My best mistake this week was thinking trigonometry would be completely new and confusing but I realized it actually connects to things I’ve learned before, just with a few new added ideas. We’re using SOH CAH TOA to figure out sides and angles in right triangles, which felt familiar. What’s new is that instead of just using the Pythagorean Theorem, we now write it as x² + y² = r², which helps when we’re working with triangles in a coordinate plane. That part threw me off at first, but now it makes more sense. I’ve learned how to find missing sides and also how to figure out angles using inverse trig functions. What helped me was seeing that even though there’s new language and setups, it’s all built on the same triangle ideas we’ve used before. This mistake of overestimating its difficulty helped me realize I shouldn’t get overwhelmed by new terms, they’re often just new versions of things I already understand. I understand the trignometry concepts that i had previously learned better now, and am able to learn from speeding too fast into automatically thinking I can’t do it, and calming down to finish the question correctly.
