Reflective Report

Reflective Report

A1. It was a surprise to me how much of what we learned in this course applies to everyday life. My most prominent memories of math in school is high school, because that was much more recent than elementary school. I have found that a lot of what I learned in high school has not applied to me since. However, reviewing all the concepts in elementary math, it is apparent how important these concepts are and how often they apply to everyday life. I do not think I was always successful in demonstrating a willingness to tackle challenging problems. For example, in one of the instructional videos I left one of the answers blank. I found this entire video difficult to comprehend and I watched it many times but still could not come up with a solution and I ended up leaving the answer blank because I was frustrated and upset by this. This was a reoccurring theme throughout the course. Due to the fact that it is online and there is no chance for explanations in a lecture, I often found myself extremely challenged by the content and this is something I need to work on.

A2. One example of this stands out in particular for me. For the online discussion where we had to give instructions on constructing a polygon using a compass and a straightedge, my group misused a word. Instead of saying “perimeter” we said “diameter”. To us, we knew what we meant when we said this because we were the ones constructing the shape, however to the members of other groups, they were very much confused by this because the perimeter and the diameter of a circle are two very different things. It made constructing our polygon much more difficult for other students and this made me realize just how important using the correct terminology is to communicate properly and efficiently in math in order to understand the concepts. This made me much more aware of the terminology I was using for future discussion posts.

A3. Discussion posts were a new thing to me, as I had never needed to do this for a course before. However, I quickly understood how important discussions are for learning mathematics. The discussion posting throughout this course allowed me to see other people’s perspectives, and more importantly, their way of understanding certain mathematical concepts. With math being a very difficult subject for me, I found this immensely useful because since the course is online, I only really get to learn one way, my way. With other people’s discussion posts, this allowed me to see how they understand something or how they don’t understand something. This made certain concepts easier for me to learn when I was able to see different perspectives and different ways of learning the same concept. Each week I would make sure to read as many discussion posts as possible for this reason. One discussion post where this was apparent was the lesson plans for lesson 5. A lesson plan is a perfect example of being able to see different perspectives and different ways of learning, as each group came up with something unique, giving us as students many ways to learn the same thing.