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So this school term is really about facing my fears.  Actually, this applies for the entire school year too.

As mentioned before, my biggest academic fear is math.  Simply because there’s way too much voodoo going on in calculus and I hate rote memorization.  What I’m talking about is that theorems are based on other theorems in which most of the students won’t ever understand fully.  Not only that, but there’re so many magical formulas out there that need memorization that it’s hard to keep up with it all unless you study math constantly for a period of time.  I guess “mathematical conditioning” would be the term here, a conditioning that I haven’t paid attention to over the years (among other things :-p).
When was the last time you could recall at any of the inverse trigonometric functions off of the top of your head?  I thought so!

My second biggest academic fear, which is a strange one, is formal logic proofs.  This is sorta strange in that I’m a computing science major.  You’d think after studying the computability of things I could write things out logically.  But no, formal logic has a language of its own.  It’s not quite math, and it’s not quite English.  It has its own syntax and method of thinking, and like math, it demands its own form of mental conditioning.

This term and the next is chock full of math and logic goodness.  Calculus and database systems this term, and CMPUT 340: Numerical Methods the next term.  Calculus is total math, and in database systems we study in a very theory/logic heavy approach.  Numerical methods is basically the marriage of the two.

I knew this year would be a killer for me, but I’m happy to say that after some initial struggle the math and logic is coming to me, albeit slower than I’d like it too.  But I am facing my fears, and I’m improving on it!

Tonight I finished assignments for both classes, and for once I didn’t just half-ass my work hoping to get enough part marks for a pass.  My marks throughout university have been really lopsided.  With formal math and logic classes pulling my GPA down and my more “applied” classes pulling my marks way up. Hopefully by the end of the year my last year will consist of only up!

So here’s to facing my fears, and hopefully continuing on like this I’ll be able to conquer them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 1:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.