My Twenty-Eighth Week as a Senior

Considering how much less I am working now compared to before the remote learning started, I’m going to talk about my week with respect to the classes I have, rather than what I did each day. My 28th week as a senior was pretty uneventful.

In Calculus and Vectors, we took the week to finish chapter 6, An Introduction to Vectors. On Monday, we did 6.5, which was about exploring vectors in R2 and R3. R2 is the xy plane. So, it’s two dimensional. A line on a piece of paper would be the same as a vector in R2. R3 is the xyz plane, making it three dimensional. Look at the corner of your room. The point where your floor and walls meet would be the point of origin. The line going towards your ceiling would be the z-axis and the lines extending from that corner to the adjacent corners would be your x- and y-axis. Then, any point in the middle of the room, on the floor or in the air, would be a vector in R3. If it’s in the air, it’s a 3D vector because it’s got x, y and z coordinates. Tuesday’s work was 6.6, Operations with Algebraic Vectors in R2. We used the standard basis vectors, i and j, to add two algebraic vectors. An algebraic vector is one on a coordinate axis, so we know its position and magnitude. It’s simple to add these vectors. You add the x-values together and the y-values together to get new coordinates which represent the coordinates of the resultant vector. We also did multiplication of a vector and a scalar. I could do a blog post explaining this if you want it. Wednesday was pretty much the same as Tuesday except 6.7 was Operations with Algebraic Vectors in R3. So, the unit vectors were i, j and k. On Thursday, we did 6.8, Linear combinations and Spanning Sets. What that means is, if you have vectors u and v, au+bv is a linear combination that gives you the resultant of au and bv. This is helpful in finding out whether two vectors are in the same plane or not because there can be an infinite number of planes in R3 and not all vectors exist in the same planes. A spanning set is a set of vectors that allows you to represent every vector uniquely because it spans the plane. For example, unit vectors i, j and k span R3, allowing us to represent any vector as a linear combo of those three. It’s a little tricky to explain it through a blog post, but if you are interested in learning more about this, there are plenty of YouTube videos that explain this quite well. On Friday, we got time to do review questions in preparation for the assignment to be given on Monday. And with that, we finished our Introduction to Vectors chapter.

In Writer’s Craft, our teacher promised not to give us any assignments while we trying to work on our Short Story ISU. I started working on my first draft and it took me about 4 days to finish it. A lot of things happened that put me in a mood that wouldn’t help me write a comedy story, so it took me longer than expected to get to the end of my first draft. Thankfully, our teacher extended the deadline from May 1 to May 8, giving me enough time to have my friend edit the story over the weekend and then open the file on the next Monday. I didn’t do much else besides reading the tips our teacher uploaded on how to write and edit better. That was my week in my creative writing class.

In English, we started reading Hamlet by Shakespeare. On Monday, we were given a Prezi about the play and a link to the paraphrasing of the first scene. We had to make notes on both and answer the four questions given with the link. This was due on Wednesday, so we didn’t get anything new on Tuesday. Once we had submitted our work on Wednesday morning, we got our next assignment for Scenes 2 and 3 of Act 1. It was a total of 14 questions, due the next Monday, so that was the last thing we got that week. Hamlet has been quite an interesting read. I like everything supernatural and King Hamlet’s ghost is a fun element of this story. SparkNotes has really helpful paraphrasing if you don’t want to read the actual play. You should definitely give it a try.

That was my whole week. I like this format a lot more because it’s a better representation of the work I’ve been doing; better than me admitting that I went a whole day without doing anything good. I think I’m gonna stick to this way of recounting my weeks. I hope you’ve been having a happy time. Stay Home. Stay Safe. – Aarushi