Cover Letter

Mastery

I feel that my level of mastery in this unit is pretty low, I didn’t grasp the
information during this unit very well so I gave myself an 18/30. The unit question
is, “Does Poe’s hero have time to escape the 30ft pendulum before it swings 12
times?” My answer is, yes, because the rats that are chewing through his straps
take 1 minute, and Poe has about 70 seconds before the pendulum swings 12 times.
So Poe will have an additional 10 seconds to escape. I arrived at this data by
recording the times for different lengths of pendulums to swing 4 times. After that,
I took that data averaged it out and graphed it. Next, I started curve fitting and
plugging in equations to find a line of best fit for the data. Lastly, I used the data
from an 84-inch pendulum and found the time it would take a 360 inch or 30ft
pendulum to swing 12 times. I think this data is correct because I worked with a
group of people to get it and we all agree upon our answers. The assignment
“Pendulum Variations” is a good assignment to show my level of understanding in
standard deviation. This assignment reflects my mastery because it is the
assignment where I really grasped the concept. I don’t have an assignment for
transformations/curve-fitting since that was one of the harder things for me this
unit. I don’t have an assignment that shows my understanding of that very well.

Effort/Growth
 I didn’t put as much effort into this unit as I have in other units, for this
reason, I gave myself a 20/30 for my effort/growth. In some cases this unit I would
do the bare minimum to fly under the radar, but in other cases, I would do what
was expected of me. I would never go above and beyond because I do not have the
motivation to do that in math. I only have one piece of evidence to show my effort
during this unit, and that is “The Locker Problem.” This is a great example of my
effort in this unit because even though I only came up with a mediocre answer I
still tried really hard and I feel like that shows in my work. I grew in a couple of
ways throughout this unit I’d say the biggest way I grew in is how I approach math
class. For most of the year, I haven't liked the class enough to put much effort into
it but this unit especially towards the last week or two I realized I need to step my
game up even more than I had been trying to. I didn’t grow as much with the
content in this unit I had a hard time grasping the information, especially if I
missed a day it would be even harder to understand the content. My evidence for
this section is a warm-up we did in class where we evaluated some functions then
graphed them. This shows my growth in this unit pretty well because again I didn’t
get the best answer I’m not even sure if it’s correct, but I tried to refine it a lot
because I really wanted to understand the content and find the correct answer to the
functions and correctly graph them.

Curiosity

How fast is the pendulum swinging? Does Poe have to escape between the
back, and forth swings of the pendulum? How will these factors affect his escape?