{{{LAGA}}} No honey, not in your head, they are in your heart, where love should come from.

I know this isn't really the Teacher Thread.

It isn't? Aw, heck.

Last week, I used sine and cosine to figure out the angles of a drawing my students were supposed to make, and in the process MAYBE made a couple of them think trigonometry might be a worthwhile class to take! Also, I learned that kids today are learning a very different mnemonic than Soh-cah-toa. Something like "Some old hippie ... totally on acid"?

And I totally feel you. Boy do I feel you. I mean, we all agree that project-based, conceptual learning in depth is much better in the long run than lightning-fast skimming over every topic in the math book every single year, but... ah, the lovely test.

I learned both SOH-CAH-TOA and "Some old hippy caught another hippy tripping on acid" from my ancient Algebra teacher. I think they're both older than the hills.

Soh-cah-toa

What dos this stand for? Sin something cos something tan something?

I think I must have made up my own mnemonic for whatever it is....

SOH=Sine=oposite over hypotenuse CAH=Cosine=adjacent over hypotenuse TOA=Tangent=opposite over adjacent

I think? Geometry has been....16 years ago.

Oh, that makes sense.

I would just picture the triangle in the unit circle in my head. And remember that tan(π/2) was undefined, so cos(π/2) had to be zero. So then sin was the vertical one and cos the horizontal one.

Yeah, whereas I'm going "OK, but...I don't remember WHY you would need the sine or tangent of anything..."

'Cuz trigonometry kicks ass!!

I would just picture the triangle in the unit circle in my head. And remember that tan(π/2) was undefined, so cos(π/2) had to be zero. So then sin was the vertical one and cos the horizontal one.

And that's easier? Wow.

Mind you, since I never took trigonometry, I have to kind of laboriously construct the whole unit-circle thing in my head, and figure out where the right angle goes and all that, and it certainly doesn't come naturally.

meara, if you know a couple things about a right triangle and need to find something else, basically. In this case, we knew what one of the angles was, and we knew what the length of the hypotenuse was supposed to be, but the program would only let us set the length of one of the other sides, so we had to figure out what that should be in order for the hypotenuse to be the right length. If I could draw a picture, you'd totally know what I meant.

And that's easier? Wow.

I would always forget which was which for sin and cos. I knew tan was the ratio of sin/cos, and I thought undefined results were cool (at some point we had to graph tan x for x=0 to 2π or something)....