Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Calculus Progress

These days, I am sitting down most nights for about half an hour to work on my calculus project. By now I've sharpened up a lot of my algebra skills; I am sometimes surprised to have forgotten so much, and other times surprised that I remember so much and have so many skills left.

Chapter 3 of my book is all the differentiation stuff, and I have one section of that chapter left ("Related Rates"). The next chapter is about what you actually do with differentiation (stuff like determining the important points of curves so you know how to graph them) - I remember only a little bit of this, so it surprises me that a whole chapter can be about it, but since applying calculus is trickier than doing the math itself, and more important and useful if you are going to ever use calculus in other courses, I'll be very interested to relearn it.

Then on to integration! I'm not sure how many chapters the whole book has, but I think my progress is adequate to get me through what I want to get through this summer. I'm not determined to finish the whole book.

I was worried that I wouldn't be able to make myself do this over the summer, because I am not really a self-starter type of person, but I've been enjoying it enough that it's been pretty easy.

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