Sunday, April 7, 2013

Calculus on the Khan Academy

I'm doing a lot of Calculus marking lately, and starting to think about matching up the Ontario MCV4U curriculum with the Khan Academy videos and practice dashboard (sorry, now known as the "Knowledge Map").

Their Derivatives 1 questions provide practice in finding the derivative of polynomials (only quadratics, in fact).  The Power Rule questions add simple negative exponents of -1 or -2.

The best place to start for Optimization questions (Lesson 12 in my world) is probably this link:
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus/derivative_applications/calc_optimization/v/minimizing-sum-of-squares
Unfortunately the Knowledge Map currently stops with taking derivatives, so there are no practice questions on the topic.

This link seems like the best place to start for Vectors:
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra/vectors_and_spaces/vectors/v/linear-algebra--introduction-to-vectors
There are exercises for scaling and adding vectors; so you have to spot 2a and add a and b, but there none where you have to find 2a+b for vectors (and students invariably need to practice the distributive step).

Monday, April 1, 2013

Yoga

Yoga is something that I've been enthusiastic about many times over the years.  I've attended classes at at least two places of work that offered them, at my local community centre in both Toronto and on the Island, and at the occasional studio.

Searching the blog I see that I've never written about it.  At this particular point in time, with life crazy but about to slow down, with loss pervading my thoughts, yoga seems like a logical practice to pick up again.  In January I set no resolutions, but my mantra became "a quiet mind in an active body".  I had some success and it's time to revisit.