Over thanksgiving break we were given an opportunity to get extra credit and make up points in our two classes. In Scott's class I have a 91%. I have high standards for my self so usually I like to have an A+. Over the break I never worked on any of the extra credit assignments. When I got back to school I realized I made a mistake by not doing the extra work. It made me angry because it is next to imposable to change your grade towards the end of the semester. I really wish that I had done the extra credit because it would have been an easy way to raise my grade. I made the mistake by not doing the extra credit. I have learned that if I'm given a chance to do extra credit I NEED to do it. I've grown by knowing what I've done wrong and what I can do next time to fix the issue.
This past week my group and I had a miscommunication that could have ruined our whole project. We were planning to go camping to take photos and videos for a 360 video and a parallax image. The plan was to go on Monday when we got back from break but the few days before we left for break we had to change the date to the Tuesday. All of the group members said Tuesday was a good day for them and we could all go. Mike said he could go but that was before we changed the date. The day before we were going Mike told us that he couldn't go. That came as a shock to us all. We started freaking out and we didn't know what to do. The whole day was spent trying to find a way that we could go. A group member and I went to a few teachers to ask if they would go with us because we needed a chaperone. In the end we did find a chaperone to go with us. A mistake was made, we didn't check with every single person to see if it was okay. I learned that we need to check and double check with people before I make big plans. I have grown by knowing how to fix issues by myself.
The issue from the paperclip problem has continued. I still jump to conclusions with problems. In this packet that we received I did a pretty good job of solving most problems. That is shown in my grade but I think I could of done a better job with some of the problems in the packet. Most Problems were straight forward. For example, there we a lot of problems that told you to find the slope of given coordinates. For me that part was simple. There was one problem that stumped me. The prices for each size pizza went up based on the toppings. It went up to four toppings and then the prices stopped and remained the same even though toppings were getting added. At first I had no idea how to answer it. I was surprised because I did a lot of work to find out how much it cost for each topping, then it evens out and it says that's how much it really cost for the toppings. My first answer for the problem was, the price only goes up to four toppings because that's what most people buy and not many people get more than four toppings and if people want more they offer the same price. After thinking about it for awhile I didn't think that answer was right at all. I then did some research and found out that you can only have four toppings. That then led to my answer. Domino's doesn't offer more than four toppings so after four toppings the price doesn't continue to climb. It's not the same issue as the paperclip problem but I still jumped to conclusions. I made the mistake of jumping to conclusions. I have learned that I need to set a goal for myself to come up with a couple different answers and choose the best one based on what I think. I've grown by noticing a problem that I have and make a goal in order to fix it.
Making the concept card was not that difficult for me. I have gone to a High Tech school for 3 years already, so, I've been using Illustrator and Photoshop for those 3 years. I'm good at the design part but for me the wording and what I needed to say was difficult. I didn't fully understand what I needed to put on my card. The information and what information exactly. I didn't understand part off my topic. Specifically what gear ratio was and how to find the ratio of two gears. So I made a first draft. It made sense but it wasn't all correct. My partner understood it so I asked him for help. He helped but I didn't quite understand yet. After a while of researching the topics and asking for help the end product looked great. In the end I was fully able to explain gear ratios to people so that they would be able to understand it. While doing this I used the critique and drafting process to my advantage. I also learned that it can really help your work. I would say that I got my concept card critiqued 4-5 times. If you would look at it from first to final draft you wouldn't see much of a difference in the design but the content was changed a lot. The people that critiqued my concept helped out a lot. Also me not knowing what my topic was and excepting that and knowing I needed to ask for help understanding it was a huge part in the success of my concept card. That is part of the mistake learn grow concept. I made the mistakes, I acknowledged them, I wanted to learn how to fix mistakes, and by learning about the concepts I grew by the amount of knowledge that I was gaining.
This past week we were given a math problem. There was a paperclip on the sheet in a graph with the graph measured in centimeters. It was not drawn to scale. The longest length of the paperclip was 4 centimeters. We had a problem to solve. It was if you had 10 meters of metal how many paperclips could you make out of it. After that everyone sat and tried to figure it out. My train of though immediately went to doing the 10 meters divided by 4 cm and that would make 250 paperclips. I did that and to me it didn't seem right so I went back to try to find out what I did wrong. After going back I realized what I did wrong. Using the 4 cm was wrong. You had to add up all the side and bend lengths. By looking at the different sides I used the graph to figure out the length of each side. I added all the sides and got 15 cm. As soon as I found that out I wanted to find out how many paperclips you could make with the 10 meters. You can make 66 paperclips with with the 10 meters of metal. In the end I ended up finding the correct answer or what I assumed was the right answer. I also learned that I can't jump to conclusions because I first thought it was 10 m/4 cm but that was wrong. You need to focus and take each possibility into account then from that make your best guess on what the answer is based on the information you have. I made the mistake of jumping to conclusions, I learned that there are many ways to solve a problem, I have grown by now focusing on each way to solve the problem and use the answer that I think answers the question the best.
This first week of school we've done some of the normal first week things. For example a name game or team building. One theme that I think we had this year was making mistakes and keeping track of them. We didn't play a traditional name game but what we did was have a seating chart then had to name who was sitting in each seat. For me that wasn't difficult because I'm pretty good at remembering peoples name. The first time around I knew 25 of 27 peoples names in my class. After we went over it as a class we did the same "test" at the end of the class. I got 27 out of 27. That wasn't a struggle for me. One struggle I did have though was trying to write my name in Arabic. I was a little surprised and confused on why we were writing our names in Arabic but it was pretty fun to try learn how to write my name. This task was hard for me because I didn't know anything about Arabic. The first time I tried writing my name was a mess. I tried connecting the sounds to the letter that was on the sheet. Apparently there were two sides to the sheet and I did't know that until we wrote our names a second time. So for the first time I wrote it the sounds were all over the place and it didn't really sound like my name. After that Adam told us a few things about the language. One being that it gets read right to left. That's a mark up on the mistake board. Later when we broke back into work time a classmate pointed out that there was a back page. On that back page I found the sounds that I needed to fully complete my name with the right sounds. That's more mark ups for mistakes. I found those sounds and from the help of what Adam said I was able to write my name in Arabic. I learned how to write my name in Arabic and that was possible because I made the mistakes and I had a will to push harder to understand what I'm learning so that I can understand it. Looking back at it making the mistakes helped me learn more about Arabic. I was able to grow in the sense that in the beginning I wasn't able to write my name and now I can easily do it.
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AuthorI'm a 9th grade math student at HTH. Archives
December 2015
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