My First Test

Last week I had my first CSC165 test. I don’t know if it was the fact that this was the first university test I’ve ever taken but I had an unexpected experience writing it. Going in to the exam room, I felt very confident. Since there was quite a lot of overlap between my MAT137 course and this, I felt that I had every concept learned forwards and backwards. I only filled up half of one side of my cheat sheet, and I found the practice test really easy. So going into the room, I was pretty high on confidence.

                My friend Rocky, on the other hand, was getting pretty nervous about it. I was confident that he knew everything and that he’d do well, but he never really settled down. He kept telling me that I shouldn’t be so confident and that the test would be harder than it seemed, and I kept reassuring him. Then we both sat down and started the test.

                The first part was pretty easy. In fact, I had no difficulty with every other question other than the last one. There was a big overlap with the practice test, so I knew it was something that I’d done successfully before. Just to be sure though, I double, triple-checked all of my answers, and played out the logic in my head numerous times per question. It was at the last question, however, that disaster struck. The last question was very similar to the one question that I couldn’t answer on our first assignment. On top of that, there was only 10 minutes left to complete it! I quickly gathered my focus and started writing all of my thoughts down on paper, so that even if I was wrong, I’d still be eligible for part marks. As I was writing, my pen stopped working. It had ran out of ink. Luckily, one of the advising TAs lent me her pen so that I could finish the exam. I tried my best, but in the end, I couldn’t come up with an answer.

                I felt leaving the exam room dumbfounded. I was disappointed in myself for being overconfident. Rocky, on the other hand, took things slow and steady, and had come up with the right answer to the last question. It was almost like the story of the tortoise and the hare. That day, I learned that when doing exams, I should always keep track of the time, and never underestimate the assignment. After all, U of T is notoriously the school where everyone fails.

Assignment 1 and power thinking.

I spent the whole day today working on assignment 1. I grouped up with 2 other friends, Rocky and Hesham and spent 6 hours in my dorm room debating and teaching each other. We used up so much scrap paper trying to work things out that my recycling bin was full. They say that you learn the best when you teach. I have never found that more true than today. We each spent about an hour on trying to solve the questions on our own, so when we compared our findings, there were some contradictions. There were some where I was mistaken but for the ones where I was confident that I held the right answer. I realised that when you teach someone, or at the least, explain your thought process, you anticipate questions that others may throw at you, and you start to branch off a part of your brain into coming up possible answers for those questions. Through this process, I will either have checked for any holes in my logic, or have more confidence that what I have is the correct answer. I have noticed that sometimes, I get too confident and jump on the first explanation that makes sense to me and move on to the next question. Through peer interaction, I get valuable insight from other people’s thinking processes, but also it allows me to second guess myself.

                I found this assignment to be challenging but not too hard. I’ve discovered that for whatever question, I can usually shut down all of my other senses and focus into power thinking mode. In addition, I think discipline is very important in trying to parse logic, as the slightest of distractions can throw your whole thought process out the window. I like to think of my brain as a weak computer with not a lot of ram. When I feel like my brain is too crowded with other thoughts and inputs, I go into my brain’s “task manager” and “end all processes” so that I can use the ‘RAM’ towards solving my problems. I’m working on honing this skill so that hopefully one day, I can train my brain into an i7 quad-core processing supercomputer.

"Hello World"

Well, this is the first entry of my SLOG. I’ve never really written a blog before but I’ll try my best to keep it interesting. Besides, it won’t hurt to get some practice on my writing skills. I’ve never really had an interest in reading and writing. I’ve always felt that I was therefore good at math and that is what I should pursue. I didn’t mind math, but wasn’t crazy about it either. I especially hated the repetitiveness of arithmetic practice problems. What I was very much in love with was computers and programming. I taught myself since I was 13, how to make games on flash and design websites. I knew that eventually, if I were to pursue computer science in university that I’d have to do a lot of math. This was something that I had a hard time understanding. When I was coding in HTML, I never found the need to know what a contrapositive was, or even what a polynomial was. Programming felt closer to writing an instruction manual than doing math. So what is the need to know all of the higher level math material if I haven’t even come across a need to use it?

            Things became clear immediately during my first classes of MAT 137 and CSC 165. I was taught in both classes about logic and If => then statements and I finally understood why I needed these math courses. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that the math I will be learning now will be different from what I’ve been learning so far. The university content challenges me to think, reason with logic, and to design a way to retrieve and display the proofs of my solutions, as opposed to the mindless and repetitive rule following that was high school math. This new math feels more like programming to me, and I experience the same kind of joy from solving a problem and writing code.

            So far, the course material has been very interesting to me and has been a thrill to learn. I seemed to have developed a “thirst for learning”, especially in math. While my friends from different majors have complained to me that they can’t stop themselves from falling asleep every lecture, I have found every class to be very entertaining, and taught at the right pace. I hope things stay this way forever.