I’m sad to say it wasn’t a productive week for me on KA. 👎🏼 (What else is new?) I was close, but I don’t think I studied for 5 hours this week, and I only made it through a single exercise. The “good news” is it was the one and only exercise from Precalculus that I needed to get done, so I’ll only have the unit test left to do next week before I can move onto AP/College Calculus BC. And to be fair, there were a handful of questions that came up in the exercise that were SUPER confusing (although I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse since that suggests I should probably go back and review Precalculus 😕). However, I got through a few of the questions pretty easily, so I at least have that going for me which is nice. The main excuse I have for not getting more done this week is that I (once again) got my butt kicked by allergies. But, with all that said, even though I’m disappointed how this week went overall, I’m happy I at least made some progress and am optimistic that next week will be better.

Here are five questions from the exercise I got through which was from Unit Four of Precalculus, Rational Functions:

Question 1

I got this question wrong.  I didn’t (and still don’t) understand how the time it took for the water to go from the tap to the reservoir, n, and from the reservoir to the pitcher, f, relate to the total volume. I think because rate = volume/time and therefore (rate * time) = volume, which you can see in my notes as (-f)10/3 mins and (n – f)5/11 mins. 

(But even though I’m pretty sure that’s correct, I still didn’t/don’t intuitively understand the equations used in this question. ☹️)

Question 2

I’m sad to say that I had no idea how to solve this question the way that KA did, BUT I got it correct by doing it my own, weird way. In my head, I knew that 20% of 72g would be 14.4g so the total onion powder between the blend and the pure onion powder needed to add up to 14.4g. I then took a guess that if the pure onion powder was 12g, the percent of the blend would need to 2.4g. Because 72g – 12g = 60g, I multiplied 60g by 0.04 and it turned out to equal 2.4g. And voila, I figured it out.

Question 3

I got this question correct but, again, not in the “proper” way. You can see my rough notes in the first page above. I started by thinking to myself—if it was a 50/50 split between the two toothpastes, then it would work out to 0.7% concentration since (1.1 + 0.3)/2 = 0.7. As you can see in the first page of my notes above, I then played around with different proportions of each toothpaste to find a concentration closer and closer to the correct amounts and eventually landed on 62.5% and 37.5%. I then did some cross multiplication to find the amount of ml needed of the weaker concentration toothpaste. So, not the way KA did it but I solved it, nonetheless. (FYI the second page of my notes was the way I was “supposed” to do it. 🙃)

Question 4

I’m going to let my notes do the talking for me on this one, but I will say that I solved this question similarly to how KA did which I’m happy about, although not exactly the same. I’m not sure if the way I solved it was “proper” or not, but I was glad that I did it in a way that at least somewhat resembled how KA did it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Question 5

Again, this was a question that I solved closely to how KA did but not exactly the same. Also, my notes above were supposed to just be rough notes. I skipped a step or two when I wrote them out but I’m too lazy to redo them, so hopefully they make a bit of sense. 

So like I said at the beginning, I’m glad I got through this exercise this week but I’m a bit concerned that I just sort of “brute-strengthed” my way through the questions. I’m happy that I have enough intuition of what’s going on to be able to solve these types of questions in my own funny little way, but I wish I intuitively knew how to solve them the way KA does. I’ll be doing the unit test for Precalculus this coming week, so if I get some questions wrong, I’ll likely need to go back and redo an exercise or two which would probably be for the best.

I’m getting SO close to finishing this off and am really hoping I can gain some momentum over the next few weeks and finish it off sooner rather than later. Assuming my allergies clear up (which they will), that will help. One little thing I forgot the mention last week was that my work schedule has now changed from working six days a week to working one day a week…………… so, I should have a lot more time to get this done.

I’m not going to go into the details, but there were some changes that happened in my department at work and between those changes, the health issues I’ve been dealing with for the past ~2 years, and CodaKaizen, it seemed like reducing my involvement at the club to one day a week is the right move for me, for the time being. It’s easily the biggest change in my life over past nine years and I’m feeling very anxious about it, but I’m also SUPER excited to put everything I have into CK and see what happens. I also REALLY want to get KA done since I said six years ago that if I could get through it then I could do anything I wanted. So, my fingers are crossed tighter than ever that I have a upcoming week so I can start to get some momentum and make quicker progress! 🤞🏼