Blog post 1

Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use? Use the language you learned in this unit.

Since I was little, I have always found math a difficult subject. I was unable to understand it, which led me to not be motivated to learn more about the subject. I would do the bare minimum and required a tutor who would just end up letting me use a calculator. This was the case for me until high school. I was lucky to get a teacher who was open to new teaching approaches. We did an assessment where we found our top intelligence and mine were social (interpersonal) 4.43/5, self (intrapersonal) 4.29/5, and nature (naturalist) 3.57/5. My lowest was logic/math 1.71/5, which made sense. This made me realize that I was taking the wrong approach when studying. I studied math like how those who have the logic/math approach do, which did not work well for me. My math teacher told those who had “social” as their top intelligence to get into groups and try teaching each other the concept and write the concept down before doing the actual math problems. This was a time when I overcame a learning challenge, as this not only helped me with math but also every class I took after that.

Since my teacher worked for all the students individually and did not categorize us in a group,  her students were able to succeed and be motivated about the subject. I thought I hated math, but I later found out it was because I did not know how to teach myself, and it was not about the subject itself. Like the article “Motivation and Learning” mentions, “[p]eople are wired to learn, and we usually prefer to keep doing the things in which we feel successful.” Which applied to me perfectly. I only started to enjoy and be motivated about math after it made sense to me, and after I got the positive results.