My Struggle
This last year wasn’t great, to be honest.
I took a lighter course load because I knew it was going to be a bit harder and even harder to find motivation, with everything being online. And I had really good professors as well. But it was different than I thought it would be because you don’t realize how much you miss with in-person because often students don’t have their cameras on. So when a teacher is teaching them, they can’t even see the kid’s reactions, like when the whole class is lost.
I started searching for help really early because of calculus one with my professor, I loved her, but it was a bit of a rough intro. The entire class kind of agreed. We all panicked a bit initially, and we had this massive group chat, and people would be sending in links from Khan Academy and YouTube and everywhere.
My professor was really nice. I liked her a lot, but sometimes she would skip over some simpler things, and it totally had a lot of us lost, but my teacher tried her best. Because it’s also harder to get help when you’re learning online, you can’t go to a teacher and show them your work. You have to do a video call, and it doesn’t work as well, but she did try really hard, and I appreciated that, but yeah, it was definitely tough.
The Calcworkshop Difference
And everyone was trying to figure out what was going on. And someone in my class sent in Calcworkshop one day. I thought I was doing okay. But then my first test came around, and I was a little confused about some of the simple things. And someone who was already using Calcworkshop said that Jenn explained them very well, like something other professors wouldn’t think to mention.
So I finally decided to watch one of her videos, and then I went and subscribed and stuck with it.
It was also great for a review. I would rather review Jenn’s videos than my teacher’s lectures because she had everything organized so well, and I am very organized. I knew what we were going to learn next before we started.
Occasionally, I watched her videos ahead of time, which was perfect for my learning because I often struggled with following along with my professor during live lectures.
So watching Jenn’s videos first helped so much, and it improved my grades a lot and made me go into the class feeling a little more confident and less scared.
I remember when we got to related rates, after watching the video, I was really excited. I knew the steps for the questions, so it made it much less intimidating as I had heard horror stories about related rates online, so I wanted to be prepared, especially since I’m not the best at word problems.
I was really surprised to see that Jenn provided exercises after each video, which you don’t find on Youtube videos. That turned out to be really helpful. I never would have thought that someone would think of doing this.
I got a 60 something on my first test before I started regularly watching Jenn’s videos. I then went up to higher 70s by the second test, then an 80 something by the third test, and I got an 88 on the final — which was great!
By the time I started calculus 2, I already had the system down (watching videos ahead of time) and was less stressed out, so my grades stayed in the 80s and 90s.
I recommended Calcworkshop to several classmates. And they’re all totally different in terms of how they learn. For instance, you may have some kids who are super on the books and attempting to stay on top of everything, while others maybe have more classes and are essentially swamped. It worked almost as a lecture replacement sometimes, or like a quick fix before a test, even when it’s not ideal.
So I told them that it works in all kinds of different situations and you can make it however you would like it to be.
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