Gordon G

Semester Reflection
Imagine being asked to solve a problem that you have no idea how to do. Not only do you have
to solve it, but you have to explain how you found your solution and how you know that it is correct.
This is the challenge that our problems of the week provided in calculus. These problems were designed
to make us use critical thinking and problem solving to find the answers to complex problems and work
with things that we dont fully understand. At the beginning of the year, I had no idea how to approach
this sort of problem, but Ive gotten much better at that sort of thinking as the semester has progressed.
When we were given our first problem of the week, I had no idea how to start. The problem was
as follows: four towns are arranged in a square, with each side of the square being one mile long. What
is the shortest road that can be constructed that will connect all four towns? I did the two most basic
shapes, with the first being three sides of the square and the second being an X connecting the four
corners. After that, I was stuck. It took a classmate showing a new pattern in class for me to take the
next step. She showed this pattern:

When X was set equal to 0.5, this shape produced a shorter distance than the X. However, when set to
0.49, it produced a slightly smaller number. At this point, I tried to do guess and check, but there were
an infinite number of options (.499, .498, etc.). Again, I was stuck until a classmate suggested making a
formula for the road distance in terms of X. Once I heard that idea, I soon had the formula

. Then, I graphed the function on my calculator and found the minimum using

a calculate function. Later in the semester, I realized that this problem was essentially a minimization,
a process that I still find challenging now that I know how to do it. In the first week of school, I had no
idea how to find the derivatives required for this process, and I was unable to find a way around that
without help from my classmates and my calculator.
As the semester went on, I improved my critical thinking, but it took until the last half of the
class for me to really hone my critical thinking skills. Our 6th problem asked us to solve a hat trick
mathematically. In the problem, there was a box with five hats, two of which were red and three of
which were black. If three people standing in a line were given randomly selected hats, how could at
least one of them be able to know what color their hat was? This problem isnt related to a calculus
concept, but the skills I used to solve it are important for many problem solving situations. I started by
asking myself when the person in the back of the line would win. I soon concluded that if he saw two red
hats in front of him, he would know that his hat was black since there were only two red hats. This was
one of very few problems that I was confident enough to start without help from my classmates. By
continuing with the same sort of logic, I was able to figure out which situations would allow each person
to figure out the color of their hat. I still have much room to improve, but its encouraging to see how
much easier it has gotten for me to attack problems that I dont understand.

Even though its not necessarily a math skill, critical thinking will be very helpful both in math
and in other problem solving situations. Just this semester Ive gotten much better at being creative with
math problems, something Ive never really had to do before. Ill be able to maximize this improvement
whenever presented with confusing problems that I dont really understand, be it in math or in
humanities. That being said, I am far from mastery of this challenging skill, and I will continue to develop
my skill by doing my best to solve all of the POWs next semester. At the beginning of the year, if I was
handed a complex problem that I didnt know, I would take the first simple steps and then be lost
because I didnt understand what I was supposed to do next. Now however, I have a general procedure
for new problems. First, I try to break down the problem to simpler forms. For example, in the hat
problem, I immediately broke the problem down in to the seven different possible situations that could
occur. From there, I was able to construct a solution that brought the seven different parts back
together. Much like I did in this problem, my next step is to search for the connections between the
simplified portions of the problem. If that fails, I try to simplify the problem even more, or in a different
way. I have found that whatever the problem is, I can usually break it down so that I understand at least
parts of it. From there, its just a question of interpreting the various parts of the problem and bringing
them together to form a cohesive solution. This process is far from failsafe, but it gives me somewhere
to start on problems that wouldve left me scratching my head after only a few minutes earlier in the
year.