The First Day of Calculus

The first day of calculus was not so bad.

Both the book and the lecture starts with a review – of graphs, domains, functions. The girl in front of me was rolling her eyes and bored. I was so needing that review, though. He put an equation on the board – X2 + Y2 = 16. One girl knew that this was the equation for a circle with a radius of 4 and an origin of zero. He drew some other graphs, and kids knew that they were asymptotes (no, I'm not spelling it correctly). I am so in trouble.

I was actually eager to do my homework, figuring if I can do it and understand now, I might be able to establish a good foundation. Because it looks like it's all downhill from here, baby.

In addition to the homework, there's some sort of lab assignments that we have. Some of them are apparently testing how well we can use our calculators. Now, I just bought a TI-83 Plus (on sale at Target). And oh my goodness, I needed the manual to find the negative sign. And if there is a way to enter 8.5% (without putting it in as a decimal), I don't know how to do it because it's not in the little quick reference and I haven't gone online for the manual yet. I am so in trouble.

What I did like, though, was some of the explanations of the uses of calculus, as well as some of the history. That was helpful and interesting. Plus, since the class is for business and social science majors, the book has (simplified) real world examples of the uses of calculus.

Plus the teacher said my name right when he called roll. That almost never happens. Like the cute little blond boy says in the Kaiser Permanente commercial, "Things are looking up."