Perhaps you are right wrt my belief that I understand concepts. An example of what I meant is; while explaining what a derivative is in class today, I understood rather easily what it is used for and how it works. However, as soon as numbers were put on the board, it was harder for me to interpret what was going on.
The idea of a derivative is definitely worth understanding and you can understand it without being able to do a lot of actual derivatives. Most "practice" of doing derivatives is applying a set of rules you learn for exponents, chain rule, and so on. BUT if you understand the concept, you should be able to derive some or all of these rules, which is a form of doing problems. Make sure you can derive the rule for differentiating x^n from infinitesimals, for example. That always made me happier to apply the rules without thinking I was doing something arbitrary.
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