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)....

Yeah, when those trig questions come up for me, I just... oh, wait. That never happens.

Tonight I'm gonna have that nightmare where I'm in geometry class and I don't know any of the answers.

Emily! Did you get the Internet to work at home? I mean, you must have, but...

Laga hang in there. My holidays are routinely a source of a lot of pain due to my family.

Tonight I'm gonna have that nightmare where I'm in geometry class and I don't know any of the answers.

The other night I had that nightmare were I was running for Congress but forgot to campaign.

OK, not really a nightmare. But I ended up losing. To my brother.

Which leads to the question: is it really so important that EVERY student learn to factor ALL factorable quadratic equations?

If they are ever planning to take any college-level math classes, yes. Or at least learn that, if they can't factor something, the next step is the quadratic formula.

(The homework I was grading today has a problem where the had to find the roots of x^2 - 2x -4. A significant number of them wrote x^2 - 2x = 4, so x(x-2)=4, and so either x=4 or x-2=4. Most of the rest used the quadratic formula. A few graphed it on a graphing calculator and found the approximate roots. One completed the square.)

thanks Omnis and ND. It would have been a lot easier if Mom hadn't said that stuff about "we're just exchanging $50 bills" and then apparantly signed off the internet. I sent her three emails asking for clarification and got nothing back. I'm hurt and I'm worried and I'm sure not looking forward to Thanksgiving anymore.