Metacognition Project Reflection - Laura de Beer

In Math class, we started a project this quarter, to show us about metacognition. Metacognition is being aware of your thoughts and your inner voice inside us. It is thinking about your own thinking. This has helped and showed me A LOT in this past quarter of math, it taught me lesson that I will remember for my whole life. Thinking about my thinking. You might wonder, what does this have to do with math? Everything. This project is what taught me how to work on my own, and that I am capable of anything, I just have to think about my thinning. We were given problems and we had to solve them all by ourselves, recording ourselves, and we had to talk out everything that we were thinking. At first, this was hard for me, because I did not feel comfortable talking out my thoughts. I thought that talking and thinking it in my head were the same thing, even though they are not. After doing two projects, I saw the advantage of my inner voice. It showed me what I was getting wrong, because I was thinking about what I was saying. When I think it, I do not think about what imp thinking, but when I speak it, I think about what I am speaking. Because of my inner voice, I learned how to make sense of a problem. I think that most of this project was about checking the reasonableness of our work, and trying to persevere when you are stuck on a problem. For example, there was this specific problem, Belinda and Bob, that I did not understand the question. My whole video was I thinking a loud about the problem trying to make sense of the problem. At the end of six minutes, after saying everything that was in my head, I found out what was my mistake and what I need to do next time: find keywords and reared the problem. After this problem, I learned how to solve a problem using my inner voice with me, and not against me. I did this by using my inner voice to ask me questions, saying them aloud, and answering them before solving the problem. The main question that I was always asking myself was: did you check your work? And WHY? I think these two were the most important questions because if I didn’t ask myself if I checked, I could just have one little problem that could ruin my whole answer. Also, I think that I always have to ask myself why because if I do something that doesn’t make sense and still get the right answer, then what’s the point of getting the answer if I don’t even know why I got it? The next problem I do, I have a bigger chance of getting it wrong. This is all that I have learned with this project, but I also learned things about me. I learned that as a mathematician, I need to know what I am solving before solving this. I say this because when I was talking with my inner voice, I found out that the reason that I got a wrong answer was because before everything I did not make sense f the problem, which was a great disadvantage for me. I also learned that I have so much that I know but I don’t express because of my inner voice.  I think that the core values that this project shows are that I am Reflective and a Risk-taker. I think I was reflective during this project because I would always reflect over my work when I was doing it, and trying to observe what I should and reflecting on it by asking: WHY? I would also at the end of every project, watch it and see what I need to o in the project that I forgot to do. I think that I was a risk taker in this project because before, I was not used to speaking my thinking aloud. I felt uncomfortable because it seemed weird and I thought I didn’t need to. Therefore, it was a huge risk for me, and I learned that you should take more risks because after everything, I learned so much about my thinking. Overall, this project has showed me a lot about my ways of thinking, and how I can improve them. This helped me a lot in math, because now when I have a problem, instead of directly asking for help, I think again and whisper what I am doing to see if I can make sense of the problem or my mistake.