I cannot believe it’s really November 28th already! My brother Longreen is getting married tomorrow at 11, and that is going to change a lot of things here at home. I’m going to miss him, yet I’m so happy for him, and for his wife-to-be, Naral. Congratulations, sweethearts.

Today I spent part of the afternoon helping Chrissa solving a few Calculus problems for her upcoming exam. I had Calculus last month, so I could give her a hand in all calm. She loves the subject, and only got stuck on a few harder problems, but overall I believe she’s going to excel on the quiz in December.

Math homework help is hard to get in school, because most clever students are too busy to provide review lessons, and often teachers don’t give a crap about tutoring. I thought our Academy would work on higher standards, but I had to change my mind about that. -__’

Free math help is available online, either for free or under commission, but does not always respect high quality standards (excepting TutorVista and a few others I heard about). Free homework help can be achieved on websites like MIT OpenCourseware though, and other universities. These institutions provide high quality teachings.

Anyway, I can give you guys some of the tips I gave to Chrissa already. Solve math problems using brainstorming first: write down everything you know/think/speculate about the problem and its data (remember to write down data!), and only THEN attempt to solve it. You’ll see what a big difference it makes.

Factoring polynomials: this is a very simple operation to do, yet so many students get stuck in between the process. One easy example:

Factor 2x + 18
Coefficients here are belong to R field (real number) and they are multiples to each other (18 is 2 x 9, that means that 2 is the Greatest Common Factor, or GCF). In this way,it is possible to factor the 2 out of the parenthesis and divide each coefficient by it: 2[(2/2)x - (18/2)]; hence: 2(x + 9).

My sole recommendation is to keep track of all signs and passages, because they are crucial to solution finding.

Goodnight. ^^

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2010 at 12:35 am and is filed under Academy, family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.