1a. From the concepts you have learned in this course, provide a real-world application of something that you think has been the most valuable to you? a.The concept of interest on a car payment.
1b. Why has it been valuable? a. Having made bought various cars over the years and having had various types of car loans and payments, I never understood the impact that interest had on my car payments. Learning about the quadratic equation and its application to interest and payment finally cleared this up for me
2a. How do you think you will use the information you learned in this course in the future? a. My dream job is to work in pharmaceutical sales. Therefore I need to take accounting courses. I will use the critical thinking skills I developed in this course to help me in future courses. b. I will also use the principles learned in this course in my future accounting courses. Especially as it applies to finance and interest
2b. Which concepts will be most important to you? a. The quadratic equation and its application in finance and accounting
2c. Explain why. Which do you anticipate will be the least important? a. As discussed above, my future position will be in sales. As such, all concepts related to finance, accounting, interest, etc., are of interest to me. The quadratic equation and its application in these domains will be the most important b. The least important will be graphing, log functions and functions, domains and ranges.
2d. Explain why. a. I see very little use of applying graphing techniques to my future field. Also, the only time I have ever used log functions was in a chemistry class, which I do not anticipate taking again. Lastly, the areas of functions, domains and ranges I will probably not have much application in my future
3a. Can you think of one real-world example of when the concept of functions might be useful? a. Maybe in pharmaceutical sales where a medication has greater than one indication. With each indication being a function, I could study the population data of patients using a medication, “x”, for various conditions, “a”, “b”, “c”. In this context I could look at overlapping and discreet data for medication “x” in populations using this medication for indications, “a”, “b”, “c”
3b. Do you think you will ever use functions in your life to solve problems? a. Honestly, I doubt it. At least not in this format.
3c. If yes, explain how and why; if no, explain why not. a. I may use the concept for problems in my future position as outlined above, or for interest for a car payment as outlined above. However, if I do, most likely these concepts will be buried in an easy to use computer program where all I have to do is plug in the data, and the functions are dealt with in the background by the computer program
4a. What one concept learned in this course was the easiest for you to grasp? a. Factoring polynomials
4b. Why do you think it was easy for you? Which was the hardest? a. Because it was intuitive to me. I could look at the problem and see the answer easily. Then once I could see the answer, getting to the answer was easy b. Graphing the quadratic equation w vortex and vertex points
4c. What would have made that hard-to-learn concept easier to learn? a. Probably just more time to practice as this technique did not come intuitively to me. However, given the nature of the class this was not an option b. I continue to find plugging answers in MyMathLab cumbersome. At least a third of my incorrect answers on homework, Self Check Quiz and Final were due to the fact that I had the answer correct, but MyMathLab did not recognize the answer because this program has very little tolerance for how the answer is put in
5a. If your neighbor asked you to explain what you learned in this course, what would you tell him or her? a. Overall critical thinking skills such as how to carefully read a word problem so the question being asked is the question being answered, not the question I want to answer b. To take my time and not rush when putting answers into programs such as MyMathLab c. How esoteric concepts such as the quadratic equation can have real world application such as interest for a car payment, studying mixed population data, the trajectory of a football once it is thrown. d. When solving a problem, rather than reading the problem and becoming overwhelmed, to realize that any big problem is a series of small problems. And that when broken down as small problems, any problem can be solved. e. To take concepts such as the quadratic equation and be able to apply such concepts to areas that I will need to study for my future dream job