In reflecting on this course, explain one example of how you engaged in intellectual risk-

taking. What did you learn in this process?

The entire purpose of innumeracy was to take risks intellectually. This class was to help

the students better understand areas of math that are often misconstrued or misunderstood. This

involves accepting the fact that you may not be very knowledgeable in a certain subject and be

willing to learn new information about it. One way we tried to understand these concepts was by

creating class presentations about the book “How Not to Be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg. For

this book, each team would read a chapter in the book and create a presentation explaining the

concepts in easier to understand terms to the class. Not only did this grow our understanding of

some of the math concepts, but also educated us on the best ways to communicate math to

others. For many of these chapters, we would have class discussions. These discussions often

related to examples in the real world. One of these discussions that stuck with me the most was

the discussion about improper graph making and how agencies and organizations can create

misleading graphs and that it occurs much more often than we think. This stuck with me because

of simply how easy it was to manipulate the data into showing something completely different

on a graph. This is especially important for myself going into a research field, because to present

your data your graphs must depict it accurately.

Another semester-long project that promoted intellectual risk-taking was our weekly

group podcasts. For these podcasts, each group chose a book to read and recorded a podcast for

that section weekly. Our group chose to read the book “Invisible Women” to learn how women

are disproportionately being impacted by many societal aspects and governmental decisions

being made around the world. This is an example of intellectual risk-taking because were are

learning more about a topic that we did not know much about.
 From participating in intellectual risk-taking, I learned more about certain math topics

that I did not know much about, or learned new ways to calculate them; I learned how to better

communicate math ideas to others; and I learned how women are being disproportionately

affected by innumeracy around the world as well as by other factors.