Week 2

This week, CSC165 was harder than the first week. In the past few lectures we discussed negation, implications, vacuous truths, converting English claims into symbolic ones, and using venn diagrams to illustrate implications. Understanding these concepts is becoming a challenge, and I know it's only going to become harder. The tutorial handouts and assignment are also much more difficult than what we learn in lecture. The second tutorial handout took me about 2 hours to do, and about 85% of my answers were wrong anyway, despite feeling good about the material during lectures. I'm also not sure how I did on the second quiz, and I hope I do well on the next one. I also haven't even started the assignment that's due in 4 days. Overall, my confidence in this course is dropping fast. I should probably do more readings and extra homework to make sure I understand what is going on in this course. If I am unable to keep up with CSC165, I may drop it and retake it in summer school, which isn't that bad since I'm doing summer school anyway. Right now, my goal is just to get this first assignment done. Oh well, there's only 9 weeks left of class.

CSC165 - Week 1

     I feel my first week of CSC165 went very well. I was fairly familiar with the set notation we covered in class, since I learned it in high school as well. I did forget some of it however, but I spent some time reading and relearning all the symbols that are used in sets. I also wish that the instructor included a table somewhere in the slides that just listed all the symbols used in set theory, since that way I wouldn't have spent some time during lecture trying to figure out what the symbols meant, when I should have been paying attention to the lesson instead. This wasn't a big issue however, because it only took about 20 minutes to relearn most of what I had forgotten. This was basically the only difficult part about CSC165 so far, and it wasn't all that bad. My plan for whenever I get stuck in this course is to just reread lecture notes, do practice problems, and get help whenever I need to. I prefer these methods because it allows me practice the course material in CSC165 in a comfortable environment. I was also familiar with the use of venn diagrams in set theory, so it was just a matter of relearning the concepts that are part of the diagrams. Some new things I learned this past week were quantifiers, and existential and universal claims, as well as their anti-symmetric pattern. I learned how to verify and disprove both types of claims and give proof as to why they are true or false. I also learned about the proper ways of problem solving (understanding the problem, making a plan, solving it, and then reviewing the problem). Nothing so far that we have covered in CSC165 has caused any problems or given me any real challenges, and because of this my confidence in the course material is high. My tutorial also went well and I feel I did well on the quiz. The handout for the tutorial was fairly straight forward, except the very last question, but my TA helped clear my confusion. I find the course material interesting as well because I like mathematics and may consider pursuing it as a double major. I also find statistics and probability interesting, so hopefully this course will cover some topics that are in those fields of mathematics. So far my first week of CSC165 has gone well, and hopefully I can stay on top of the material and do well in the course, but I know that I will have to work hard in order to make sure I can grasp all the concepts that will be taught.