Rabu, 23 Mei 2012

Mathematics..it's a beauty.

PART 1
In many ways you can approach math like sports:
·            Train with a buddy. If you possibly can, get a study buddy or form a study group, and meet regularly at least two or three times a week. Very often one of you will be able to help the other one with a problem.
·            Deal with cramps right away. When there’s something you don’t understand, you may be tempted to just put it aside and hope for the best. That strategy doesn’t work at all in math! Because everything builds, if you don’t understand A you will probably not understand B and C either.
If this happens in class, ask a question right away. Don’t apologize and don’t worry about looking stupid; probably other people have exactly the same question.
Outside of class, use the Baker Center tutors or talk through the problem with your study buddy. Visit your instructor during office hours or make an appointment for another time.
·            Warm up before the event. Before class, look back over the readings and your homework. Make sure you are ready with any questions.
·            Stay in training. Review your notes after class, even rewrite them to make sure you understand everything. If there are several days between classes, review the material at least every other day to keep it fresh in your mind.
Make sure you train enough. The College recommends 2–3 hours per classroom hour, but you may need more.
Recognize especially that in the summer you’re making a big time commitment. If your class meets five days a week for an hour and 40 minutes a day, that’s two 50-minute classroom hours, which means you should expect to study 4–6 hours per night, every night.

When you study a foreign language, you know there will be a lot of words you don’t know. The same is true in math, except that many of the words look like English words. But math terms like set, prove, hypothesis, term, solution have special meanings that are different from ordinary English. Approach math like a foreign language and make sure you understand every term. It might be helpful to build up a vocabulary list in your notebook.

When you’re building a house, you would never think of trying to put up the second floor before the first floor. Building is a sequential process.
The same is true in math: each concept builds on the ones that came before. In history, you can understand the Depression pretty well even if you didn’t study World War I. But in math it’s different: you need to understand factoring very well or you won’t be able to solve equations.
This means that if you’re strapped for time, the one course that’s most dangerous to let slide is your math course. With other courses, if you don’t understand day 11 you can probably follow the lecture on day 12. With math, you have to understand day 11 or you’ll likely be lost in day 12.
The moral is that you need to stay current. If ever you don’t understand something, get help on it right away. Otherwise you’ve just knocked away the first floor of your house, and you know what that will do when you try to put up the second floor. - Stan Brown, 2011.

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