In class this week

For Mandarin I, we will review the unit 5.1 "Visiting Friends" and start unit 5.2, a narrative on the topic "Visiting Friends". We will have a quiz on 5.1 at the end of the week.

For Mandarin II this week, we will write emails in Chinese to the students we visited at Tsinghua University High School, and make group Powerpoint reports about our trip to China.

Calculus I:We have made extensive work- lots of practice -where the students have worked problems in chain rule, implicit differentiation, product rule, and yes the quotient rule. More work and less lecture theory... We will also cover differentiation rules for logarithmic functions, Linear approximations of differentials (an engineer’s favorite topic.... just ask one). If time permits we will start exploration into related rates, maximum and minimum or applications of derivatives.

This week in ODE, we will have student presentations on Monday, where students have been preparing a topic in ODE that relates to what we have covered first and second order ODE's. Each student will have up to 12 minutes to present a topic and will have 3 to 4 minutes for questions. We will also be looking into superposition principle and undetermined coefficients, Thursday we will look at variation of parameters and I will try to find an application to physics, where variation of parameters is used to describe a particle in a well, or electron under the potential attraction of the atom, good application problems helps the students to learn well....
Friday I am hoping to make another closer look at mechanical vibrations.

This week in Calculus II we will finish up series, considering Taylor Series and their approximations. We will have an exam at the beginning of the following week.

This week in Linear Algebra we look at Linear Transformations from R^n to R^m, including rotations, dilations, and reflections. We will also look at the next in our series of Labs, a study of Markov Chains.

Junior English:
We are finishing Cannery Row this week and a paper is due on Friday!

This week in U.S. History, we will study the Roaring Twenties and the Crash.

This week in Economics, we will study the ten principles of economics and we will look at the economy of China.

This week in European History, we will examine the foundations of early modern Europe.