Progress

“When am I ever going to use this?”

That question usually bothers me, but for a while in this course, I was one of those people who thought they were not learning anything that would help them in the future.  During the first few weeks of class, I concluded that calculus was absolutely useless to me and that there was no way I’d ever be able to do well in AP Calculus. 

On the first quiz we took, I honestly wasn’t sure what I was doing.  I had relied on memory to find the domain and range, which proved to be completely useless, as I mentioned in my previous blog post.  As the course went on though, and I spent a lot of time working on the homework packets, my critical thinking skills improved greatly.  Instead of just memorizing how the domain and range usually was, I was able to think about why the domain and range of a given function was the way it was.  I think I did fairly well in the first unit because I took the time to make mistake after mistake on the homework until I realized why they were mistakes.  By the time I took the first test, the class no longer seemed impossible to me because I had developed an understanding of the material that made me capable of thinking about the problems without relying on a calculator or my memory.

During the second unit, I had already restored some confidence in my math abilities, but I still doubted myself.  I think it’s good for me to doubt myself, sometimes, though.  For example, I missed a day of school and we learned something new while I was gone.  Originally, I had assumed that I could teach the new material to myself, and I tried to solve the problems but I didn’t really know what I was doing.  I’m so glad that I ended up asking for help because I would’ve been lost otherwise.  The thing I struggled with most in this unit was completing the square when the “a” value wasn’t one.  It was difficult for me to remember to multiply the perfect “c” value before adding it to the other side, and it was easy for me to forget to do one simple thing that would give me the wrong answer for the entire problem.  In addition, I had previously relied on my calculator a lot to find the vertex, the y intercept, the x intercepts, etc. but now I can bring all of these ideas together and again, think about why.

Even if I don’t end up with a career that requires me to find the domain or y intercept of a given function, this class has not been useless to me.  My work ethic and my critical thinking skills have improved greatly.  Even though the math in this class is more complex than what I’ve learned before, it’s really only made me understand more about math because I can finally link a ton of things together in a way that will forever be useful to me, regardless of my future career.

I don’t know if I’ll take AP Calculus next year but I have not marked it off as impossible like I had at the beginning of the class.  And then there’s that infamous question: when am I ever going to use this?

The answer is this:

Regardless of what I decide to do with my life, I will use the skills I learned in this class every day. 

- Paige