Math 171 (Statistical Decision Making)
Background:
I took this course fall semester of my freshman year. It was also another one of my honors courses my fall semester. I was surprised when most of the math consisted of determining what test to use and how to perform the test on the calculator. Math is not my strongest subject, but I pushed through and learned how I can study math to best fit my needs.
Problem Solving:
I can say that it was a rookie mistake when I sat in the front row of my 8 a.m. math class. I was already waking up at 5 am to go lift at Iler for cheerleading and underestimated how tired I would be afterwards. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would struggle to stay awake in class, but I did my best because I was sitting in the front row and in perfect view of my professor. I had even resulted to chewing minty gum and drinking cold water to help keep me awake. Whenever we took notes, I was able to stay awake. Whenever the teacher started lecturing, it was like my brain flipped a switch and wanted to go to sleep. I knew that in order to retain the information, I had to learn most of it on my own time when my brain was actually cooperating with me.
I had to devise a plan.
In class, I would try my hardest to stay awake and write down the notes; however, I would have to teach the information to myself later in the day. Luckily, statistics wasn’t too hard to learn on my own. I made sure to look over problems in the book, study examples in my notebook, do practice problems, and do the review problems before tests. I learned that the practice problems helped me the most because I could look at the answers and figure out where I went wrong in the problem. Hopefully I can use these study habits in future classes!
One of the major projects we had to do was a math paper which I included below!
This paper determined whether there was a difference between the average high temperatures in the fall versus spring in Lancer Park.