Math Monday

6/10/2013

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Happy Final Monday of the 2012-2013 school year!!!!!!!!! I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel like I'm being discharged from prison in a way. Anyway, the Math Monday blog for today is to explain how writing about math in these blogs has helped us with learning our math standards and information, etc.

To be honest, writing about math in this blog hasn't helped me very much at all. I'm still really bad at math and the class, because these blogs can never be completely up-to-date with what we're doing, especially at this time of year. During preparation for the Math CST, I had nothing to do because I didn't take the CST itself. I can see how it would help my classmates, however, because they would be able to look back on their blogs in memory and remember what they had written about things they had learned in the past and were reviewing. I don't think writing in this blog helped me enough with my Math class as it should have. I just don't think it was very effective for me, personally. 

Another part of the prompt talks about the fact that the education policy is changing. Whee. I seriously could not care any less about that itself, because it's going to change back in ten years when it no longer applies to me, but I probably should care about what's going to happen. Kids are going to hate school even more. They're going to be held behind and peered at because they didn't get the exact correct work that a different mind did and the same answer, but we do that now anyways. Teachers stress the importance of math, but in reality, most of the jobs people will have don't use things that are beyond basic. I don't think there's much of a need to know the quadratic formula and to use it step-by-step to get a ridiculously complex answer in the real world, but it's not like what any student says will be taken seriously. The only reason we need to do a lot of detailed math work is to please the people who run the education systems. I don't think we should rush a decision of a life plan on any young person, but I don't think we should stress next-to-useless things like imaginary numbers and how to use them in hypothetical situations when a very, very small percentage of students would ever need to use them in their life. 
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My Struggles in Math

6/3/2013

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Happy Monday... just kidding, that's an oxymoron. Anyways, today's Math Monday blog assignment is to name the hardest thing we learned this year in math and tell what we did to solve it and how it affected our math learning, etc.

The hardest thing to learn in math this year was probably some of the specifics of exponents. I know how to write basic exponential form and I know what scientific notation is, but I had trouble with negative exponents. I also struggled with parentheses in this situation and distributing things that involved exponents. That was one of the few things I learned this year that I had never done before in a math class. However, using resources around me like other people's help and knowledge and my math textbook (which helped me a lot throughout the year, actually), I eventually learned somewhat how to do what I had previously had a difficult time with.

Another difficult concept I studied this year was learning how to find a slope in a graph. This tied into our study of functions and linear equations. It involved formulas and a lot of words, too, which made things very confusing for me at times. I would always get mixed up in finding what certain values on the graph were. I overcame this one, however, by taking notes on what my teacher was saying and on what the book told me. Now I don't have as hard of a time with slope when I do use it.

Things like this, which are all examples of trial-and-error, are very important to fundamental learning, especially school. Making a mistake or not understanding something specific is not the end of the world. When we make mistakes, we shouldn't dwell on them, but rather go on and look back to them as things to learn from. I think that this is why we study history. We don't want to make the mistakes of the past. All human learning has some elements of what I described above. In this way, learning things like these are more practical than we thought!
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