I'm going to be studying physics full-time, without a tutor or a class, roughly 25 to 50 hours a week from now until Sept 1. This will be a journal of my progress.
preliminary study of calculus completed
Posted Mar5-12 at 11:21 PM by bobsmith76
I'm getting ready to move on from calculus onto a college physics textbook. all in all i spent 190 hours studying it spread over 47 days, averaging 4.2 hours a day and 1.9 hours per section. i read about 1100 pages. as you can see from the chart below, together with a 4 day moving average and a polynomial curve, in the beginning i was bewildered and a bit overwhelmed, then i got the hang of it, got excited and completed the majority of my work, then my passion began to flag a bit.
[IMG]http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k137/kylefoley76/Untitled.png[/IMG]
i'll finish the 14th chapter soon and i have 16 chapters so i think i will just finish the other two chapters later. i started reviewing my notes last night and it's not quite as exciting as moving onto a new chapter. but i do eventually need to review everything i've learned, as hard as they may be. i want to get a solid database of notes so that at any time i can go back and relearn a problem that i've forgotten. it's possible that i can keep moving forward and never look back, after all i did that for the first 14 chapters and whenever i went back to review something i was able to access the needed information rather quickly. still, it's kind of bewildering confronting so many new facts and i want to try to make sense of it all. midway through the book, maybe around chapter 8 i realized that my note-taking strategy was inadequate. what i need for the more complicated algorithms, that is, those that involve more than 5 steps is for me to write out how to do each of the steps, since the book is so completely incompetent at explaining things.
throughout the book i understood very few theorems. for instance, i've seen kepler's laws explained in algebra and i understood them but when this book tried to do the same thing in calculus i didn't know what was going on. this comes as a severe disappointment since, as a philosopher, theorems were the one thing that i really wanted to understand. i've decided that doing problems mechanically is so much easier than understanding why one is doing the steps in the first place. for example, anyone can take the derivative of 2x^2 but it is much more difficult to understand why one is taking the derivative. it got to the point where i just gave up trying to understand the theorems. then again, i could rarely understand that books' explanations about anything. for some reason there is something about mathematicians and the printed word that do not go together. when mathematicians (or anyone explaining math) are forced to explain things off the cuff, orally, things for some reason become so much more clear. perhaps it's because it's easier to not know what you're talking about and write, then it is to speak and not know what you're talking about. when you're speaking, you're looking at someone and you're seeing if whether or not they are holding a straight face, moreover, you have to speak fluenty. you don't have to be thinking fluently when you're writing. you can just come up with whatever you think is clear, regardless if it takes 5 minutes to complete a sentence or not. for that reason i had to rely heavily on youtube to explain these calculus concepts. i'm afraid if i ever get up to higher math there simply won't be any youtube videos to explain things and i don't believe in taking courses in order to learn things. i learn things much better by myself. however, i can easily foresee that certain math and physics concepts become so difficult that i will really need a human who knows what they're talking about to explain it to me. it's just a fact of life that it's easier to transmit clarity in speech than in writing.
i'm rather troubled by my inability to understand theorems. i have a feeling that this is not a way to learn math. doing steps mechanically does not imply real understanding as anyone who has read searle's chinese room knows. one of these days my inability to understand theorems is going to haunt me. i'm just hoping that after reading enough math texts, getting more comfortable with the jargon, knowing more and more facts that sooner or later a light bulb will go off and it will come clear to me.
[IMG]http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k137/kylefoley76/Untitled.png[/IMG]
i'll finish the 14th chapter soon and i have 16 chapters so i think i will just finish the other two chapters later. i started reviewing my notes last night and it's not quite as exciting as moving onto a new chapter. but i do eventually need to review everything i've learned, as hard as they may be. i want to get a solid database of notes so that at any time i can go back and relearn a problem that i've forgotten. it's possible that i can keep moving forward and never look back, after all i did that for the first 14 chapters and whenever i went back to review something i was able to access the needed information rather quickly. still, it's kind of bewildering confronting so many new facts and i want to try to make sense of it all. midway through the book, maybe around chapter 8 i realized that my note-taking strategy was inadequate. what i need for the more complicated algorithms, that is, those that involve more than 5 steps is for me to write out how to do each of the steps, since the book is so completely incompetent at explaining things.
throughout the book i understood very few theorems. for instance, i've seen kepler's laws explained in algebra and i understood them but when this book tried to do the same thing in calculus i didn't know what was going on. this comes as a severe disappointment since, as a philosopher, theorems were the one thing that i really wanted to understand. i've decided that doing problems mechanically is so much easier than understanding why one is doing the steps in the first place. for example, anyone can take the derivative of 2x^2 but it is much more difficult to understand why one is taking the derivative. it got to the point where i just gave up trying to understand the theorems. then again, i could rarely understand that books' explanations about anything. for some reason there is something about mathematicians and the printed word that do not go together. when mathematicians (or anyone explaining math) are forced to explain things off the cuff, orally, things for some reason become so much more clear. perhaps it's because it's easier to not know what you're talking about and write, then it is to speak and not know what you're talking about. when you're speaking, you're looking at someone and you're seeing if whether or not they are holding a straight face, moreover, you have to speak fluenty. you don't have to be thinking fluently when you're writing. you can just come up with whatever you think is clear, regardless if it takes 5 minutes to complete a sentence or not. for that reason i had to rely heavily on youtube to explain these calculus concepts. i'm afraid if i ever get up to higher math there simply won't be any youtube videos to explain things and i don't believe in taking courses in order to learn things. i learn things much better by myself. however, i can easily foresee that certain math and physics concepts become so difficult that i will really need a human who knows what they're talking about to explain it to me. it's just a fact of life that it's easier to transmit clarity in speech than in writing.
i'm rather troubled by my inability to understand theorems. i have a feeling that this is not a way to learn math. doing steps mechanically does not imply real understanding as anyone who has read searle's chinese room knows. one of these days my inability to understand theorems is going to haunt me. i'm just hoping that after reading enough math texts, getting more comfortable with the jargon, knowing more and more facts that sooner or later a light bulb will go off and it will come clear to me.
Total Comments 0
