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my blog
ive been learning calculus on my own and it's been pretty easy so far, looks like i'm a quarter through the course and it took me a week including days i wasted just playing games or watching long youtube videos, i think normally this course is supposed to be 12 weeks long so at this pace i'll be done with it 3 times as fast as usual which isn't a boastful comment just an observation because obviously the standard course pace is designed to accommodate the majority of people but even out of those there would be some number of them that could do the same thing i'm doing too, and even out of the ones that struggle with singlvariable calculus i would bet most of them would do well if they had the proper preparation going in because one thing you'll hear over and over again from people talking about intro calc is that it's really not that bad if you know your algebra and trig, now this might seem obvious that math builds upon earlier math but the thing about algebra is that from what i've seen it can be taught very disjointedly, ok everyone today we're gonna learn about exponents ok so heres how negative exponents work and heres how fractional exponents work and ok we're done now we're gonna talk about functions and how to shift and otherwise permute them and no it's not really gonna be related to exponents but uh y=x^2 is a parabola so there's an exponent lol, basically you can eke by without synthesizing skills because the curriculum has to cover stuff or is designed in a way that doesn't overlap well and provide opportunities to demonstrate that synthesis, another thing is it's easy if you're told explicitly to carry out certain operations but in calculus there's a point where they stop telling you what steps to take and you have to know not just what you can do but you also need to understand when and how to apply those things on your own which i think most people supremely fail at in general, people are horrible at knowing why, they just parrot
