Today Joshua and I pulled an AP practice exam from AP classroom. I set a timer for 15 mins and had Joshua complete a free response problem on his own. He finished the problem with 15 seconds to spare. We graded the problem together using the scoring guidelines AP provided. Joshua earned 4 out of the 6 points. I told him although that seems like at 67% which is not good, if he can manage 4 out of 6 points on each FRQ he does, he’s looking at a score of 4 - which I think would be fair for Joshua to earn.
Today Matthew got great practice with the unit circle. Matthew recalled that sine goes with y, cosine goes with x, and tangent is y/x. I gave him problems like sin(300 degrees). Matthew had to visualize where that corresponds to on the Unit circle. Then he had to relate that location back to the reference angle of Quadrant 1. He determined the ordered pairs there and then was able to evaluate the trig function. These problems are like a puzzle with multiple steps. I could tell he enjoyed working through the problems, and felt a sense of success when achieving the right answer. Today we finished the Chapter. The goal moving forward is to review and then take our last test.
Today Joshua and I worked on the Multiple Choice Practice Test in AP classroom. I asked Joshua to take the lead in the problem solving. He worked the problems aloud and did a great job recalling concepts we haven't seen in a while. We got through 12 problems and Joshua only had difficulty with 1 of them. We covered polynomials, rational functions, limits, logarithms, polar coordinates, and some other overlapping topics. Tomorrow we will focus on FRQs.
Matthew and I continued practicing the unit circle today. I had had Matthew draw it out himself. We started with the quadrants and labeling them in degrees and radians. Then we practiced "slicing" each quadrant into fourths and considering how that would affect the degrees/radians there. Matthew did well with this. It got tricky when we shifted to multiples of 30 degrees (or pi/6). But after we practiced, Matthew started to see the patterns on his own. Once we completed the circle, we related it back to the trig functions sine, cosine, and tangent. We will need to practice more again tomorrow.
