Thursday, September 6, 2007

Scribe postage # 1!

Hello everyone! My name is, Aichelle, the lucky recipient of posting today's scribe. How are you today? ...oh really, that's great! =) So today in class, Mr. K. started off by showing us a slide with a graphic. In a group Mr. K. asked us to make a list of what we know about functions. After a few minutes students went up to the board and jotted down some key points. After a number of people went up to the smart board, Mr. K. had called up every other student who had not been up there and add on to the list.



This the result of everyone's brain power put together. Sandy said that every function has a degree. She is right but Mr. K. informed us that every polynomial function has a degree. Ethan stated that functions have x and y variables. Mr. K. told us that you don't always have to use x and y as variables and that other graphs that aren't functions can have x and y variables. I said that functions can be inverted Mr. K. corrected me by saying l +0 l functions can be inverted.

After the discussion was over on what we knew. Mr. K. talked about the famous block of wood. He said the block of wood has different faces/sides but it's all still the same block of wood. This was an analogy to functions/graphs. Functions can be respresented in different ways as Mark said [numberically, graphically, verbally] but it's still all the same thing. Mr K. also talked about stuff we did not write. He mentioned intercepts, the shape [concave up/down], the "flavour" [linear, quadratic, peacewise, trigonometric, exponential], and the two different variables [independent and dependent].

We then looked at a description of a function made by a student. The student's way of describing it was clever but it was wrong. [Found on second slide]

Next, we looked at a chart which had questions attached with it. Graeme said the growth of the population looked as if it was growing exponentially. Mr. K. told us to whip our calculators out so we could see how that data changed. We plotted the data into our calculator [everyone did so except me due to the lack of battery power!] and we saw how the population dramtically changed. We saw that as the years have gone by the population increased faster. Mr. K. talked about change and said that is what calculus is about. Change. We also tried to find an equation that fit that data...it was close but it wasn't good because it wasn't as accurate [78% accuracy]. [Found on slide three, slide four shows the plotted data]

We moved on to the next slide and graphed it on our calculators.since we cannot have a negative number under the square root. √4 -x²---> The domain must be [-2, 2]. We found the range on the calculator [-32.2385, 20.2435]. We know two roots already which are -2 and 2. There was another one that we found on the calculator, 1.0627. [Found on slide 5]

Lastly we analyzed a graph. Mr. K said these are questions we must be able to answer when describing a graph. Like, finding g (3). We went over the first three questions and time was cut short due to the bell. [Found on slide 6] That was our first official class. Yesterday was basically an introduction with a few ground rules.

*Reminders*
Homework: Chapter 1, section 1 [1.1] ; odds + 4
Sign up for the blog [Yesterday's homework.].
Use labels for your scribe posts.

OH! Graeme is the next scribe lol.

6 comments:

Lani Ritter Hall said...

Hi there Aichelle,

Lucky you are to be able to start out the year, don't you think!?

It's good to see the result of "everyone's brain power put together". I wonder how much you think that will be of value to you this year?

Is your calculator charged and ready for the upcoming week!? ;-)

Lani

aichelle s. said...

Thank you for the comment. It's great that we get to communicate again for a second time. I am lucky to start out the year and I think that everyone's brain power put together will be of great value because there are only so many of us in the class which means we will all be able to interact with eachother more. Actually, the problem wasn't with my batteries. I put different batteries in and it still wasn't working properly. So, I had to buy a new one..and now I have it.=)
Thanks, again.
---Aichelle.

Lani Ritter Hall said...

Hi Aichelle,

Thank you for the response!

I regret I neglected to mention previously that I found your use of a different color to set off each paragraph and your reference to the slide you were discussing very effective in your scribe! Nicely done!

I think you are absolutely right that the interactions of your small class will very valuable in your learning.

Lani

aichelle s. said...

Thank you! =)

Mr. H said...

OK Lani stole my thunder and praise. This is a nice post and the use of colour to separate the ideas makes it easier to follow what happened in the class that day.

Great scribe. Nice work.

Mr. Harbeck
Sargent Park School

aichelle s. said...

Thank you, Mr. H! =) My brother was a former student of your's his name is Aldrin and he was in your class two years ago..I think the first time you used a blog..haha I'm not quite sure..
---Aichelle.