Unit Reflection

During this unit, I really learned a lot. And when I say I learned a lot, I really do mean it. It is probably too much to even list but the a way to show how much I learned is that around 90% of what we saw during this unit is new information and the other 10% we had seen it last year but not in as much detail as we saw it during this unit. We first started off with mitosis and meiosis in general and we saw mitosis last year but we only learned that it was the replication of cells. Last year we didn’t learn the different steps and what happened specifically in each step but in this unit we did. We learned PMAT and that first, chromosomes duplicated, then they lined up, etc. We also were briefly introduced to chromosomes last year but we didn’t know what they actually did and in this unit we learned that humans have forty-six of them in each cell (Excluding sex cells), that they contain DNA, that we inherit half from our mom and half from our dad, etc. Apart from this, we learned about Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA and specifically learned about the structure of DNA (Nitrogen bases, sugar group and phosphate group), about the replication of DNA and how they code for different proteins. Lastly, we didn’t even see meiosis last year. Everything we learned about meiosis in this unit was completely new to us. In regards to human reproduction, I defiantly learned a lot. The main thing I learned was about why we look similar to our family members and how traits are inherited. Apart from this I learned about how a baby develops from a zygote all the way to an actual baby. So as you can see, I have defiantly learned during this unit and I really enjoyed learning about this because almost everything we saw was completely new to me.

In addition, the main reason for which I believe I learned all of this is because I understand it and I am able to explain all we learned in the unit to another person. The moment you can teach someone else what you have learned is the moment, in my opinion, that you have truly learned the subject and have understood it. Apart from this, I also believe that something well learned is something that is not forgotten and I have not forgotten what we saw in the unit and I am almost 100% sure I won’t forget it in a couple months when we take the semester exam. The actual means through which I learned this information mostly includes researching independently about the subject, getting visual and oral explanations by our teachers about what we had doubts and doing projects in which we included what we had learned over the course of a couple of weeks.

Lastly, this information is extremely important to know because it is what makes up your body. It is the body you are stuck with for the rest of your life and it is important to know how it works and why it works the way it does. This is also important because if for some reason you get hurt or sick, you can have an idea of why you got hurt or sick and how you can get better and what your body does for you to get better. Obviously, mitosis and meiosis only help you understand why you got sick and how you can get better for some diseases or injuries but knowing something is better than nothing. Apart from this, mitosis and meiosis help you understand your own phenotype and why you look like your family members like I mentioned before. But in addition to that, it helps you understand the risk of your future child having a genetic disease because you might not realize that you are a carrier of a disease, your child already has it. To conclude, I really enjoyed this unit because I learned a lot of things about how our bodies work and I learned a lot of new things I did not know about. So I hope the next unit is as fun as this one and a I hope I learn as much as I did in this unit.