It was a disappointing week for me on KA. It took me a few days to figure out specifically what to do now that I’ve finished Differential Equations and am starting back at Algebra 1 to work through the newly added content. I likely only ended up studying for 3-4 hours this week which is hugely disappointing considering the math I was working on could be done by a 12-year-old. (To be fair, on Tuesday I had such terrible allergy symptoms that the day was a write-off so I got nothing done.) I ended the week working on a Unit Test in Algebra 1 that was 10 questions long. I attempted it three times but each time I would make a careless mistake and had to start over. 😡 It was annoying, but at the same time I was also glad to be back to doing exercises and a unit test, in general, so it wasn’t that bad. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to get some momentum going beginning next week. Considering how easy the math seems, I don’t have any excuse not to.

It took me a few days before I realized what my plan of attack is going to be now that I’m back at the start. Here’s a screenshot I took that will help explain:

At first, I thought I’d go through every single video that’s been added since I first started. However, the videos don’t give you Mastery Points by watching them, and my guess is there will be a number of videos that will be too simple to be worth my time — especially in the earlier courses like Algebra 1. So, I decided that unless I see a video or series of videos that I think I need to watch — which will likely happen more as I get further into the courses — my plan is to simply do the exercises and unit tests until I reach a point where I don’t know what’s going. Once I reach that point, then I’ll go back and watch any videos that relate to the questions I’m struggling with.

In the screenshot above, you can see that the white square are exercises I haven’t done yet, and the light purple squares are exercises where I need to do the unit test to get the full Mastery Points for that exercise. So, in Algebra 1, I need to do five exercises and redo six unit tests to get all the possible Mastery Points.

Here are all the questions I worked through this week which are all from the second unit in Algebra 1, Solving Equations & Inequalities:

Question 1

As you can see, the math here is pretty straightforward. You just need to write the statement out as an inequality. The “hard” part with these questions is making sure I read the statement properly so that I don’t misinterpret what it’s saying. This was always an issue for me and has always been super frustrating. Anyways, the math here is easy so I don’t think I need to explain anything for this or the next question.

Question 2

Question 3

This question came from the second exercise I worked through this week, Linear Equations & Unknown Coefficients. I remember this type of math being fairly confusing to me years ago. After working through the Linear Algebra course, this seems like baby-linear algebra so I just did it in my head and didn’t bother writing out notes. It was satisfying to be able to do it since it was confusing to me five years ago, but it almost seemed like it wasn’t worth my time. I’m sure it’s not a bad thing to reinforce these basic fundamentals though, so I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Question 4

Question 5

This was the first question I did from the Solving Equations & Inequalities unit test. It was nice getting back to basic algebra which always felt like I was solving little puzzles. What wasn’t so nice, however, was the pressure I felt having to get this question and the next nine questions correct otherwise I’d have to redo the test. (Foreshadowing.)

Question 6

Question 7

I ended up getting this question correct but didn’t remember the specific definition of what the question meant by “OR”. As you can see by the math I did in my notes, I knew that the solutions for x were -16/9 and -19/13, so I could rule out the bottom two options. Given that -16/9 is less-than -19/13 but x was less-than -19/13 and could therefore be slightly great-than -16/9, I knew the third option didn’t make sense and ruled it out. The word OR made me think that x could be either -16/9 OR -19/13 and, given that -16/9 < -19/13, choosing the first option meant that x would satisfy both options. 

(I don’t think that made sense. You can see why I found this question confusing…)

Question 8

I got this question wrong because I didn’t reduce my answer down to lowest terms. Instead of writing -133/19 I should have written -7. I had already missed two questions before this point, after getting this question wrong, this was the third time I had to go back and restart the unit test. It was also the sixth question in, which made it that much more frustrating. Although I was/am annoyed, redoing this unit test and everything in Algebra 1 will be a good refresher on basic arithmetic, so I’ve at least got that going for me which is nice.

And that was all I got done this week. Like I said, not that great of a week but I’m happy that I’ve at least got the ball rolling, the math isn’t difficult (it’s almost fun, for that matter), and I’ve got a good plan of attack going forward. This coming week it’d be nice to get through this unit test early, and then hopefully I can get through two exercises and two more unit tests. It’s hard to say if that will be doable or not, but given that the math is super straightforward, I think doing so will be a function of time spread grinding out questions rather than a function of learning anything new. So really, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to do it. Fingers crossed I can make it happen! 🤞🏼