A common question in (older?) textbooks is to give students a function or relation and have them graph it without technology (because in the old days technology was not available). Students had to find all the appropriate information without hints or further direction: they were supposed to know what to do and do it. AP…
I had an email last week from a teacher asking, how come I can use a substitution to find a power series for , and for , but not for ? The answer is that you can. Substituting (2x) into the cosine’s series give you a Taylor series centered at x = 0, a Maclaurin…
My choices for the Good Question series are somewhat eclectic. Some are chosen because they are good, some because they are bad, some because I learned something from them, some because they can be extended, and some because they can illustrate some point of mathematics. Difficult Problems and Why We Like Them (6-10-2013) These posts…
In this post we look at another part of the AP Calculus BC exam. Good Question 15 discussed the unusual units in 2018 BC 2(a). In this post we look at 2018 BC 2(b) where units help us find the correct integral to answer the question. How do you answer a question of a type…
My choices for the Good Question series are somewhat eclectic. Some are chosen because they are good, some because they are bad, some because I learned something from them, some because they can be extended, and some because they can illustrate some point of mathematics. This question and the next, Good Question 16, are in…
Good Question 14 – The Integral Test I have no criteria for what constitutes a “Good Question” for this series of occasional posts. They are just questions that I found interesting, or that seem more than usually instructive, or that I learn something from. I cannot quote this question (2016 BC 92) since it is…
Let’s end the year with this problem that I came across a while ago in a review book: Integrate It was a multiple-choice question and had four choices for the answer. The author intended it to be done with a u-substitution but being a bit rusty I tried integration by parts. I got the correct answer,…
Teaching Calculus 