Post 1

In the first class in calculus that we learned something new, I was completely lost. I was mad because I thought "I'm going to fail because I'll be lost the whole year." And Mrs. Robinson telling us we needed to know EVERYTHING from Advanced Math didn't help either. But once I got the hang of it I realized that it's not really all that bad. I guess I was getting nervous about the whole AP college credit thing. Now I'm kind of anxious to see how the rest of the school year plays out in first hour.

Something that I understood well this week was most things to do with the Derivative Formulas. I guess it just clicked in my head? Anyway I think it is very easy because one you establish what your u and v are then you can simply plug in to one (or more) of the formulas. Although I was a little confused about how to solve a derivative with multiple formulas in it in the beginning, but I'm pretty sure I got it now. And of course probably the easiest thing is that the derivative of any number is 0.

Something I am still a little confused about is average speed and instantaneous speeed. I get it for the most part but I get confused about the [f(x+h) - f(x)]/h (or instantaneous speed) formula. I always get confused on how to plug in a number into a formula that you have to plug into another formula.

One problem that I didn't quite know how to solve was a problem on the worksheet we had to do for homework this weekend (pg. 126 - chapter 2).
Number 37:
(x^2 + c^2) / (x^2 - c^2), c is a constant.

I get that you have to plug into the quotient rule. But I get stuck whenever you have to take the prime of (x^2 + c^2). I get that the derivative of x^2 is 2x. I do not know what to do with the c^2 however. Do you treat is like a number or like x? If treated like a number the derivative of it would be 0, but if treated like x the derivative would be 2c. It's racking my brain on what to do.

In conclusion to the first week, I think that as a class we are on our way to success on the AP. We can only achieve this goal if we keep up the hard work all year though. So everybody be ready to learn tomorrow!
-Ryan B.