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!
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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