I got smoked this week on KA. The plan was to get through five exercises and two unit tests, but I only made it through three exercises. 👎🏼 As you’ll see in my notes below, all the exercises were about proving congruence of shapes. The questions were all terminology based, i.e. I needed to pick or create the correct sentence that stated why the shapes were congruent. In general it was confusing, but what made it worse was in the multiple-choice questions, the answers given all seemed like they were saying the exact same thing. It was super annoying and confusing. 🤬 By the end of the week, I was just happy to have grinder my way through three exercises, let alone the other two exercises and two unit tests I had planned on getting through. These types of exercises/questions are up there for the ones I like doing the least on KA. The ’good news’ (if you want to call it that) is that I only have two more exercises left in this unit, so I’m past the halfway mark in that sense. 😮‍💨 (Although the unit test will be made up of these types of questions, so I’m sure it will be just as frustrating…)

Here are two questions from each exercise I worked through this week:

Exercise 1 – Justify Triangle Congruence

Question 1

So you can see that these questions are verbose and difficult to decipher (or at least they were for me anyways). The first thing I needed to become reacquainted with was the notation used on shapes to denote parallel lines, angles, line segments, triangles, and congruency. Once I read through a couple of questions, deciphering the notation became fairly simple. That said, even once I got aa better handle on the notation, I still struggled to understand the nuance between the multiple-choice options. I happened to get this question and the one below this correct, but in total, I likely got ~10 questions wrong while doing the exercise before I managed to get four correct in a row, which took me until Wednesday.

Question 2

Exercise 2 – Prove Triangle Congruence

Question 3

These types of questions, where I needed to fill-in-the-blank, came up in all of the exercises I worked through this week. I generally found these questions easier than the multiple-choice ones, although I still got them wrong pretty often. But regarding this second exercise, I once again didn’t really know what was going on with the questions. I didn’t get through this exercise until Saturday morning, partly because I was frustrated and annoyed that I found the questions so confusing, and so I gave up after only about 20 minutes of trying to do them on Thursday and Friday.

Question 4

The only reason why I got this question correct was because I’d gotten wrong before and had seen KA’s solution after getting it wrong. When I saw this question the first time, I was trying to think through the side-side-angle congruency criterion. It seemed to me that if the two side lengths and the angle were all the same, the triangle would be congruent. I forgot that the side adjacent from the angle could be obtuse or acute and have the same two side lengths and angle measurement. This is why the solution states that the side-side-angle congruency criterion isn’t valid in this case.

Exercise 3 – Prove Triangle Properties

Question 5

This is a great example of how wordy these questions and their solutions were… 🥵 I was somewhat able to grasp a laymen’s understanding of what the questions were asking and of the different terms and phrases used, but a lot of times I was just trying to make an educated guess. For example, where it said “hypotenuse-leg congruency”, I really had no clue what that meant but assumed it was where the altitude dropped from the vertex of the isosceles triangle that bisects the bottom line segment and meaning that each triangle created were mirror images of each other, i.e. they were congruent. But really I had no clue.

Question 6

Exercise 4 – Prove Parallelogram Properties 

After finishing off those three exercises, I start this fourth exercise on Sunday and got three questions correct in a row but got the fourth question wrong, so I decided to leave it for next week. So I’ll wait until next week to talk about this exercise since I have to redo it, but nonetheless, here are two of the questions I ended up getting correct:

Question 7

Question 8

And that was it for this week… Pretty pitiful but I suppose I made some progress which is better than nothing. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I think a good, realistic goal for this upcoming week would be to get through the remaining two exercises from this unit and the unit test. Considering how daunting I find these types of questions/exercises, I’ll be pumped if I can manage it. I’m pretty sure I liked working through Geometry when I first did it five(ish) years ago, so hopefully things will get more enjoyable once I get through this unit. As usual, fingers crossed I can get through it! 🤞🏼