Morgan Ashley Chang

Mu Block

Math Reflection

Ten years ago, during the final quarter of second grade, I sat in on a conference with my

teacher and parents. What seemed to be a normal parent-teacher conference actually became the

day I was first burdened with a fact that would affect my education for years after: I was good at

math.

“Morgan’s standardized test scores have come back and we’re all very proud of her. Here,

take a look,” said Ms. Tam as she passed the results to my parents. They looked at it intently

while she proceeded to point out my math score. “You see, over here she got a 99 percentile

score, which is very good. And yes, she’s only seven, so we can’t exactly label her a

mathematical genius, but we would like to put her into the GATE program here.”

My parents did what any proud parents would, they accepted the offer. Soon, I was

meeting once a month with five or six other kids and a teacher who I hadn’t met before. I never

minded attending these meetings, yet I never saw the point. We would read fun and exciting

stories about folklore and how things came to be in the world, but I didn’t see how any of our

lessons were helping me improve in math. When I finally did ask why we weren’t doing any

math-related work, my teacher smiled a well-practiced grin and responded calmly, “Well you’re

already so good at math, why would we need to work on it?”

This moment here was when my mathematical education took a decline, though no one

would have been able to tell. My report cards over the years showed consistent A’s in the subject,

but this was no indication of my learning. The truth was that I had become lazy and turned off to

learning math.
 Luckily, when I started attending high school at CAT, my started to improve, thanks to

one key factor: the teachers.

The thing about high school though, especially one such as CAT, is that it pushes you

more than you ever imagined it would. It demands that you are always present in your learning

or otherwise prepared to accept the consequences. When you are at this rigorous level of

learning, you discover things about yourself as a student. One of the hardest things I needed to

learn about myself was that anyone can be naturally good at math, but in order to actually retain

what you practice, you can’t go around with the mindset that you’re always going to be the best.

This harsh realization that I was not always going to be able to coast along in math came

sometime this year during the twelfth grade, when my quiz grades were coming back lower than

I would’ve liked. With these quizzes, there were not many questions to answer, which meant it

was easier to fail the quiz with fewer incorrect answers than normally expected. When I had

more than one quiz come back with a negative grade, I saw that it wasn’t a fluke, and proceeded

to get help from my peers, something I wasn’t used to having to do. My second most important

lesson that I needed to learn was that half the battle of being a good math student, or any student

for that matter, is knowing when to ask for help.

Learning this lesson could have possibly been one of the most important things math has

taught me, and I know I will be able to apply this thinking to my life in all my future years to

come. When I was sitting down with two of my group mates Ian and Kathy, they attempted to

explain to me how they had come to find the formula for the height of one’s position on a ferris

wheel using the sine function. As they each took turns trying to describe to me how they had

derived each piece of information to make a complete generalization, I realized that asking for

help isn’t an indication of being dumb, and quite the opposite actually. Asking questions is only a
sign that you care enough about your education, and can accept that while you may not know

something, there will always be someone else who does, and will be willing to help you

understand it as well.

Weeks later when we had to figure for the horizontal position of a person on a ferris

wheel along the x-axis, I was actually the person who had found the formula first. At this point, I

encountered math lesson number three: You are only as good as your ability to explain your

thinking to others.

As I attempted to point out why I knew we needed to use cosine, or how I got certain

numbers to fit into the equation, I began to see why it is so important to explain our work,

however tedious, during assignments such as Problem of the Weeks, or class presentations. When

you don’t work on your explanation skills, no matter how great something makes sense in your

head, it is worth nothing when you cannot put it into words for others to interpret. And without

practice, this skill can never improve. Communicating clearly is one of the most important skills

to have, and without it, frustration is always bound to be close by.

Though this year so far has been tough for me in math, I have taken one final lesson

away: it is okay to embrace math. Math has always loomed overhead as something I’ve been

pretty good at, yet it had no importance to me. Somewhere between second grade and high

school, I had fallen into the trap of believing that being good at math made me less cool, or a

“geek”. I had always prided myself on not caring about how other people saw me, yet here I was

not embracing the fact that when I tried, I could calculate and formulate numbers and concepts,

and potentially help others do the same as well. Then again, I do not know if I could have fully

embraced math before if I hadn’t learned the lesson of asking for help. I most likely would’ve

still been stuck in the state of mind that if I was doing good enough work, it shouldn’t matter if I
truly understood it or not. By accepting that I’m not always going to know everything in math,

it’s taken the pressure off of me to be the one everyone always goes to, and has reinforced that I

still have plenty more math to learn, which sounds just fine by me.