Edwin Kuang

Class #120

Journal #2

As week two concludes, I want to look back and reflect on what happened this

week. Coming off a three-day weekend, I was lucky enough to go back home and visit

family which was nice even though it has only been a week since winter break ended. It

was fun while it lasted but when the day came to return to school, I was sad to leave my

parents again. The sun hadn’t even risen yet and I had left the house on a two-hour

drive toward Davis. Everything was going smoothly until I got pulled over for suspicion

of drunk driving and slight speeding. They said I was driving over the lines which could

have been me being tired from not getting a good sleep the night before but after I did

some of their field of sobriety tests, I was let go off on a warning for slight speeding.

That was a scary event as it was my first time getting pulled over but I was lucky

enough to not get officers who were on a power trip and were only given a warning.

After I got back to the dorms, I took a quick nap as I was so tired from poor sleep from

the previous night but also tired from the long drive.

I was quite scared of the quiz as I didn’t know what to expect because this was

the first time not only taking a math quiz in college as I didn’t take MAT 17A but also the

first quiz with Dr. Daddel. The quiz was surprisingly fair and was pretty similar to what

the homework problems were conceptually going over which I thought was nice

because previously in my high school classes, some tests had nothing to do with

previous assignments or lectures.

 For the rest of my classes in the next couple of days, nothing special happened

besides my chemistry class where I got all of the iClicker questions correct which I was

really happy because that will contribute to my final grade quite a bit.

I’m still really happy that my Calculus class was moved into California Hall which

is the biggest hall on Davis campus. Learning in the cramped theater room was not

exciting, to say the least. Feeling cramped and claustrophobic isn’t the best feeling to

feel when sitting in an hour-long lecture hall and trying to learn and dive deep into

important topics. This week, I learned about arguably one of the most important topics

in Calculus, the Fundamentals of Calculus Part 1 and Part 2. This took a while to

understand but Dr. Daddel, my Calculus professor explained these two concepts well.

After taking some time to learn about the midpoint theorem, jump discontinuity, and the

net theorem, we finally got to the long waiting u-substitution that I remembered from

Calculus in high school that this was an important idea to understand and know idea on

when to use it to solve a problem. After laughing when none of the students responded

to knowing the chain rule or the power rule, class ended and I finally got to go back to

my dorm and rest. After taking a quick nap, Started my homework and got it done in a

relatively respectable time. Gave a call to my parents and some of my friends and had a

quick chat before I went to bed.