Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Looking Back at Grade 11 Mathematics (Functions)

I don't really have much to say about this course, since there was nothing particularly memorable to me; I moved through the course rather effortlessly. Did pretty well (98), but worse than grade 10 (100).

However, this is not to say that this course was unimportant. Many concepts introduced in this course are actually ones that frequently appear on contests or ones that just come up a lot when solving math questions. For example, trigonometry with radians and geometric and arithmetic series are all things that one must know.

Also, it was through this course that I realized my greatest problem: I often misread the questions. On five out of eight tests, I misread the question somehow, and as a result got 2-4% lower (per test) than I could have gotten. This obviously served as an important lesson to me, and I now make sure that I underline the key information in each question so that I don't make any mistakes.

Also, I would probably always remember the fact that my teacher often marks me wrong, giving me higher marks than I deserve. There was one question where I drew an acute triangle instead of an obtuse one (and the answer turned out to be within 5% of the right answer). There was another question where I totally forgot to take account of one part of the question, and still ended up with an answer similar to the actual one. What's funnier, though, is that the teacher seems to have used my (a lot of) my tests as answer keys, and marked other people wrong...

So after all, perhaps math isn't that unmemorable; I still have a lot of memory about the course if I try hard enough to remember.

Topics covered:
- trigonometry (degrees, radians, graphs, transformations, identities)
- geometric and arithmetic sequences/series
- financial math
- imaginary numbers
- exponential functions
- quadratic functions (review)