This week, we learned all about the shell method. I personally learned about how horrible I am at drawing solids of revolution. I just can't do it. I think I understand all of the concepts fairly well, however there is still a little bit of confusion as to which method I should use when. I'm not really sure about when to use the shell method versus the washer method. If we could go over that one more time in class before we take the quiz that would be great. I'll leave you with my attempt at drawing a solid of revolution. As you can see, it's not very good.

This week we took a quiz over the first few chapters of chapter 7. It went really well for me I think. We didn't get it graded yet, but from what I experienced while taking it I had a general understanding of everything we were doing. The last problem on the first page I had a little bit of trouble with but other than that I did totally fine on the entire thing. We had a sub on Thursday and Friday when we started to work on the washer method. I don't think very many people fully understood it after the video she showed and I was absent on Friday so I'm not really sure how that went but it seemed to be going fine.

I don't mean to bash on your assignment, but at least for me, the blog post has become more of a chore than a learning tool. I'm going to be blunt, it's not something that I use to reflect about what I learned, it's something I forget about then do last minute for the grade. I think it has become like that for most of the members of the class, seeing as about 3/4 of us forgot about it entirely this week, I just wanted to let you know how a lot of us feel about the blogs at this point in the school year. That being said, I'm fairly certain I did well on the quiz. So yeah!

This week was more slope fields, integrals and antidifferentiation. We integrated with and without U substitution. We integrated using x and y seperating the variables. The week was cut short by a snowday on Friday, but we had a test on Thursday that we were supposed to finish on Friday. I hope I didnt forget all of the material over the three day weekend. It is very possible that I did, but I am holding out hope. It is possible that we will have another snowday or two next week as the low temperature on Thursday is -13 and we are supposed to get three inches of snow on Monday. Who knows. This picture perfectly embodies how it feels to live in Michigan this winter.

This week in Calc, we did more integrals, and we were introduced to the idea of slope fields. Slope fields give you a good way to visualize a function from its antiderivative. They can also help you figure out integrals that would otherwise be impossible. We took a quiz on the same topic. I think I did fairly well on it. I finished pretty quickly although I couldn't for the life of me remember that the antiderivative of lnx is 1/x. I probably will not forget that anymore. Other than that I think the quiz went well. We then worked on differentiating for x and y. That led to a conversation about the use of c and k both for arbitrary constants. To illustrate that it doesn't matter what variables one uses, I did algebra with smiley faces to prove my point.

This week we worked on antidifferentiation. It honestly felt really cool to work on some of the long complicated problems. You'll work for a while not see anything, and then all the sudden you see some trick or some trigonometric identity that unlocks the rest of the problem and then you're done! It's oddly exciting for a math problem. It feels very fulfilling once you finish. I feel like didn't learn the material on U substitution for definite integrals. I'll have to look at that part of the chapter more in depth. Although there really aren't that many examples of that kind of problem in the book, maybe I'll ask you for help. I'll leave you with a picture of a fun problem we did the other day.

This week, we learned the fundamental theorem of calculus. This theorem essentially states that for every function, there is both a derivative, and an antiderivative, or an integral. I don't feel like I learned the first part of chapter 5 very well. I did very poorly on the quiz. You said that was to be expected, but I really did poorly. I will have to go back and relearn the sections before any other tests we take. So in conclusion, I think that 5.1-5.3 went poorly, but 5.4 went very well.

At this point in the year, I think I have written an entire blog post and then deleted it by accident at least 5 times. I can learn complicated calculus, but I can't learn to save my work. I accidentally deleted the entire post from my phone today because I quit the app before it was finished posting and before I had saved. But basically what I talked about was that I feel really good coming out of chapter 4. I did well on the test. I think I did well on the project. I did poorly on one quiz, but I did a mastery, and that helped me learn how to optimize. So chapter 4 went pretty well for me. So far chapter five seems to be going well too. I understand RAM. I think it will be really interesting to learn everything else in the chapter. I missed part of the day on friday, but I took a picture of Shane's notes so I can teach myself.