Siiick

Not in the good way. Do teenagers still say 'sick' when they really mean grouse? That will only make sense if you grew up in Melbourne in the 1970s-80s. Everything was grouse back then, which sounds much better than being sick.

Apparently, the Australian east coast is in the middle of the worst flu season for... however long. The kid went down first and brought her icky school germs home to infect the rest of us. So, little being done and nothing being written.

I did reach another Khan Academy milestone though! (even sitting in bed with a sore head, it was still the most fun thing to do)

Finished the section on polynomials. At 68 lessons, it was a big one!

A lot of this stuff I did in high school, but that was 30 years ago. Often, back then, I would learn how to apply the formulae but missed out on lot of why things work as they do. There might have been several reasons for that: I missed a couple of years of high school; perhaps they taught how (formulae) more than why (foundations); or perhaps I just grasped the hows more easily than the whys back then.

This time around, I've enjoyed building up the knowledge around the problems bit by bit. Just in polynomials, there was how to find y intercepts, x intercepts (zeros), how many x intercepts to expect (fundamental theorem of algebra), how to tell whether an x intercept goes through the axis or just touches it and turns back where it came from, what the equation will do when fed very large or very small numbers. From all these clues, we can build a rough picture of what the graph looks like and what behaviour to expect.

!originalworks