There seems to be a mismatch between your description of the problem and your description of the solution. If you are already able to grasp concepts, but not to apply them rapidly, then the solution ought to be on the application side, not on the comprehension side as implied by "turbocharge [...] ability to absorb and deeply comprehend".
This being so, I suggest you practice doing problems. Lots of them. Go through your physics textbook (or calculus, or whatever) problem by problem, and do them all. Practice makes perfect.
In addition, it is my experience that people who say they grasp the concepts but can't apply them haven't actually grasped the concepts at all. I have yet to encounter anyone (including myself) who really fundamentally gets it (where 'it' may be physics, calculus, or even algebra) without doing a lot of dang problems.
Finally: It may be the case that your current learning effort is a bit misdirected. You say you want a career in a software-ish direction; you don't need to know a whole lot of either math or physics for that. You mention pre-requisites, so perhaps it is unavoidable, but any additional effort besides coursework may be better spent on programming. Which, again, you should learn by doing exercises, not reading books. Fire up emacs, write "Hello World", compile from the command line, run ditto. Iterate from there. For the sake of the absent gods do not start with an IDE or anything that hides the compilation step.
For the sake of the absent gods do not start with an IDE or anything that hides the compilation step.
Could you say more about why this is important for beginning programmers?
Hi everyone,
I am graduating as a philosophy student shortly, and want to pursue computer science / programming/ something-of-that-sort.
I am currently taking some basic math (calculus) and physics (mechanics) courses in order to obtain pre-requesits, and to develop a basic framework. My problem is that I can grasp concepts and ideas, but when it comes to solving specific problems with actual numbers, I seem to shut down. Specifically, it takes me much more time (read "hours") to solve problems that ought to take 10 minutes. This is a particularly bad thing on tests and exams.
I believe that the difficulty I am having stems from so little exposure to symbolic reasoning in the past 5-6 years. I am looking for resources, techniques and advice to "turbocharge" (to use CFAR terminology) my ability to absorb and deeply comprehend technical material, so that solving problems becomes second nature.
Thank you so much for your time,
Jeremy