Pre-Calculus class was the most normal class I had while in 11th grade. (Normal= close to what a normal high school Pre-Calc class would be which means using a textbook and not doing any really large collaborative projects.) All of the content taught was taught straight out of a textbook and we used the resources that were included in the textbook. It was so weird!

 

One thing that was different about this class is that 50% of the learning comes in the form of revisions. Most of the assignments we do can be revised, which is a good thing since almost all of the partner quizzes this year included at least one ridiculously complex problem. (You can see some examples on the artifact page.) This allowed us to grow in the qualities of collaboration and inquiry.

 

Whenever we got stuck on a problem, we didn’t go to the teacher, instead we asked our peers for help. We were able to work with our peers to figure out how to do these problems and as a result, our teacher wasn’t swamped with questions. (Our Pre-Calculus class is much larger than any of our other classes so there are too many students for our teacher to be able to help each individual student every time we had a question.) This student-help-student situation allowed for growth in collaboration, since we were working as a group to find the answers, and inquiry, since we had to try many different strategies to find the correct answer which sometimes would take up three days working on the same (amazingly annoying) problem!

 

Some of the hardest concepts for me to understand and work with were reversing logarithims, transforming sine, cosine, and tangent into different forms (as seen on the Not Easy Quiz picture), and working with imaginary numbers. (Anything that I can not easily apply to real life confuses me...) Even though I didn't understand these concepts, I still continued to work on being able to use them and as a result, I still have an A in that class.