Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Just finished my quiz in TrigApp. Students started turning in their papers a little after thirty minutes before the end of the period. The last student passed his paper after I announced the last five minutes.

The quiz had them completing four tables. I could understand how it would have looked intimidating.

The first table was conversion of angle measures from exact degree, approximate degree, DMS, exact radian and approximate radian. They also had to give both the complementary and supplementary angles of the original angle. In retrospect I could have spent more time clarifying what the definition of an exact measure is (no decimals, all integers) as opposed to approximate measure (no fractions, no radical sign, no pi symbol). I also didn't specify the measure to be used for the complementary and supplementary angles.

The second table was just simplifying angles whose absolute value is greater than one complete rotation and getting the co-terminal angle less than 360 degrees. The trick is, the minimum angle has to be positive, when one of the large angles given is negative. They also have to identify the quadrant of the angles, and the multiplier of the number of rotations.

The third table was only for using the formula describing the relationship between the radius of a circle, the length of an arc and the angle that describes that arc.

The last table was for the lengths of the three sides of a right triangle and the trigonometric relationships. For this one, I forgot to specify whether the values had to be approximate or exact, so afterwards I told them that either will be accepted, just like in the unspecified format of the first table.

There was one student who asked me several questions during the quiz, shades of some students I had last term. The most compromising question he asked was verifying if the definition he thought for complements and supplements were correct. I just answered, "If that is what you remember."

Second was his admitting he wasn't sure what to do with the third table. I had to remind him that the variable "s" was for the length of the arc before he remembered. This is despite the fact that we had review questions just about this last Tuesday.

He also tried to ask me to borrow some correction fluid for him to clean up his test booklet. I just told him that erasures were okay.

This is the same student who, a few meetings ago, met me outside the hall asking me to help him with Math 1 even though I'm not teaching that subject this term. Does he find me more approachable than his teacher there? He still should try to consult with his teacher first before asking others.

And that's it for our third week of classes this term.