SOH-CAH-TOA

So, I should probably be blogging about something culturally interesting and different, like my school's sports festival that was on Tuesday... But I just don't want to. There are a lot of pictures and it is kind of 11:30 pm here and I just don't have the energy to sort through all of the pictures and things that happened that day. Instead I am going to blog about Math! 

 I know it sounds totally nerdy and it will sound cliche in a moment but try to refrain from judging. I must say thank you to all of my wonderful math teachers back in Northfield because you have provided me the key to understanding the international language of math. It is seriously the only class I can completely understand and follow along with for the entire period- even English class is taught mostly in Japanese. Math is an international language.

For the past week we have been working with sin, cos, and tan but fairly simple definitions of what these are. Today, we actually started to apply sin, cos, and tan to graphs and the unit circle and figure out things like "what is the angle if sin=1/2". I have to say I was a bit confused as to what was going on at first during class today because all of the instructions were in Japanese... but then it clicked and my year of Pre-Calc came rushing back to me! I was able to quickly finish the worksheet the teacher had given us and was pleased to see that all of my answers were correct (he had been doing the problems from the worksheet on the board as notes for the class... I just kind of did them and went back to check that I had done them correctly- I did!).

After class a lot of the kids were still working on the problems and still a bit confused. To be fair the way the teacher was teaching them was to draw it all out on the graph,  use different lines to determine the angles, and I am not even sure what else it was just a really confusing way to teach it (totally my opinion, besides this I have really liked my math teachers teaching style). If I were learning this for the first time I would be confused too.

My friends were shocked that I completely understood what was going on and asked why I wasn't confused. I took this opportunity and in a mix of Japanese and English I explained to them the way I learned how to solve these problems: SOH-CAH-TOA. With a lot of pictures and diagrams they were able to understand and actually took notes from me! Of course I don't want to be rude or disrespectful to how our teacher was teaching us, so I told my friends they should probably still do it his way and that mine is just another way to look at the problem. In the end both ways come up with the same answer. I was just super excited that I was able to help my classmates in a topic other than English!

Sayonara from Osaka, Japan.