Advocating

Math

 

I grew the most in advocating for myself in math this year. This growth happened when I started to ask clarifying questions in times that I got confused. I didn’t want to move on being unsure, so I made sure to get that clarification. I asked for help from my peers and teachers because I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed to advocate to move forward. Before this process I would be afraid to speak out when I got confused, now I know that I have to speak out if I want to succeed. This growth in advocating helped me throughout the Looking for Pythagoras unit.

 

I am also developing this skill in Science. When I am unsure of why or how something is something is happening, I ask a question to clarify. This is an important skill because if you never really understand something it’s hard to build off of that knowledge if you don’t really understand it. This is why I knew that I needed to work on this quality.

 

In math, I grew in advocating the most during our Looking for Pythagoras unit. In this unit we learned how to find what the Pythagorean Theorem was. We also learned how to use and apply that equation to various situations. We investigated triangles, rectangles, and squares to find the Pythagorean Theorem. We were not told what the equation was right away, instead we found it for ourselves through investigation. Another big subject that we learned about was square roots. This was something that we built off of to help us investigate more about the Pythagorean Theorem.

 

A time that I really grew in this quality in this unit was in my Key Problems. A key problem is a homework review of the investigation or lesson that we did that day in class. This key problem helps me to find the important points of the lesson. The Key Problems show my weakest and best point in this process. I had to advocate for myself more than I usually did in this process because a lot of the time I would get confused or stuck. You can tell that I advocated after first learning about this content because my grade from Key Problem 3.1 to Key Problem 4.4 changed from a sixty percent to a hundred percent. Advocating really helped me to be successful in this unit.

 

In the first picture, we learned about square roots in Key Problem 3.1. This was my first time learning about square roots, so at first I got stuck a lot. This is where my growth in advocating really bloomed. I had to start to clarify my misunderstanding. Square roots are a way of expressing the side length of a figure such as a square or triangle. The number inside of the square root is the area of the square of that side length.

 

The second picture shows Key Problem 4.4. In this, we reviewed the content of what we had just learned. The difference was that we did it on our own. This was hard for me because I liked to clarify with my teacher when I got confused. So when I did these I would come to school the next day with questions. Some of these questions included misconceptions on how to properly find a length using the Pythagorean Theorem. I didn’t know how to transfer square roots and squared numbers at first but I soon learned how to properly make these calculations. This helped me to be able to move on to the next lesson without misunderstanding.

 

The content shown in this is how to apply the Pythagorean Theorem (a2+b2=c2). We had to first learn about right triangles, equilateral triangles and isosceles triangles. Right triangles have a one right angle in it (90 degrees). Equilateral triangles have all the same side lengths and angles. Isosceles triangles have two equal side lengths and angles. We applied these rules to our problems to find missing sides of triangles.

 

I hope to continue growing in advocating because it has helped me to be successful in my assignments, tests, and projects. Advocating helps me to clarify misunderstood perceptions. This is a very important quality to have in high school and in a future career. If you are unsure but don’t clarify, you could mess up a lot of projects and even worse, a company. This growth in advocating will help me to be successful in the future.