Alien vs. Predicate

I'm the alien, but I'm slowly learning their ways (rules).  Last week's tutorial went better than I expected.  My patient friend explained to me what I was missing, and after some time I started to understand.  I was able to make more notes which is always a good sign, and after we went over the exercise we had our quiz.  I think I got the two questions right actually, and I came away from that class feeling more confident about filling in Venn Diagrams.

Yesterday's class went pretty well too.  A lot of it made logical sense, so I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on what we learned.  Earlier today, I took a look at the assignment for tomorrow's tutorial, and I don't really know how to answer the questions.  It's the introduction of (x,y) that confused me, because we hadn't gone over a lot of examples about mixtures of predicates.  The class notes were somewhat helpful, but not enough that I knew the answers.  I felt like I was able to come up with a guess or a partial answer, but I know there's something I'm missing.  I'll have to pay attention during the tutorial so I can figure out how to translate the sentences into predicate statements.  Maybe my patient friend will give me some clarification as well, but I feel bad for asking him too much!

Another week, another confusion.

M

Quantifying Confusion

It's a double meaning, in the spirit of statements and precision.  The first meaning implies that I left class feeling a little bewildered on Tuesday.  My ability to understand the material during the lecture went from "okay, sure..." to "wat".  In the beginning, learning about universal and existential quantifiers was pretty straight forward.  Answering the example questions was slow-going for me, but when the answers were explained I was able to understand what was going on.  After I made a little cheat chart in the margin of my notes, I was feeling comfortable with the new symbols being introduced for subsets, intersections, and complements.  From there we moved on to Predicates which seemed a little too abstract for me to make sense of.  Maybe because the words and numbers are slowly disappearing and being replaced with symbols and letters, I'm not sure.  When we spent time going over the examples it started to become clearer, but I am still worried that on my own I wouldn't get the right answer.  Then all my hopes and dreams were dashed when we moved on to Implications.  Take all of your common sense and nuke it, because there are a new set of rules in town.  I kept running up against the same issue; if I tackled an example myself I got it wrong, but when the professor explained it I started to understand.  However, I never got the feeling that I understood well enough to learn it.  Just merely understand why that was the case.  There are so many rules and examples that I couldn't keep them straight, and for some reason my logical thinking was failing.

Which brings me to the second meaning of my title.  I don't know how to determine out what I don't know or how much I need to go over.  Someone might say "you should post a question on the discussion board!" but I wouldn't know what to ask specifically.  I could find an example somewhere of an implication about weather and umbrellas, but for some reason I don't feel confident that it will help me for an exam.  The very basic examples are not that bad of course, but it's when the words like "sufficiently" or "only" are introduced that I panic and start hurling P's and Q's at all parts of the sentence.  Sometimes I wonder if I over-think things, and I have wondered that during many tests and difficult questions in my academic career.

So tonight I am going to go to the tutorial ready to target questions and hunt down answers.  I will be interested to see how the quiz goes tonight, and I hope it will be a useful study-aid for the future.

M

Day One

Yesterday was the first day of Mathematical Expression and Reasoning.  Going into this class I was nervous; the title sounded somewhat intimidating and there were warnings out there that the material was challenging.  This also happens to be the second course of my first year of undergrad, so naturally I as a little nervous.  Once we had gone through the syllabus and admin talk, we launched into course content.  To my surprise this class was basically covering some topics I had seen before.  This summer I read the wonderful book Godel Escher Bach, and followed it as best as I could.  With my programming background it wasn't a far stretch, but it was definitely challenging.  In class yesterday I realized that a lot of the topics would be familiar with chapters and ideas from GEB.  The lecture was lighter and more fun than I expected too, but I could tell some of my peers were finding it difficult to follow at the speed the professor was moving.  The concepts are very abstract and unlike anything most people have seen before, and it was only my prior knowledge in programming that helped me that day.  I can only imagine it will be another week before my head is spinning though.  My impression is that the learning curve is steep, but I will just keep studying.

I am already looking forward to next week however, and am really excited to dive in to the material.  It's been so long since I've done any serious programming that I'm really looking forward to starting again.  Until then, I guess I'll take a look at some course notes.

M