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