Professor Heap, TA's, and fellow classmates,
I'd like to formally welcome all of you to my sLOG! Through this blog, I will be sharing, with you, my trials and tribulations on my path to become a master logician! In this week's entry: weird symbols and problems with problem solving!
Weird Symbols:
{∀∃∩∪⊆⊄ℕΩ¬}: the set of all symbols that looked alien to me at the beginning of the course.
In highschool, "set notation"was a domain that I shyed away from at all costs. I remember in my gr.12 Advanced Functions class, our teacher introduced two types of notation. The first, set notation, seemed incredibly complicated. Being a disastrous combination of mindnumbingly lazy and extremely impatient, I decided I preferred the second type of notation, interval notation. You know, (0,5) or [0,5].
Like all vices, eventually my laziness and impatience would come back to haunt me. This time in the form of CSC165 and MAT223.
Immediately I felt uncomfortable with some of the symbols that were being presented to me on the lecture notes or in class. My main struggle wasn't so much in defining the symbol, but being able to convert between symbols and english - understanding and parsing problems. My good old friend Salman Khan over at KhanAcademy really helped me get comfortable with sets, sample spaces and the symbols we use to describe their relations in his "Statistics" stream of videos. Since then, I feel significantly more comfortable reading and understanding the symbols we use.
Problems with Problem Solving:
Part of what really attracts me to CSC165 (besides the fact that I need to take it to get into the subject POST) is that we examine the thought processes involved in breaking down everyday problems, and analyze them in a tangible way. I often take for granted the foundational principles that govern human reasoning. It became apparent, after the first lecture, that I was finally going to examine the core of what I have so vaguely labelled "common sense". This really appeals to me because I feel as though problem solving has been one of my weaknesses and I am ready to handle that aspect of my learning!
One particular tidbit that stood out to me was when Professor Heap (in the first lecture) advised us to write down the logical steps we are taking throughout a problem. He even told us to write down "I'm Stuck! this is why..." which I had never thought of before. I can honestly say that I have been implementing this strategy in my other courses (specifically CSC148 and STA247) and it's been working out amazingly! I've been able to greatly reduce the time I spend on any given word problem. In the past I may have started to work on a problem, read it again and realized that I interpreted it incorrectly. Now, I have a concrete and directional thought process that immediately points out any logical fallacies. I look forward to working on my problem solving skills as we move through the course!
Now that I've conquered the weird symbols, and have gotten a little bit better at problem solving, I hope to write again next week with the new challenges and victories I've made on my journey to "prove 'em all"!
First Entry!
