SOURCE: On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at approximately 1900 hours, I received a telephone call from Sgt. John Sanzone, who told me there was a drive by shooting that had just occurred. Sgt. Sanzone assigned me as the CSI lead on this case.
It wasn’t the hard class or the teacher or my studying style, but it was my mentality that was holding me back. I thought that what I had was confidence, when it was really just arrogance. That arrogance blinded me from the fact that AP calculus BC isn’t a typical high school course, it’s an actual college level course. It dawned to me that
I went from geometry straight to Pre Calculus skipping Algebra II. I knew coming into this class that it would be unbelievable hard. Every person in my class that signed up to skip a year of math had a personal talk with the teacher who told us that he does not recommend anyone to skip any year of a subject, especially math. To take Pre Calculus as a Junior we were required to take Math Tutorial, a class that was solely devoted to helping us with the difficult math. I knew I wanted to take this class, I have been particularly good up until now at math
A good question can mean so much to different types of people. So many people look up questions on google daily due to what they are currently dealing with. A good question must spark an interest in someone. A good must also be relatable to what the reader's current thought process. For example, in high school, when I am stuck on a Calculus problem.
My body cried like a newborn babe, afraid in an unfamiliar place. Immediately, my fresh eyes were greeted by waves of black hair, friendly smiles, and the Japanese language. I had arrived in Japan. I did not know the language or the customs, but I dove right into the dark pool. I was determined not to let the unknown drown me.
The first week was relatively easy and I had no worries, but then the second week came along and changed my perspective of the class. The heavy amounts of math were not my favorite. I was sufficient in math, but this was more complex than any other math I had experienced before. I struggled on the first couple of quizzes and tests. I started to become discouraged with my capabilities.
Learning Calculus is time consuming and much of laboring. Practicing Calculus problems at least for three hours would be of great help for students in mastering Calculus concepts. Test preparations should be serious and a review of Algebra skills is also essential if students lack in the prior knowledge of Algebra. Pre Calculus courses in prior classes lay the necessary ground for high school topics. Getting the support of the instructor during office hours and seeking the help of student support teams minimize the struggles of students in learning Calculus courses at high school
While I acknowledge that many challenges in life are not academic in nature, my most challenging experience was taking a course titled “Advanced Algebra 2”. While I have excelled in many academic subjects--as I have even taken three Dartmouth College courses-- Mathematics has never come easily to me. Sitting in a small classroom with thirty other students, I may as well have been in a foreign language course that I was not familiar with. The day that our first test grades came back, I was astonished.
I failed because I didn 't take notes and did the math in my head not showing work on tests, and I didn 't do homework (correct answers on math tests were only worth only about ½ a point on tests). Because homework, notes, and showing work were weighted so much just in math, I repeated pre algebra until 10th grade. Always got correct answers on tests. I demonstrated that I could get the right answer without aid (calculaters weren 't allowed until I got into algebra). I demonstrated that I would do the math.
Math is mandatory in life and is appealing to us. Some students belive that just because math is hard they should give up. Math will lead us to many great goals and
Throughout my early highschool years I struggled with math, many of my teachers didn’t stay the same, I changed who I called my friends, and I changed how I spend my free time during the winter. High School is tough. It’s nothing like middle school. During my Freshman year of highschool I had to take Algebra I. Algebra one started out as a review of stuff I learned in Junior High. Eventually though the year I couldn’t keep up with the work and I no longer understood what was being taught to me.
I really enjoyed linear algebra last semester and would go as far as to say that it was the most interesting math class I have ever taken. My results on the last exam and one of the quizzes were worse than I would have hoped but besides that I felt that I was able to keep up with the material and had a firm grasp on it. Similarly, in vector calculus I preformed very poorly on the exam, in part do to going blank on a single concept that was at the core of a couple of questions. Still I should have spent more time studying and spending more time on the material from the beginning of the course. I still feel that I have a more comfortable grasp on more of the vector calculus material than I do in
Also, at first I thought I was going to fail that class because I couldn't understand anything. But, after a while I really got the hang of them, and now I'm kinda good. I am most proud that I could actually do very hard math. I think I tried my best in P.e class but i guess i needed more than that.
I would like to start this reflection by acknowledging that despite BC Calculus being the hardest math course I have taken, it was the most impactful on how I view and interact with mathematics. I remember the day of our infamous “Bull Run” invitational meet (one of the hardest cross country courses in the USA), I was complaining to Ebenezer about how hard the class had gotten despite it only being the first quarter. He reassured me that despite the challenge, this course shaped his love for mathematics and that after taking this class he would go through math problems — related to his running pace — as he was racing. Although I have not developed this degree of infatuation where I constantly think about math as I run, I do understand what
PCELL: Let me give you a little bit of background on the project, and particularly why I am here at Tri-C. I don’t know how familiar you are with some changes in developmental and first year undergraduate mathematics. It used to be that everyone took courses that were kind of on a calculus track, even though they were never going to take calculous unless that fit unto their major. So, they took classes like college algebra, finite math and trig, just because we have been teaching them for decades.
