Friday, October 23rd

We warmed up with two simple questions, one from the book and one that Mr. O’brien came up with. The problem from the book was number 42, a cubic function with three different roots. The other one was a quartic function, and we were able to solve it through the use of Wolfram alpha, or guess and check, but lead to our later exploration of Polynomial Long Division and Synthetic Division later in the class.
Before we refreshed on these two forms of division, we went over homework, which was composed of problems from section 2.1 and 2.2. since this was our first time looking over chapter two homework together, we refreshed on some basics, like finding the Axis of Symmetry (of quadratics) and and the roots of polynomial functions etc. This will be the material present on next class’ quiz.
Our lesson regarding Synthetic Division and Polynomial Long Division showed us that while both were effective, each had their time and place. Synthetic Division was more simple, but Polynomial Long division could be used regardless of what the polynomial is being divided by. We then saw how the remainder theorem can help one find function values.