It was a pitiful week for me on KA. 😓 I didn’t get through the Integration and Accumulation of Change unit test which I’m very disappointed about. In total, I’m guessing I would have done around 50 questions throughout the week, but I’d always get ~40 – 50% of the way through the test and then get a question wrong and need to restart. When I had to restart, I was pretty frustrated and demoralized so I didn’t put much effort in after that. I’m guessing I spent 5 hours studying but it may have been less. Partly what made this week so frustrating was that, more often than not, the questions I got wrong weren’t all that difficult mathematically; they often had to do with Riemann Sums. 😒 The silver lining is that I found integration questions pretty easy which, in my mind, are the more important types of questions. Also, a big reason why I didn’t put as much effort in as I should have was because I had some BIG breakthroughs on CodaKaizen this week which I’ll briefly talk about at the end of this post. But anyways — not a great week, but I’m still optimistic that I’ll able to get through this unit test soon. 😤

I only took screenshots of four questions this week partly because the questions were all more-or-less the same as in my last two posts but also because I confident that I’d get through the test and didn’t bother making notes because I thought I’d have other stuff to talk about. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Calculus AB – Unit 6 – Integration and Accumulation of Change – Unit Test

Question 1

This was the first question I got wrong this week and I was on the 22^nd of 30 questions when I did. 😭 I got it wrong because I didn’t understand what it was asking. I thought it was saying: at x = –2, what is f(t) equal to, i.e. what’s the “height” of f(t)? Before I submitted my answer, I was pretty doubtful that I understood it correctly since it seemed way to easy. Turns out what this question was really asking for was the area between f(t) and the x-axis from x = –4 to x = –2. Getting questions like this wrong was super frustrating as it just came down to me not understanding the notation or what the question was asking, not because I don’t know how to find the stupid area under a stupid function. 😡

Question 2

I was on the 13^th question when I got this one wrong. I got it wrong because I didn’t divide the area by 2 which I needed to do because each subdivision was 0.5 in width. Again, another question I got wrong because I was going to quickly and didn’t remember/think that I needed to multiply the subdivision by it’s width.

Question 3

I actually got this question correct on my first try and more-or-less thought it through properly, although I was SUPER unsure of my answer before I submitted it. I looked at the options for about 5 minutes trying to understand what each part of the expressions denoted. I eventually decided that the fourth option was the only one that made sense since it was a midpoint Riemann Sum where the function was running across, 3/2, 5/2, etc., and since the fourth option was the only one that had 3/2 in it, it seemed like it had to be correct. My intuition was correct, but looking at the other options, I’m guessing they too represent some sort of variation of a Riemann Sum but I have no idea what they’re saying. 😕 My reasons for screen-shotting this question was 1)to show-off that I got this question correct, and 2) also to be honest and say that Sigma notation is super confusing to me and I don’t understand how it relates to integrals. 

Question 4

I got this question correct mainly because I had the derivative of arctan(x) fresh in my memory from the previous few weeks and recognized the pattern, but still, I wasn’t 100% confident that I had it correct. After looking at KA’s answer, I decided to write out an example of the derivative of (1/k)*(arctan((x + h)/k) to get a feel for how the derivative works and, therefore, how the integral works in reverse. It took me a while to work through each step (my note above is one that I rewrote after writing out about a page-and-a-half of rough notes) but I was eventually able to wrap my head around it. 😮‍💨

I ended the week at 8/30 questions correct (10 behind where I was at the end of last week…), BUT I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to get through the test early this coming week. I think what I need to do is commit an entire day to it and just tell myself that I’m going to keep doing it and restarting as many times as I need until I get it done.

As I mentioned at the top, I had some pretty big breakthroughs on CK this week which I was PUMPED about. I’m not going to go into the details simply because it would be difficult to explain, but in essence, there’s a BIG part of CK called Hero’s Journey Self-Authoring that I wasn’t sure how to integrate into sessions I have with people and this week I finally figured it out! I had two new people volunteer to try out the program (the first new people I’ve worked with for ~1.25 years) and as I was working with them, it snapped into place. There were a few other smaller but still key breakthroughs I also had the with new volunteers and by the end of the week, I felt like CK is FINALLY ready to go. (After around 22 months of working on it. 😳) So I’m now very happy, very excited, and very scared to start trying to sell/market the program.

To bring this post full circle, I think it’s SUPER important that I get through KA so I can build my confidence in general now that I’m finally ready to promote CK. So even more than usual, my fingers crossed that I can actually make some decent progress this week on KA and get it done! 🤞🏼