In the following days and hopefully weeks or months I am going to do a series of posts on Math. I am taking a course, Calculus with Applications, through MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and will be doing a number of exercises from that course and posting them here.
This course’s “Philosophy of Learning” is rather interesting. Here is what the course textbook has to say:
Philosophy of Learning
- Amount learned is proportional to time put in.
- Best way to learn is to figure out ideas yourself or teach them to someone else.
- Second best is to do so with hints from others like your friends or us.
- Third best is to get the ideas from reading; but pause in your reading to think about them.
- Fourth best: unacceptable: don’t get them at all.
- The object of a lecture is not so much to inform you of important facts, but rather to stimulate you to try to learn about some concept.
- The object of the course is to empower you to use the concepts of calculus in any context.
Point #2 seemed to ring true for me. When I have had to learn a particular subject deep enough so that I could teach others, I usually learned that subject well. I don’t kid myself into thing that many, of any, people actually read this blog. However, posting some of my lessons here will still fill that same roll. I will still go through the motions of having to learn something enough to teach it.
Its going to be slow going. Its been a while since I was in a math class, but I hope that as I get going the cobwebs and dust will be shaken from my brain and some of the old math I learned will come back. And even if it doesn’t, I can still learn new things!
