(Psst: This is the beginning of tri 3. Yes, I’m starting to write it very late, my sophomore year is about to start, I KNOW. ) (Extra note: just getting ready to do another freshman class when I’m already starting sophomore. Hurry lol)Like usual, I’m holding a fierce dominion over this math class. I wasn’t letting the opportunity to be the dominant power slip away, because I really enjoyed when I did have it. I’m writing this a few days after school ends, and I’m definitely gonna study even harder this summer break so I can maintain my hegemony over the 2a-2b-trig kids.
Unlike some of my previous math classes, I had absolutely zero opposition when it came to being the star of the show- honestly, I was the only one putting in any real effort. There was one time during a weekend where I put 10 hours of my own voluntary time on the line and just studied from dawn till dusk, trying my best to ensure I got good results. Everyone else failed to have the ability to make that kind of commitment anywhere. It was pretty sad, because I had some really smart friends in the class that could have dominated but just wanted to play Brawl Stars the whole time. I had a friend, TK, who was certainly smarter than I am (Seriously, my success is 99% effort and 1% talent, and even then I have no idea what the hell I’m doing sometimes), but there were times I felt he wasn’t using his brain as much as he could be. He would always partner with me to get a free excuse to play Brawl Stars, and the occasional time he’d look up at my work and grade it himself.
“You’re wrong,” He’d always say spontaneously.
I was taken aback quite a bit when he started doing that. “What’d I do wrong?” I’d reply. He’d take a minute to look carefully at my work, then came to his conclusion.
“Wait, nevermind, you’re actually right, good job, good job, keep going, keep going, keep going…” He’d always say quickly afterward, in case he was scared I might kick him off his team to do the work alone. Most people would be annoyed to have a parasitic relationship with a partner in a math class like that, but not me. Being with a bad partner can be advantageous, because it gives you the ability to pull more weight and gain a greater insight into whatever it is you’re studying.
And what did we actually study?
The overall class consisted of four units; A, B, C, and D… and yeah, this is certainly a filler class. Out of all four units, only two of them covered actual trigonometry. Here’s each unit in a nutshell for the 2 percent of people who actually care about this article.
First off, trigonometry in a nutshell is essentially just right triangles for two months. Yeah, most of it is filler stuff but there’s surprisingly quite a lot to talk about when it comes to right triangles. Here’s a brief summary-
Unit A: The first unit mostly reviewed random concepts from Integrated 2, so go back to Integrated 2 if you want to see them in depth. We spent the first three weeks or so of class jumping between topics from Integrated 2 that a surprising amount of people struggled on. We had a really short 10 point quiz the first week, and I was literally the only one (to my knowledge) with a perfect score going over things we’ve been studying for two months. How is that possible? I mean, a stupid mistake here and there is forgivable; but people were consistently getting 6/10s and 5/10s- WHAT…
Unit B: Welp, it took a month, but we finally got to actual trigonometry! Yay; we started out with the unit circle, which is basically a circle of angles where you get a bunch of values from different angles on right triangles; that might go over your head. There’s six different values you can get from an angle using permutations of opposite, adjacent, and hypotenuse. They are:
Sine (Opposite over Hypotenuse)
Cosine (Adjacent over Hypotenuse)
Tangent (Opposite over Adjacent)
Cosecant (Hypotenuse over Opposite)
Secant (Hypotenuse over Adjacent)
Cotangent (Adjacent over Opposite)
We then went on to make graphs out of the functions for each of these, which took some really interesting shapes (it gets a little less interesting when you realize it’s not that hard to figure out what it means.)
Unit C: The third unit continues to discuss actual trigonometry, such as more sines, cosines, and tangents, as well as the new stuff- they also had us use trigonometry, a study about triangles, in a variety of algebraic ways, which is something that could really go over a lot of peoples’ heads. It’s really just us solving equations or being given extremely fancy trigonometic expressions which we have to simplify.
Unit D: And then they go back to their non-trigonometry curriculum; this time, we’re discussing probablity and these things called permutations and combinations. They’re defined as the number of ways to arrange something. To find these probability values and combinations, we have to find the “factorial” of that number, we can be notated with an exclamation point. (For the factorial of 10, you do 10!) It really just means to multiply all the numbers before, so you would do 10 times 9 times 8 times 7 and so on until you get down to 1. We only spent about a week or two on this, but it was really fun… for me, because I kept carrying everyone. I also discovered around this time the idea of doing extra homework… units B, C, and D were really fun for me, because I got marked as a tryhard. I don’t know- having your effort get acknowledged like that just feels good.
The class wasn’t that hard; I never really stressed out about any of the tests because it was mostly easy. Despite this, it was really difficult for– just about anyone to actually get a solid A (My A sort of slipped in the later half of the class since I was neglecting it for actually difficult classes, like Chem, but I still ended with a 94) which might just stem from the fact that literally no one was paying attention in class, and acted surprised when they didn’t do well. A lot of kids were playing Brawl Stars the whole time, a lot of people were on Snapchat, and then we have this one guy who was trying to convince girls to date him the whole class and got surprised when he ended with a C at the end of the class.
Final thoughts on this class?
It’s not hard. If you get anything below a B+ in my opinion, you’re not putting in enough effort.