# Behind the curtain

A brief glimpse “behind the curtain”: the setup I use during zoom video classes!

The lockdown/circuit breaker sure has brought its shares of challenges in teaching and learning. Lessons are certainly slightly less effective without the physical interactive component: I can’t just look over students’ shoulder and check on their progress, and it’s definitely been harder to gauge how my explanations are faring without the feedback from non-verbal cues. Not to mention the occasional lag and technical difficulties.

# Still climbing onto the shoulders of giants

It was year 2005/2006: I was taking further maths in JC under Mr Wee when he showed some video clips about linear algebra (what we were learning about at that time) to us during lecture. In addition to the math content I also remembered how he told us about this initiative by MIT, the OpenCourseWare, where some course content (including video lectures) from the university were being uploaded and made available for free to the public. Thinking back, this was pretty remarkable (youtube was still in its infancy). I recall at that time, finding the experience pretty interesting (MIT is nerd heaven after all, so there’s the brand name recognition. Plus the video lecture was challenging but engaging: something I’d sure hope to experience when I get to university), but that’s about it. After all, who has time during JC do much more on top of academic and social life!

# Q9b discussion

### The integration part

We have $\displaystyle \int \frac{1}{(1-x^2)(1+x^2)} \; \mathrm{d}x = t + C$. Since the denominator is so complicated, partial fractions is the way to go.
$$\frac{1}{(1-x)(1+x)(1+x^2)} = \frac{A}{1-x} + \frac{B}{1+x} + \frac{Cx+D}{1+x^2}.$$
Give it a go!

# Youtube videos

I’ve been hard at work producing Youtube videos recently: check out my channel here:

My youtube channel

# New year, new notes

With every topic summarized into one page, we hope that these set of revision notes can help you in your learning. Hopefully it will be a really handy reference when you practice and work on questions.