Best Work
Select one item from the assignments that you have not written up for
a "write-up" and that you think represents your "best work"
in the course. Submit a write-up about it.
"Best work" is a somewhat subjective term, what I consider to
be my best will probably differ from what someone else may consider my best
work simply by way of each of our perspectives. I am not yet the artist
in GSP which flows so naturally from others after clocking in some number
of hours. I have clocked in the hours, and I am proficient
and even to an extent "good" at GSP, but the artistry (which by
nature has nothing to do with the mathematics, but the sketches not only
become inherently aesthetically pleasing, but bells and whistles sometimes
do provide a clearer picture to others) I am still lacking. This is something
I look forward to conquering. Nevertheless, I have noticed my progression
during the quarter and the grandest part is that a new way of thinking is
evolving. My best work has to be my script file (assignment 5). I have put
a lot of work into it, and there is a lot more work to come.
Some of the scripts are not good. For instance, one of the first scripts
I did was the Simson Line script. Mostly, I saved this as a script because
I was working on explorations of it at the end of class one day and needed
to leave because of the next class. Thinking myself clever, I saved a script
so I could just reconstruct it without all the work next time. (Yes, I saved
a gsp file also, but I wanted a script.) Anyway, when I returned to the
script, the given asks for 14 points. 14 points!! A lot of help this would
give me! But this was very informative to me. It's much the same as telling
someone to make back up files, but the person probably will not understand
the imperativeness of this act until he loses an enormous amount of work.
However, the overwhelming majority of the scripts are as efficient as possible
and completely useful. I have had to really think about figures and relationships
within the figure in different ways in order to perform the construction
with some of the restraints. Trisecting a segment seems so trivial, but
it's not for the first time contructor. Constructing the golden ratio, a
regular pentagon and decagon, these are all things I find incredibly satistying.
I want to be good at GSP, but this is very much more than just being "pretty"
or using it for my own problem solving ability. I want to use it to help
my high school students. Now I will be a better helper if I can use GSP
to help my own problem solving ability, but additionally, knowing mathematical
relationships which are not that obvious until you really start wanting
a script with constraints on the given, this combination will be a real
asset in my classroom. I have begun to see new relationships between figures
and within a figure. It's a real style of thinking, not just a means of
a good demonstration.
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