Graphing Sine & Cosine

Tutoring graphing sines and cosines can be tough because often teachers muck it up pretty bad when they first introduce it. Throwing up a big equation with a lot of a's and b's and c's all at once. As usual I will take the opposite approach, introducing the confusing letters one at a time, building towards incorporating everything. It's worth noting that these problems vary quite a bit from teacher to teacher, so there's a decent chance that the harder examples in the later tutoring videos of this chapter won't be relevant to you. If you're in honors, though, it's worth nailing these because these concepts really cement some concepts that will help you out in Calculus next year!

Sine & Cosine Graphing Overview

In this video I introduce the terminology of amplitude, period, vertical shift and phase shift, but save actually learning to work with them for later videos. The main thing here is to get the broad idea, and see the similarities and differences between the graphs of sine and cosine.

Amplitude & Period

Every journey begins with the first step. This journey isn't great, and we're starting with two steps: amplitude and period, a.k.a. the numbers surrounding the sin or cos. Not too bad, especially if you use my patented "simple four step plan for graphing sine and cosine!"

Vertical Shift in Sine & Cosine Graphs

Vertical shift is the number at the end of the equation in problems like f(x)=2sinX+4 and y=cosX-2. This is the second-most annoying way a trig teacher can make a problem harder, but if you follow my "simple five step plan for graphing sine and cosine!" you'll get through it okay.

Phase Shift (honors only) (free)

Phase shift is the horizontal shift that happens when there's a number in the parentheses with the X, as in y=sin(X-2). Sure, these problems are difficult and take forever, but if you follow my "simple six step plan for graphing sine and cosine!" you stand a chance.