1.+Persisting

PERSISTING "//Persisting means staying the course, taking the time to work at something until you achieve excellence.//" I didn't think my first Habit of Mind would be applied so early on in the school year. To my surprise, however, I encountered great difficulty even with concepts in our first unit.

One of our first webassign quizzes was on significant digits. I'd never really understood them, but I didn't think that it would be a huge problem. However, as I went through the quiz, I was surprised by all the exponents and decimals and combinations of the two. I would use up multiple submissions and still couldn't get the right answer. It was so frustrating. Ms Knowles then briefly went over how to solve this type of problem, but I still couldn't figure out when I should round and how many significant digits to keep. The quiz we were taking was meant to be finished in half and hour, and while everyone was finished, I struggled through an hour, and eventually, the entire 80 minutes of class.

Here I will, somewhat shamefully admit that, I was pretty much on the verge of tears by the end of that class period. I had no clue why I wasn't able to figure these questions out. Every other person in the room had finished, why couldn't I? I thought about just randomly submitting until I ran out of submissions since it //was// a formative quiz, however, I found myself still persisting and actually trying to re-workout each answer. After that quiz, I looked through the textbook trying to find something to help me understand these significant digits. Eventually, I found this problem which was very similar to those I had trouble with. I took the time to understand this and then re-did questions on WebAssign. When the time came around to take the actual test, I was able to breeze through these problems. //10/14/11//