinion. I say this because I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know in grade 9; to my surprise, they weren’t super tricky. I believe this was the case because I was very focused in class and committed to ensuring I knew what I was doing. In other words, I would try not to get distracted and make sure that I finish my work on time. I learned how to find the LCM of two numbers as well as the GCF of two numbers. Before coming into this class, I probably couldn’t do that if you asked me to. To find the GCF or LCM,  I learned that you have to use prime factorization (which is something that I think I am very good at and know how to use it) to be able to find them. If I didn’t know how to find the prime factorization, finding the LCM and the GCF would be a long shot. Although I feel good about this class, I still have a lot of work to do if I want to complete my goal of getting a B.

(two photos in one!)

Although I didn’t learn many new things, I felt good about this week in math because it was a good refresher. In other words, it made me remember many things I did last year that I forgot about. Usually, math is not one of my favourite and strongest subjects but so far, I am feeling pretty confident about what I have been doing so far in math. the work hasn’t been too complex, and I have been able to understand what the teacher is telling me. This week I learned about product law, which was something that I hadn’t heard of before this class. Other than it being a pretty cool concept, it is something that will not only help with this unit and this class, but it will help me with my math as I go further along in my high school career.

Math is a very useful tool to have, whether it is in school, at work, or even sometimes at the grocery store. Some examples that I can come up with are finding the prices and getting the best value for your goods, understanding loans, mortgages and even sometimes how much you are paying for school. Another way that math is super useful is for sports. Coincidentally, baseball is my favourite sport; unfortunately, there is a lot of math involved. Some of the scenarios where math is used in baseball are calculating your batting average, your earned run average, and your fielding percentage. In fact, my coaches sometimes make us do a little bit of the math to figure out our stats! Another very common situation where math can come in handy is when you are cooking or baking. When doing so, you are forced to calculate and find out the proper amount of flour, sugar, baking powder, etc. Especially in baking, you must get the right measurements because if you fail to do so, it could result in your food not being tasty, or even sometimes not edible. The last scenario where math is super important is when you are traveling. In fact, when I was travel to the states, we had to calucuate how long (and how many km) it would take us to drive to the hotel to the baseball field. Math is surprisingly very helpful and you even sometimes do math without realizing it.