Month: January 2022

Surprisingly, pre-calc 11 has went by pretty fast. Today, we just finished off our last unit test and are now going to take the upcoming week to study for our final. That being said, I have reflected on this semester and have compiled a list of what I think are the 5 most important things I learnt this semester, in order 1-5.

#1: The factoring box.

For most people in the class, they probably have known how to do this since grade 10. But however, for some reason this concept never clicked for me. Meaning factoring always ended up taking me longer than most and required me to think extra hard trying to find other ways to do it. This year, in grade 11, this concept was re explained to me in class and it started making a lot of sense. The “box method” saves me a lot of time on tests and while just completing daily homework and I find it doesn’t take much thinking and now that i’ve gotten comfortable with the concept I find myself not even really thinking necessarily and just doing. Without learning the box method in the first unit, basically all the units following until trigonometry would have been very difficult as it required a lot of factoring.

 

#2: Rotational angles

This was a new concept for us this year, as last year in trigonometry we just did angles in quadrant one.  But this year as we started using all four quadrants we introduced this new concept and term “rotational angle”. Basically it is the angle that is symmetrical to the angle in quadrant one and will have the same reference angle, but we are measuring the angle it rotated from position one in quadrant 1 to quadrant 2,3,4. Depending on what quadrant it is in you would calculate it differently. For example in quadrant 2 you would do 180-refrence angle. I think that was important to learn because as we keep going in math (pre-calc 12), this will keep coming up but get harder so I think it was good that we started it this year and i ended up grasping the concept, although not right at first.

#3: Rational expressions

I found this unit to end up being my favourite unit we did. For me it was not overly challenging but I liked the attention to detail you had to have because, like most things in math one little mistake and the whole question would be done but I found especially in this unit. I chose it as one of my top 5 because it aloud me to continue to better my factoring skills and become much faster at them then I had been before, which will be beneficial for me as I continue on in math. I also just found it made a lot of sense for me, sometimes in math we do steps in a question where I don’t see why but everything in this unit just made sense.

#4: Rational expressions; inequalities

Unlike #3, this was not a concept that came easily to me, or even made sense at all. And that is why I added it in. These types of inequalities really challenged me. It required to stay in for a couple lunches and spend lots of time after school studying and trying to figure them out and master them. I am not sure if these will show up again in math, but that isn’t why I added it in my top 5. I added it in because they showed me things don’t always come easy but you can’t just give up. There was so many times I just wanted to stop and hope I figure it out on the test or go and eat lunch with my friends, but that would have been giving up and it showed me that with hard work and determination I can do it. And I hope to  carry that attitude and drive with me throughout the end of high school  and to post secondary.

#5: Graphing and finding the stretch.

This is a concept that took me a while to first figure out and as we go back to study for our final this concept just isn’t fully coming back to me. But I find this quite interesting how each number just has a spot in the equation. I know that with some more review it will come back to me. I found that just going back and reading my blog post on this topic already has started to help, because it is me explaining to me. Why I added it in was because I remember very clearly this was the last thing I needed to learn before the unit test and for some reason it wasn’t clicking, but I couldn’t just let it go as it was a very important part of the material I needed to know. So I took the time the specifically focus on this and getting a classmate to explain it to me as well as Ms. Burton and then I took that home and practiced for an hour or two and ended up getting it, even though it felt so impossible.

And those are my top 5 things I learnt this year in Pre-Calc 11, some for math reasons and some for more personal growth reasons. I really enjoyed this course and am excited to continue taking Pre-Calc 12!

 

This week in pre calc we started learning sine/cosine law. Learning these laws made trigonometry much easier and faster to do. The laws consist of different formulas made up to find either a missing side length or a missing angle in a triangle.

Sine law: For sine law to work you need to have an angle and the side length facing each other at least once, because without this you won’t have enough information to fill into the formula and will have too many unknowns, making it impossible. Another thing to be aware of is you need to check for the second triangle in quadrant II. How you do this is you take what the angle would be in quadrant II (180-__), and then add it up with your other angles. If it goes over 180 degrees you will reject the answer because we know that doesn’t make sense and can’t be possible.

Formula:

You don’t need to use all three options when solving for either the side length or the angle though, you need one fraction fully filled out as well as your fraction with your unknown.

Applied:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cosine Law:  Cosine law is a mesh of trig as well as the pythagorean theorem and you will see that when you look at it. Something to remember when using cosine law is when you’re solving for a side length, at the end, you need to square root your answer as well as b^2. Just like in pythagorean theorem your second last line of work needs to be square rooted because you can’t have what you’re solving for squared. When you’re solving for an angle using cosine law it is the equation to solve for a side length but rearranged algebraically. Something to note when solving for an angle is, when putting it into your calculator you need to put brackets on the top line of work as well as around the second line, just so your calculator doesn’t get confused and accidentally give you the wrong answer or an error.

Formula:

Applied:

These two new laws that we have learnt, in my opinion has made trig this year much easier and make much more sense for me. It’s just a matter of labeling everything properly, which if you weren’t sure how, you label the side length across from the angle the same thing. So if angle A was facing a side length it would now become side a. It’s more a thing of punching it into your calculator properly.

This week in pre calc 11 we reviewed trigonometry and started on our new parts of it. This week we focused on finding angles in ALL quadrants and not just one quadrant, meaning we have more than just one answer, where as before when we would only find the angle in the one quadrant we would just have one angle.

We also learnt a new acronym that will help us know if the ratio is going to be positive or negative in what quadrant. The acronym is “All Students Take Calculus”.  This makes solving questions a little faster, because now when solving for theta we have more than just one answer, so it is useful to know if it is going to be positive or negative and will save you some time.

Here is the acronym “All Students Take Calculus” in the quadrants. What it is showing you is that in quadrant one all ratios are going to be positive. So no matter what ratio or numbers you use the answer will always be positive. In quadrant two all sine ratios will be positive but everything else will be negative. In quadrant three all tan ratios will be positive while the rest are negative. And in quadrant four all cosine ratios will be positive.  This acronym is good to know because if you for example find an angle in quadrant three that’s tangent and it’s negative well then you know you did something wrong and can go review what you did.

Those were the big things we learnt this week. Some simple things but will make trigonometry much easier if you know how to do them.