How tweet it is

My Calc II students were all atwitter again today. I knew today's tweet would treat them to a challenge: I asked them to (in 140 characters or fewer) summarize the method of partial fractions for integrating rational functions. Anyone who has more than a passing memory of Calc II likely remembers that the process is not particularly hard...but it's long as hell and therefore difficult to summarize succinctly.

Those I felt were some of the students' strongest tweets are below, complete with intentional spelling errors and sparse spacing. I think they did very well (only a couple of them seemed to miss the method altogether...if you're one of those people, please don't hesitate to come on by my office; we can go over another example or two together).

"makesuretopislowerindefreethanbottomfactorbottomdecomposethebottomintegratethatdecompositionclearthedenominatorssolveforconstantsbingo!"

"1)long divide 2)factor 3)look for decomposition 4)anti-differentiate 5)find constants"

"1.long division if degree_top>degree_bottom.2.factor denominator.3.A/linear&Bx+C/irreducable quads. cross-mult.denomxnumerators.4.solve A,B,C"

"to integrate fractions, 1st long divide, then factor separate the integral and solve if not solvable separate out each term bottom and the" [ran out of room!]

"1poly long division 2factor3decompose w/each factor in the denominator4integrate5cross multiply and solve for each constant."

"makeoriginalfunctionsumofpartialfractions.clearthedenominators.findx-valueto=0tosolveforconstants.ifcant,comparecoefficientsonlikepowers."

They're definitely growing more accustomed to writing in this highly constrained genre, one which encourages concision and carefulness, and the ability to get right to the heart of the matter.