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> Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach. What do you need to do to “cement understanding and intuition of the
by jacobolus 7y ago
> Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach.
What do you need to do to “cement understanding and intuition of the unit circle”?
The common diagrams shown in high school trigonometry courses – e.g. https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_md.gif https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_m... – basically involve only 2 meaningful facts: a rhombus made of two equilateral triangles has a long diagonal with squared length of 3, and a square has a diagonal with a squared length of 2. (a) These are fairly easy to figure out, and once understood are quite easy to remember, and (b) all of the derived factoids are pretty much trivial.
Students are typically taught this material in a quite terrible way, unfortunately.
- kiba 7y agoI memorized the facts and then was able to figure out the relationships after the fact. That may be a brute force way of doing it, but it works for me.
- jacobolus 7y agoMy point is that there’s very little there. People shouldn’t need to go to extensive effort or need a special system or method to learn 2 simple facts. Taking a simple thing and wrapping it in a big pile of obfuscation is a poor way to teach/learn. (That this is taught this way is not the fault of students.)