When I first heard we were doing blogs for Calculus I was a bit skeptical. Why??? I tried to be neutral about it. I wanted to understand what our professor’s end goal was with this, and today it really hit me. I think it’s working. I love learning in unconventional ways. I used to hate how I would go to high school and be forced to follow a certain formula of learning and most of that was based on passing the SOL’s (Standard of Learning tests) instead of actually caring that we learned something worthwhile. I’ve also been disappointed in the amount of knowledge I never learned.

Example #1. I went to Germany when I graduated High School back in 2004 (don’t ask… I took a hiatus). I took an intensive learning class for 3 weeks and was the only American in my entire class. We had people in my class from Switzerland, Japan, China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, etc. and most of them did not speak English (surprising to me at the time). The teacher would ask me to tell him how tall I was, and I had no idea how to tell him in the metric system, so everyone laughed at me when I told him in inches how tall I was. Later, I was asked what the population of my home country was. I didn’t even know. I guessed at 1 million (still kicking myself over that one) and people laughed at me again. I just never learned this sort of thing in school. And this makes me incredibly angry.

I hate the way our public schools do things. I hate how everything is based on test scores and no one actually cares if we are LEARNING.  The “No Child Left Behind” BS only made it worse. Hear me out here. Some children need to be left behind. Some children are smarter and need to be pushed ahead. It may not be fair, but life is not fair. Some people are born beautiful, some people are born ugly. Some people are born smart, some people are born with only a brain stem. Life is not fair. So let’s not act like we’re all the same. Doing this sets us back as a society. We need to harness our strengths and work on our weaknesses even harder. I’m not saying weaknesses can’t be overcome, but if you pretend they don’t exist, or that a child has learned what they needed to learn when they have not, you do that child a disservice.

I had a point, I am trying to get back to it I promise. My point is, I think the professor has branched out, and taken a chance on us. I think that by doing these blogs we are able to learn in our own ways, and learn from each other. Instead of just handing us a book and telling us to read it, she’s making us read it and (if we do this the way it was intended) think about it, and apply it, and share the learning process with each other. Maybe someone else who blogs will come up with a better way for me to understand a certain concept, or link something that really drives the message home for me.

I also find that learning something using multiple senses/parts of the brain helps me to retain the knowledge. Not only can I visually learn math, I also get to write it out, and then type about it, while considering new ways to blog about it to keep this blog from being monotonous and make sure I get a good grade. Suddenly I realize the brilliance behind the plan, and I applaud my teacher for taking a risk, and not being a stereotypical math teacher. I feel lucky to be the first semester to do this project.

Anyway, I am really happy because the Quiz on Wednesday went really well for me, I feel like I have limits down and I remember functions a lot better. With that, I will leave you with a fun math-related photo I found, and I will try to write a little more about actual Calculus on my next post.