Remember That Time I Thought I Made A Mistake, But I Was Wrong???

Several of you are going to want to thank Anna for her polite, kind, and pleasant demeanour this afternoon. Here's why.....It seems as though in my haste to create a nice little test for you all to practice up your trig./solving/unit circle skills, I probably neglected to do any questions (or assign any, for that matter), that have anything to do with radian measures as decimals. Question 10 on your tests did indeed instruct you to provide your solutions as radian measures, but as Anna so politely stated, "It sort of doesn't seem right to have to learn to do that for the first time on the test." I agree. Question 8, I believe, also had an instruction to use the interval [0, 2pi]. In that case, I have more of a leg to stand on after looking specifically at the answer key to Exercise #4, but the important points are thus:

1. If you feel like you got a raw deal somewhere, sometime, the easy thing to do is complain and be grumpy and never address the issue with someone who can make a difference. The hard thing to do is to state your case convincingly while retaining your composure and some measure of grace. Anna did all of that, admirably.

2. As students, you all have a right to be evaluated fairly and consistently. I take that pretty seriously.

3. You need to go on to your post-secondary studies with the idea that a positive attitude and a sense of humour are at least as important as pure aptitude. The world is full of successful people who understand this very well...

Hope to see you tomorrow to deliver the good news in person (and change a few of your test scores)...

Until then...

RM

Friday Feb 8th

We started class today with our first mental math. Then Mr. Maksymchuk handed out a package of useful information on circular functions, which is our first unit. The page I found particularly interesting was the page listing some common mistakes students make and then the right answers. There were also learning techniques, like concept maps, word circles, and LAPS sheets. Then we went over questions 6 and 5 from our homework, as the slides beside and below show. For question 5, we first did it by converting from radians to degrees, then converting the answer back to radians, but then we realized it would be less complicated to do the entire question in radians.

The next thing we learned in class was how to post on the blog. We will be taking turns being the scribe. The scribe's responsibility is to post any notes from the day's class, then add relevant information. As far as uploading the day's notes, Mr. Maksymchuk will save the slides as notebook slides (which we don't have the proper software to open), pdf files (which we can view on any computer with Adobe Reader), and as png files. These image files (the png) are the ones that we can uplaod to the blog. We sign in to the blog, then click the new post link in the top right hand corner. There's an option to upload a picture. Browse to my computer, rsfiles, coursework, math, block four grade 12 precalculus, and find the images, which will be labeled by date and information. After we add the images, we add text and publish our amazing blog post.

There was no homework assigned for the weekend. Mr. Maksymchuk is going to be away on Monday, so be prepared to do some reading and more questions in the exercises.