Reflection 12: Final Goals

Honestly, I can't believe I'm almost done Calculus. It was a lot of work, but I still can't believe it.

Over the past semester, I have definitely acquired more knowledge of mathematics than I had before; I've learned about and gained a pretty decent understanding of concepts like limits and derivatives, as well as an idea as how to model certain things in the natural world. I certainly feel more proficient in some subjects than others, particularly in growth models as compared to things like continuity and derivatives (though I still understand them, I'm just not quite so good at solving their problems). I held an A in the class most of the semester, which I'm very proud of and somewhat surprised at, because as I mentioned in one of my blog posts before, I am not the best mathematician and certainly my middle school self would be astonished. Things do change (ha-ha calculus ha-ha mathematics of change).

Achieving these goals were probably most helped by in class examples followed by homework problems that were achievable/able to be checked. I often found that homework problems that couldn't be checked/compared to something often were fairly useless in my learning because I had nothing to compare them to, and so it was pretty easy for me to accidentally go down a wrong path. Additionally, guidance in class was also very useful, and projects often helped apply the knowledge to what would likely be real world scenarios.

I would definitely advise incoming students that if they want to perform well on exams and quizzes, homework is probably the best way to study, but not to stress on problems that are profoundly difficult- sometimes it just takes good judgement as to what constitutes good studying and what is no longer productive.

I would probably give myself an overall grade of around a high B to a low A. I've put in quite a lot of time to this course and have definitely learned a lot, but obviously there have been some concepts that I've needed working on, and there were times when I just couldn't do homework to gain a better understanding of the concepts. Overall, I did understand most of the material though (at least so I think), so I feel as though I'm pretty "alright" with calculus concepts, hence the B to a low A reasoning.