Exhibit: Exhibit:

Honors Math Test Honors Math Quiz

Benchmark: Academic Skills: Math

Math has always been one of my favorite subjects. It isnt always easy and sometimes it is a challenge but in the end it all comes together. Every year as a requirement we have to take a math credit. As an 8th grader I took Algebra 1 and as a freshman was placed in advanced algebra. In previous years they had offered honors math as a zero hour class but had discontinued with that. In my junior year Mr. Blackledge pushed really hard to get Honors Math back. Two weeks into the second trimester of my junior year Mr. Draper finally approved for Mr. Blackledge to teach zero hour Honors Math. I was already enrolled in pre-calc and trigonometry but I decided to add honors math to my schedule. Previously students were allowed to take a zero hour class and drop a different class during the day. Our trimester had already started so we werent allowed to drop a class; we had to take the six classes we were already enrolled in plus an extra one, honors math. I wasnt sure how I was going to be at the school by seven every single morning and how I was going to manage three math classes a day, but I did. I found that a lot of the concepts covered in pre-calc, trig, and honors math overlapped each other but were taught in different ways. It benefited me a lot! Both of my pieces of work are from honors math. I chose my first honors math test because it was a lot of new information I had never learned before. It had a lot to do with logic and reasoning and with converting numbers to different bases. I had no clue what I was doing at first because I had never learned anything like this. It turned out to be a lot of fun though. The second piece I chose was a homework assignment. Mr. Blackledge showed us much simpler ways to graph eclipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas, sin, cos, tangent graphs and others. These concepts overlapped a lot with trig and pre-calc. Honors math just taught us the short cuts to graphing these functions. It was like taking out all of the unneeded steps to solving problems and jumping to a shorter and quicker way to solve them. As a young adult I think that this class and these assignments benefited me a lot. It wasnt easy to take three math classes, but it did help that they all overlapped. I was constantly having the same information pounded into my head and I will remember it a lot more clearly because of that. It also helped me find easier ways to solve problems. Having to make the decision to be at school an hour earlier and take an extra class benefited me. I knew I may never get the opportunity to take the class again so I figured I should no matter how hard it was. It made math a lot of fun and I learned a lot of new material.