November 2014 Monthly Bragging Thread

elharo

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

I just finished an entire difficult textbook with (virtually) all the problems, on my own. I think that might be a first for me. The textbook is Art of Problem Solving Introduction to Algebra. I know that finally completing introductory algebra many years out of high school doesn't sound like a big deal for most LW members, but for me it was a big and difficult step.

Working through this textbook took me about seven months, with a few scheduled breaks and a longer break for my third child being born.

Final grade (= average grade for all the chapters, using a grading system I made up): 93.7 out of 114.8 possible.

A big thank you to zedzed for offering to impose artificial deadlines on me for each chapter, and for giving me occasional help and advice. I would definitely not have been able to do it otherwise. Everybody please upvote zedzed's confirmation below for helping out a fellow LWer.

If anybody else would like someone to set up a system of artificial deadlines for them then please PM me. For me at least such a system seems to be the best anti-akrasia tool I've ever found, short of having real deadlines.

Hey, terrific! Did you enjoy the book itself? I really liked AoPS series; I remember getting a whole lot out of Introduction to Counting and Probability. I distinctly remember thinking over and over, why didn't they tell me this in school!

I'm not sure what your ultimate goals are, and you're probably already familiar with the online AMC8/10/12 and Olympiad problem banks that others have mentioned; if not, I couldn't recommend them more highly for bringing newly learned skills to bear on novel problems. At one point, I worked through all the AMC8, then all... (read more)

3Vaniver12y

Are you familiar with Beeminder?

34zedzed12y

Thanks for the thanks, but I'll also comment on iarwain1's discipline getting this done. This journey began about 7 months ago, and through all the difficulties life has thrown, the progress has been consistent. I'll also comment that the grading system above is very difficult, and were I running this particular course, it would've been upwards 100%.