9th Week

Calculus - Week 9

So this week in Calculus was a very stressful one for most...but I got through it rather easily. On Sunday I went to Kaitlyn's house to study with Chelsea, Mamie, and Mabile and we finished our short answer packets. Monday and Tuesday we got the answers for those and revised any questions we had etc. We were having some issues with limiting on optimization problems but it turned out okay. Wednesday was the first part of the exam which was Multiple Choice. The multiple choice wasn't that bad. We were allowed to miss 5 so what I did was go through and do all of those that I knew how to do correctly instead of worrying about one particular problem. Then I went back and focused on those I was unsure of and made educated guesses. It turned out okay because I missed 4 or 5 but that was allowed so I made a 60/60. Next day we got to take the free response part. I think it was very very easy. I felt comfortable with everything about it. I knew how to do the problems and justify myself well.

All in all, all of the preparation for the exam was much needed and helped out a lot. If people didn't make as good of grades this time, maybe next time a little more preparation will help.

As far as what else we did this week, we did implicit derivatives. The reason implicit derivatives (I think anyway) are useful are for those problems that it's hard to solve for y only in terms of x. I think this will come in handy for those.

Basically implicit derivatives are nothing new at all... the steps are pretty much just this:

1. Take the derivative of both sides (implicit derivatives usually have an equals sign)

2. When you take a derivative of a y term, state that. Do so by putting y prime or dy/dx. Like ( taking the derivative of y^2 would be 2y(dy/dx) )

3. Move all of the terms that don't have a dy/dx in them to one side. Factor out a dy/dx out of all the terms that do have it, then divide to finish solving for dy/dx.

That's basically all it is. Just make sure when you are doing these is like...say you are doing product rule with like sin's and cos's...make sure you put cos(x) where its supposed to and cos(y) where its supposed to. It would really mess up problems (like the one we were working in class) if you mix this up. So take these longer derivatives slow and just avoid making silly mistakes.

Anyway, I'm going eat Taco Bell. :-)
-John