Arika Sari’s Math Experience

Math has always been my favorite and my strongest subject ever since I started school.
One of the earliest memories about math that I have are the counting blocks we used in
Kindergarten.  We had ones, tens, and hundred blocks in which we used to learn to
count and add.  I remember liking the hands-on way of learning.  I believe this started
off my enjoyment of math at this very early age. The best memory I have from math
was in grade 3 when we had the strawberry fraction cake.  We were first being
introduced to the concept of fractions, and our teacher brought us a large strawberry
cake to help demonstrate the idea.  She asked us questions like how we would split it
evenly among different numbers of people and we had to work together as a class to
come up with the answers.  It was the closest thing to inquiry based learning that I
experienced in my math classrooms, even though it was still very guided by the
teacher.  We would come up with the answers, but since there was only one cake, she
made sure that we had come up with the right answer before she actually cut into the
cake.  And of course, the best part was at the end, when we all got to eat the cake!  I
want to provide my students with fun ways to learn that they will remember. I consider
myself to be good at math. Math, ever since I was a child, was my best and strongest
subject in school. My teachers never used to call on me because I would answer all of
the math questions. I grasp the material quickly and put forth 110% effort. I also learn
math from outside the school, like when I want to buy something, I have to figure out
the cost of a discounted sales item, comparing prices per unit, paying with cash and
practice doing the mental math to see how much change I will get back. I have had
good and bad experiences in math class. My best experience is getting straight A's on all
my assignments for the all semesters in junior and high school. Another good memory
was when I was the first person in my class to figure out a mathematical riddle in 8th
grade. A bad memory was when my math teachers had very weak explanation power.
My teachers failed to provide me intuition. Second, my surroundings were not that
'mathy' meaning I didn't have people who knew a lot of math. So, until the internet, I
was inspiration-less. After high school, I had calculus in my first semester at university.
At this point in my life the asnwer to “why did I have to learn calculus?” is “I totally
loved mathematics and wanted to study more”. I remembered some of the theorems
and formulas, but nothing much. What I really enjoyed this time around where all the
applications. I still remember the day when my teacher explained that the integral was
the area under a curve and he went on to explain the whole process using some graphs.
For the first time, I saw the importance of calculus in other domains and it was
fascinating. Also, I managed to understand the definition of limits (again a graphic
explanation helped more). At that point I also had a better understanding of inifity and
infinitesimally small, which helped more. Personally, I think calculus can be quite hard
to understand if you don’t see the applications or you don’t understand the basis of each
concept. I still believe that this is one of the most useful part of mathematics.
Well maths is something which is totally based on understanding the basics instead of
just taking everything just for granted. some of my high points are :

 I always try to focus on the basic of the sum instead of focusing on

different sums and then relating one to the other.
 understanding maths require a lot of brainpower and interest.

I always try to feel that i am playing a game or somebody has given me a challenge
which i had to beat. One thing is true that there are some students who are not able to
understand mathematics, but thats just an excuse because if you want to you can
understand even higher mathematics .