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

Last Friday afternoon the faculty had a seminar introducing some computer freeware and commercial software for use in their subjects. The speaker even highlighted some local projects that he said some of his students did for three months (or roughly one term), including one that highlighted the endangered species in the Philippines.

Since this is the same person who was the adviser of the College of Computer Science students who did their undergraduate thesis on astronomy software, I thought the speaker would at least show their work. After all, he did go into some very relevant and not so relevant applications. Unfortunately, it wasn’t included in his presentation.

Last Monday in my Mathematical Methods 1 class I started discussion on equations in one variable and one degree involving absolute values.

This was after we had a graded board work on the questions from their last quiz. When it came to the word problems, there were no volunteers, until I gave the working equation interpretation of the problem. Then I asked some students to continue from there.

For the equations involving absolute value they had to remove the absolute value by taking both the positive and negative expression of the enclosed terms and solving like normal equations. This gave them two values for the variable.

On Tuesday I discussed inequalities in one variable and of degree one and two (in other words, quadratic) involving inequalities, and rational expressions with the variable in the denominator.

There were two rules involved here. If the expression had the absolute value less than a constant, then they could put it in a three-part or three-sided inequality with the negative of the constant being less than the expression and solve like we did last time.

If the expression with the absolute value is greater than the constant, then they have two statements, one where the expression without the absolute value is now greater than the constant, and another where the expression is less than the negative of the constant.

I gave them samples using just two whole number positive constants to prove this, before we tried it on some inequalities from their textbook.

Either way, they came out with either one interval range or two.

For quadratic expressions, they had to solve for three up to five ranges, depending on whether the two intervals they got overlapped or not.

I was going to give more examples on this today, before taking up the next chapter on graphing, until David walked up to my cubicle, looked at my preparations and told me he did not take that up with his students.

I didn’t argue anymore that we should just so that it would be included in the coverage of the quiz tomorrow. I just accepted it, as I know the students would be relieved to learn about it as well.

And those are my three MM1 sessions for the last four days. Class dismissed.