01/07/2024 - Road Map to Calculus
A short break and even shorter session
Hello all,
After watching a bit of The Math Sorcerer a few days ago, it was mentioned to practice maths a little everyday instead of doing a large session and having bit breaks in between. I cannot remember the rationale completely but it would seem, at least to me, that you are not being consistent with your progression. Like starting and stopping all the time.
If you did a couple of problems each day, you are being consistent. It may seem to some that you’re not going far enough in terms of effort but I remember it as you aren’t learning in the most effective way. With that being said, I am not sure but I do struggle to be motivated with problems that require lots of mental effort. As such, I did some math problems today.
My session today was just going as far as I could go before getting distracted or my mind starting to numb. Which was about 15 minutes. That’s it. That’s all I will do today.
The thinking is similar to training to run. When you start, you won’t make it more than 500m, likely, before becoming completely exhausted. If you keep trying to push yourself, it’s very likely your mind is going to associate running with pain and, thus, it’ll be harder to be motivated for the next run. It’s not really how far you go, it’s about improving your running over time and the side effect is improving your health too.
In the case of maths, todays session was 15 minutes. Tomorrow it might still be 15 minutes. But if I keep going, I might start reaching 20 minutes, 30 minutes, et cetera. Or it might turn into multiple sessions in night. For now, we are just interested in improving our tolerance to mathematics - call it mathematic stamina.
The main part of the session was turning slope-intercept form equations into graphs, sometimes you needed to use other methods to get the equation into the form below.
6 questions of this, fairly straight forward.
Before I go, I want to mention my inspiration for doing these blogs. Jean Louis Van Belle from Reading Feymann. Blogging about their journey to learn more about what they love. To me, I want to look back at where I started and how I felt, and constrast it with my future self. I am starting now because I didn’t do this while I was younger, which I now have low resolution of what it was like in the past to learn and work hard.
For now, I will see you in the next post.
Steve Frampton.