This week was really cool. We had very little homework, and we spent most of our time just learning. The kinds of classes that I like are the ones where you interactively learn things, and it isn't really material based like tons of tests and homework etc. Being a math oriented person, I often feel like I understand the material well, and that having a 45 minute assignment over it is preposterous. I realize that some people are stupid and need lots of homework to help them understand what the heck is going on, but I feel that I am not one of those people. So, I really appreciate that we often don't have homework. And on top of that, I learned just as much as I normally would.
The subject of this week was all about derivatives. I totally understand these and I feel awesome about them. Derivatives are all about the slope of the tangent line at a point in a function, and this is super visual. It really makes a lot of sense taking a graph and drawing the tangent lines on it, and seeing how it all works. I think the whole concept of finding a function just to see the slope of the tangent line any point of another function is a bit arbitrary. While it is incredibly interesting to me, it just seems like something not very important. Graphing is all about x’s and y’s. I don’t understand how suddenly is all about x’s y’s and (f(x+h)-f(x))/h’s. Mr. C knows what he is doing however, and I suppose that I will just trust his judgment.
We did a laboratory this week. It focused on the graphs of f’(x) and how they relate to the original. This lab was super helpful and jam-packed with plenty of light bulb moments. When going through the packet, everything seemed to start making sense, like how the f’x graph is negative as f is decreasing and f’x is above the axis when f is increasing. I can now just draw an f’x graph looking at the graph of the original.
The subject of this week was all about derivatives. I totally understand these and I feel awesome about them. Derivatives are all about the slope of the tangent line at a point in a function, and this is super visual. It really makes a lot of sense taking a graph and drawing the tangent lines on it, and seeing how it all works. I think the whole concept of finding a function just to see the slope of the tangent line any point of another function is a bit arbitrary. While it is incredibly interesting to me, it just seems like something not very important. Graphing is all about x’s and y’s. I don’t understand how suddenly is all about x’s y’s and (f(x+h)-f(x))/h’s. Mr. C knows what he is doing however, and I suppose that I will just trust his judgment.
We did a laboratory this week. It focused on the graphs of f’(x) and how they relate to the original. This lab was super helpful and jam-packed with plenty of light bulb moments. When going through the packet, everything seemed to start making sense, like how the f’x graph is negative as f is decreasing and f’x is above the axis when f is increasing. I can now just draw an f’x graph looking at the graph of the original.