Some days, my mind does not seem to come even close to working. This is demonstrated by my activities in a lesson this morning explaining how to factorise quadratic equations. I'd warned the class beforehand that the method was quite difficult, and I think my actions showed that...
Firstly, I'd point out that I'm an engineer by training, and therefore a somewhat lazy mathematician. The result of this is that if I need to solve an anyway tough looking quadratic (that is, one with a co-efficient of x squared greater than one...), I'll shove it straight into the quadratic equation without even thinking of factorising. This means that I'm less than fluent when it comes to factorisation. It should have been less of a surprise then when I ran through my example and soon found it didn't factorise. D'oh, not to worry though, I just made another one up. The unfortunate thing is that not only is my factorising pretty rubbish, so is my mental arithmetic, and so my second example also didn't work...
Third time was the charm, but I think I was long past the attention span of my class. Maybe next lesson I'll get it right...
Firstly, I'd point out that I'm an engineer by training, and therefore a somewhat lazy mathematician. The result of this is that if I need to solve an anyway tough looking quadratic (that is, one with a co-efficient of x squared greater than one...), I'll shove it straight into the quadratic equation without even thinking of factorising. This means that I'm less than fluent when it comes to factorisation. It should have been less of a surprise then when I ran through my example and soon found it didn't factorise. D'oh, not to worry though, I just made another one up. The unfortunate thing is that not only is my factorising pretty rubbish, so is my mental arithmetic, and so my second example also didn't work...
Third time was the charm, but I think I was long past the attention span of my class. Maybe next lesson I'll get it right...
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