For those of you thinking I've disappeared, I havent
. I've been round reading some things, seeing if I can do problems before seeing the solution and stuff.
Anyway, I had two triumphs recently. We were learning about absolute value, and stuff with ^ and V... I don't know what it's called (the "and", and "or" stuff), and the teacher was having a REALLY hard time explaining. She had a number line on the board and was trying to explain why: x > -2 ^ x > 5 was false (assuming I remembered right and ^ is and). She said, and I quote, "Are you telling me 6 is greater than -2?" Class says yes, "No, it's not."
So I'm sitting there with my number line trying to figure out how the hell 6 is not greater than -2. And I was seriously wondering if I'd been taught wrong with number lines way back when.
So I tuned her out and tried to figure out how the problem was supposed to be an OR statement...and I'm sitting there thinking 6 IS greater than both of them... theres a long gap in thinking and then I wondered what about 3?
I got it, and I raised my hand and asked if I could explain, she said yes. I walked up to the board and everyone was laughing at me. She said "What?! You don't think you can learn anything from her? Be quiet" and I about fainted...she's never been nice to me like that before - in a way that says I might actually know something.
I circled everything between -2 and 5, and said simply "these are NOT greater than 5, therefore x is greater than -2 OR x is greater than 5".
The class was silent, and I sat down all happy and the teacher said I got it down
.
My other triumph, was literally the next day when we were learning about true values....I'm talking about | 2 + x | > 6x + 7 or something random like that. I got an 80% (B) on my homework
.
So I can do it, I just need to understand it first
.