No Wonder I Was Making Great Progress

I've been saying for days I was about to start the matrix, right? Monday night after I posted my blog, ate some cake, and pondered leaving my five year old on someone's doorstep (it was a bad Mama day) I cracked open Everything to practice what I've done so far. My planned quick practice turned into three hours of BWUH? because Everything just had to be written by someone just like my Algebra I teacher. I didn't close the book until 3:30 a.m.

Idiot's Guide is amazing at breaking things down, but so far it hasn't thrown the same type of trick problems at me. The things my teacher would've said, "I just taught you how to do this with an example -- apply what I just said to something that looks absolutely nothing like what we just did!" Fractions with equations in both the numerator and the denominator. Equations with mixed numerals. The dreaded word problems.

I knew it was all going too smoothly. I'll give myself this much -- I must understand what I'm doing now. I was able to figure out which concepts applied to the equations.


(5x - 4) / 7 = (2x + 9) / 3

I saw this and thought, "What the !@#$ am I supposed to do with this shenanigans? I guess I could make the denominators match."

[(3)(5x - 4) / (3)(7)] = [(7)(2x + 9) / (7)(3)]

(15x - 12) / 21 = (14x + 63) / 21

Multiply by the reciprocal to get rid of the denominators... while writing this I realized I could've just cross-multiplied the whole thing from jump street. This is what I get for doing algebra at 1:30 a.m. I can't believe I did all that extra work. And I did it for three different problems!!!!

15x - 12 = 14x + 63
x = 75



When I got to (2n + 9) / (5n - 2) = 1/3 I freaked out a little. Bearings were quickly restored via the long method. Let's try it the short way with cross-multiplication!

3(2n + 9) = 1(5n - 2)
6n + 27 = 5n - 2
n = -29

No algebra after midnight for me. I added three more steps to this.


The inequalities were really disappointing in Everything. No "less than/greater than or equal to" dilemmas at all. I flipped through and didn't see a section on them at all. Everything Guide to Algebra my rear. There was one answer that threw me. I won't bother with the whole process because I did get it right. The book gave the answer as -6 > x > -18. Idiot's Guide calls this bad math grammar and would have me write it -18 < x < -6. I like that better because it's ordered as the numbers appear on a number line. Is one considered technically correct? Technically correct is always the best kind of correct.

The matrix keeps getting shoved back, so I'm officially setting a new start date of 01/14/13 so I can get my posts about fighting with word problems and inequalities up and not do so much of this back and forth between concepts. Books have to be renewed by the 17th, so I have to finish these books three weeks after that. This will get interesting.