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Saturday, October 27, 2018

Calculus Extras...

One of the fun things about learning calculus in high school is that as a student you get to refresh your memory and pull from your memory and create sweat droplets from all the extra work in juggling the things you have to know in addition to the new crazy great topics you are learning at a breakneck speed.

There's algebra! geometry! trigonometry! rational functions! ln x! fractions! It's like all your years bundled up into one. 

My students this year do not as a whole instantaneously remember the trig values in any quadrant of any of the 6 special angles. I am also not doing my daily "IR" quizzes this year (immediate retrieval) because of the other things I am implementing, and I just don't have the time. I am trying to put basic trig questions on many homework sets, but that is not always possible or enough. So, my next attempt is the following: (can download HERE).




 I have created a practice sheet for them to use at home. All triangles are such that they can be reference triangles in Q1. I am hoping that the repetitive nature will help. Then on the back, I have the same set up, but the side values are omitted. 

My thinking is that after this is perfected (maybe I should have a quiz they must answer in a set amount of time), then the next installment is a picture of the xy-plane with a terminal side marked in Q1 with the angle given. Then the final installment is just the statement given.

Hopefully, this will work to keep things stuck in their brains.