Exam week! Yayyyyyy (sarcasm voice). Nothing went on this week. So I guess I'll tell you about nothing.

Monday, we went into the computer lab to fill out out evaluation sheets for our "post test" but it wasn't really a post test. Just some data Cresswell will use. I was almost proficient in everything (awesome!), except for a few things that I really know how to do, but I just learned how to do them after the quiz/test was over.

Tuesday, we finished up the non-calculator portion to our quiz we took on Friday which seemed fairly easy. I started to understand how to get each part of what we were asked like the asymptotes, concave up/down intervals, intervals of increasing and decreasing, and inflection points all without using a calculator. I really depend on my calculator for a lot, so it was a challenge for me to do this at first, and it's still a little challenging but that's okay. I'm not completely lost when I do it so that's good!

Wednesday, we worked on the exam review and Cresswell answered any questions we had. I felt like the review wasn't terribly tough and I remembered lots of things like how to do limits, which we learned almost at the beginning of the year. The exam review was so helpful, I wouldn't have known what to study besides old tests and quizzes we had. It was nice to have other problems to do that we hadn't seen before.

Thursday, today, we took the exam. I didn't think it was too difficult, but we'll see about what grade I get. I made a stupid mistake on the non-calculator part. I graphed it backwards. What was I thinking? I don't know. I had a memory lapse or something and I forgot how to properly graph an x^3 graph. Oh no :( but hopefully that doesn't impact my exam grade too badly.

This week seemed to go by too fast for me. Cresswell was gone on Monday so all we did was a worksheet that I thought was easy and Tuesday I was on an astronomy field trip to MSU, so when I got back to class on Wednesday I had some catching up to do.

Honestly, I still don't fully understand what we learned on Tuesday that I was taught Wednesday. I had to learn on the go because of the quiz being on Thursday. It helped that Shane was willing to explain section 4.3 to me, but I also had one of my other friends explain it to me so I could try to understand it better. I also didn't get a good understanding of the Mean Value Theorem, but Cresswell showed Shane, Keigan, and I a few examples and that helped me a little bit.

Overall, I'm still a little rocky with this chapter so far, but this is what happened to me last chapter and I ended up doing fairly well on the final test, so I'm really hoping that's what happens this chapter!!

Will attaching a link to a video work on here? I'm about to find out! This video is a video I watched to try and understand what we first learned when chapter 4 was introduced. http://youtu.be/GyQZI_B_dxo

This week seems like a blur! This week all we really did was start chapter 4.
Section 4.1 gave me a little trouble at first but I eventually got the hang of it. I'm not so sure I liked the digital notes. I mean, yes I liked them, but I am one who likes to take a lot of notes to feel like I fully understand what was being taught and with the digital notes, I feel as though we didn't take too many and we only did a few examples. Other than that, I thought that section went okay.
Section 4.2 the first day was fairly easy considering we really didn't do a whole lot. The second day of section 4.2 has stuck with me the most. It was very easy for me to get the whole "find c" thing considering we already learned about anti-derivatives in chapter 3. It's going to be weird for me to admit this. but I actually like doing anti-derivatives. Did I just say I liked something in math? Yeah, I'm surprising myself here! But really, anti-derivatives were easy for me to understand and finding out what "c" is is just adding one more algebraic step like we've all done since Pre-Algebra! Not so hard!
We did an activity today (Friday) that once I got some things explained to me it all just clicked. I thought it was interesting to see how the extrema on the graph of a derivative of a function showed us the values at which the original graph was concave up or concave down. I already knew that the zeros on the derivative graph were the extrema on the original graph and that the derivative could be graphed by using the slopes of the line of the original graph but I didn't realize how much more related the graphs were.
Overall, I felt pretty okay this week with the things that we learned. Of course, though, I don't consider myself very good at them yet, but with more practice I'm sure my understanding will increase!!

The CCC's this week have been very beneficial to me. I like being able to get taught how to do a problem by another student because they can relate to my understanding of the questions.

This week wasn't too bad! We were taught the derivatives of inverse trig functions and also the derivatives of exponentials and logarithms. Although I stumbled a bit with derivatives of inverse trig functions, I thought this week wasn't so bad.

The derivatives of inverse trig function section was difficult at the very start, but as we did the example and I got to understanding it, I thought I did pretty well. All we have to do is plug in the inside function into the derivative of the inverse function and then multiply that by the derivative of the inside function and bam! We have our answer! (After some simplifying of course). So really, this wasn't a hard section for me to understand once I really understood it.

The derivatives of exponentials and logarithms section we did was easy for me! And I am always greatful to have something in math be easy because that doesn't seem to happen all that much! But anyways, the definitions of the different things we were given helped so much on the anti-derivatives worksheet. Instead of guessing how to do the last few problems, we could actually know how to do them. I actually enjoyed finding the derivatives of exponentials and logarithms because the definitions were easy to follow.

Also, these sections helped me come closer to fully understanding chain rule. I was having some difficulty with that, but now I feel quite a bit more comfortable with chain rule and that makes me feel not as panicked as when I didn't understand it at all! This weekend, I am making my mastery videos in hopes of gaining some points back from last Friday's quiz, so we'll see what happens with that!

This picture I have attached is of Sam and I working on making our mastery videos, we had fun doing it together!