Just like the past few weeks, it was another bad week for me on KA. I was hoping to get through three unit tests and two exercises, but I only made it through one unit test and one exercise. 👎🏼 I think I only studied for three-ish hours this week which was pitiful and which I have no good excuse for. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on CodaKaizen and am making a good amount of progress with is good, but I’m disappointed that it seems to be coming at the cost of the progress I was making on KA. I feel like I’m close to getting CodaKaizen off the ground and if that’s the case, I’m hoping I’ll soon be able to allocate more time to put towards KA. In any case, I did manage to get some work done this week and therefore keep my 302-week streak alive! Oh, and even though I didn’t study as long as I should have, I did end up writing out 23 pages of notes, so I’ve at least got that going for me which is nice.

The one unit test I got through this week was from the unit Solving Equations & Inequalities. None of the questions had math that was difficult, but I would sometimes rush through reading the question and misinterpret what it was asking and therefore submit the wrong solution. Other than that, it was very straightforward. Here’s a question from the test:

Question 1

It took me a while to think through what the difference between ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ are in these types of questions. I literally added this exact question to my last post except it was an ‘OR’ version of the question. In this case, it used ‘AND’ which means that the solution has to satisfy both inequalities. Since the inequalities state that x is less-than -19/13 and -16/9, the correct answer is -16/9 since -19/13 it not less-than -16/9 and x has to be less-than both.

(I said this last week but I’ll say it again — I find it really hard to put the reasoning for the solution to this type of question into words. So I’m guessing the explanation I just gave didn’t make sense…)

Once I got through the unit test, I moved on to the fourth unit in Algebra 1, Linear Equations & Graphs. There was one exercise I needed to do in this unit before I could start the unit test. It ended up being the only exercise I made it through this week, but before starting it, I realized it was a part of a new section that must have been added to the unit since I started six years ago as there were also two videos and an exercise that I hadn’t worked through. I worked through the video first which I found tricky to understand initially:

Looking back on this question now, it seems super straightforward, especially after having done the exercise where the questions were all essentially the exact same as this one. I can’t remember why specifically I was struggling so much with this question, but I remember it was because I wasn’t setting up the equation properly. The way you setup the equation to state that you multiply the speed of each creature by the amount of time it’s been flying, then use algebra to solve for t, still seems unintuitive to me. Obviously the math is elementary, but I have a hard time picturing how multiplying the speeds by the time travelled and then using algebra to solve for t makes sense. 😒

It took me a day and a half to get through this video — although I only spent ~45 mins working through it on my own and then watching Sal work through it and making notes — so by the time I got to the exercise it was already Friday. I made some careless mistakes a few times and ended up having to do it two or three times. But nonetheless, here are three questions from the exercise:

Question 2

As you can see, the math isn’t too hard here, but the issue is setting up the inequality properly. That said, even though I understand how to do it, I don’t intuitively understand why you can use algebra this way to solve for t. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Question 3

This question was just like the video from above in that you have to add (t + 12) to one side of the equation. Again, not hard to do, but thinking through it was a bit confusing, at least at the start. I think I screwed up a question like this on a previous attempt by subtracting a number from t from one side of the equation instead of adding it to the t on the other side of the equation.

Question 4

This question I actually found quite hard to think through and ended up guessing but got it correct. 🙃 I wasn’t confident that I needed to multiply the value of the variable (what I called x) by 5. In the end, even though I wasn’t sure, it made enough sense to me to do it so I just went for it and ended up getting it correct. Not exactly the way I thought I’d getting questions correct back on Algebra 1, but a win’s a win.

And that was it for this past week. I think my schedule for the upcoming week should be a bit lighter than this past week in terms of other stuff I have going on, so I’m really hoping I can make some better progress. I’d like to aim at getting through three unit tests, but based on how this past week went, that may be a bit of a stretch. So my goal is to get through two unit tests and one exercise that I’ll need to do ahead of the first unit test. I feel like that reasonable so, as usual, fingers crossed! 🤞🏼