It seems my last few posts got less wordy and more to the point, which might not be a good thing. I am not sure if I improved with communication skills. I didn’t want this blog to be stiff and boring. It’s better that I do it this way, formal speech makes me feel too robotic, with a subject that can come across as stiff and uninteresting as it is. I’ve kept the wording in these blogs casual. However, I have much room to improve, and I see that in this blog. I have a mother with a Master’s degree in Psychology who was a Licensed Professional Councilor, and a father who has a PhD in Psychology who practices as a Clinical Psychologist. I’ve always felt I was a decent communicator. Here I am able to explain how calculus and philosophy aren’t so different, and how each can be useful in other aspects of life, outside of school. And finally, my best metacognitive post: Calculus and Philosophy. I then took it a bit further by studying how calculus even came to be, trying to figure out why it exists at all in the post History Lesson. Soon, I felt I finally understood the point of the blog, in this post. One of my earlier posts, My Brain on Math highlights my starting point. This is when I hit my personal metacognitive high point. I do feel I grew, however, when I was finally able to relate calculus to philosophy. I feel I already covered some of this growth with my critical thinking section (ie applying calculus to chemistry and creating my own equations for chemistry). Metacognitive growth, as I understand it, would entail my ability to take what I learn in Calculus and apply it to other aspects of my life. Then I created my own equation! If that isn’t critical thinking, it’s definitely creative thinking, and I am proud of it. I did have to look in the book, but I got it. I’m proud of myself because I was the only person (at least in my group of calculus buddies) who actually solved the distance equation on the worksheet before the Professor helped us. Finally, my most recent, and possibly a personal best for me, was this post on Optimization. It’s one of my personal favorite posts, simply because I was able to make my life so much easier. In this post, I actually created new equations for my Chemistry exam using my math knowledge. But it’s still not my best critical thinking post, I think this particular post was one of my all-time best critical thinking moments: Chemistry Equation Post. ![]() I’m not kidding, I do weird things when I see numbers. I find the next example a far better example of critical thinking, this post is called You Know Math’s Taking Over Your Life When… In this post, I started seeing math problems on street signs, I started deriving numbers every time I saw them. Though not a terrible post, it was just the beginning of how much calculus would help me in chemistry. This first example is one of my earlier posts, called Chemistry & Calculus. I’d like to share a few examples of progress as far as my critical thinking skills improved on my blog. I find my mind is sharper, my logic skills are sharper, due to the way calculus exercises my brain. ![]() My math skills haven’t just improved as far as math alone is concerned, I actually think better overall. It seems as the semester has gone by, I’ve found myself more and more adept at solving math problems, not just in calculus but also in Chemistry, and have even found myself doing better with small things like calculating tax on a grocery bill, or calculating a tip for a waiter much more quickly. I do feel my critical thinking skills have grown. I’ve actually enjoyed how much I’ve learned. Calculus has not been the end of me, nor has it even been close to the end of me. Certainly my attitude improved after naming my blog. I feel like I did well in some areas, and not so well in others as far as my progress went throughout the semester. I realize calculus is probably not the most sought-after blog to read for fun, but my goal in this blog project was to make sure it was readable, and that there were moments where it was actually entertaining. My old blog seemed to frivolous and self-indulgent. I’ve had a private blog, which I ended right before I started this blog. This was my first blog dedicated to anything remotely intellectual. This is a reflection and self-assessment on my progress in developing and growing skills over the course of this blog in the areas of critical thinking skills, metacognitive skills, communication skills, technology skills, creative engagement with the material, an adventurous “tinkering” outlook, and sense of contributing to the community of learners.
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