Hi, I’m Kelsey. :) You might be familiar my face or name because I blogged my freshman year. I’m now a junior Communication Studies major and Psychology minor. I’m taking a few of my major classes and finally finishing up my general education classes. My last general education class I’m taking, other than bible courses, is Analytical Inquiry. Analytical Inquiry fills my math requirement and I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s an alternative to College Algebra for non-science majors. We focus on a lot of case-study math, such as learning about auto loans, inflation, and taxes. I love learning math that I know I’ll be using after college and can even currently apply to my life.
Another really great part of the class is the service-learning aspect. Service-Learning is a program at APU that allows students to learn by serving the community. We were able to teach a local sixth grade class how to use the car loan formula in order to pay the best price for a car. We looked at buying cars at high and low APRs (loan interest rate for the year) and rebates.
I really enjoyed our Service-Learning project. Not only was volunteering in general fulfilling, actually being able to teach the kids something relevant was extremely rewarding. While the two girls I was teaching only got through half of the worksheet because of time constraints, it was so fun to encourage, help, and teach them. Math is one of my worst subjects so it was nice to be able to understand the material and teach it to someone else. It was nice to see how excited the girls got when they started recognizing patterns in the formula and getting ahead of my instructions. I taught two girls at once which was great because they were able to help each other as well. One of the girls caught onto the formula a bit faster, while the other seemed to get a little behind and didn’t want to ask for help. I really admired the girl who picked it up quickly and yet I could relate so much to the one who needed just a little bit of guidance.
I really wish we could have had a little bit more time. It was so nice to have a break from my schedule and homework assignments to go teach the sixth graders. I’m really hoping future classes take advantage of our Service-Learning program. It was great! :)
