Hey! I just arrived in Toronto!
To be honest, I was really scared on my first week. I am in an exchange program and I am here only for a year. This was the first class I ever attend to on University of Toronto. So I did not really know if i had the prerequisites to attend to the course and all that mathematical language was very hard for me to understand at first.
I had to choose one course to drop because in my program I have to take 4 courses exactly and I was enrolled into 5. And after the class my thoughts were: "I should drop this class". Although I really liked the professor and his good sense of humour, I felt that somehow I wasn't ready. But since I had until next Monday to decide which one I was going to drop, I decided to wait until I had attended to all the other 4 courses.
You are lost when you don't even know which questions can lead you to what you need to know...
This week we didn't had tutorial. But even if we had tutorial, I would not know what my questions should be about. In my opinion this is a stage when you are so lost you don't even know what questions you should make.
The class on Friday did not help at all. I was even more lost. I understood even less. I felt like everything was turning into a big snowball and I had to do something before it got too big.
But you are not completely lost if you know what you need to know!
I'm glad I started reading the book. The book is great! It really guides you through the whole process. And the best part of it is the big amount of examples.
I went from nothing to everything in one day. I woke up very early on Saturday morning and started reading the theory and the examples. I was really lost at first, so i read the first three examples very carefully and took notes about the steps the author takes to solve each. The other ones I tried solving by myself, but always comparing to the book answer to see if I am doing right and check how he solved the parts I am getting stuck. I felt like the last 4 examples on Simple Induction i solved very fast and very similar to the book. I got very confident! Actually, it might sound a bit crazy but... after a while I started to enjoy solving the exercises. :)
So I decided to keep on with this course!
I still have some problems understanding the professor. It could be that I take some time processing information in english, since I have just arrived in Canada. But since I have no difficulty understanding my other professors this might be an issue, but not the main problem. I really like the personality of the professor though. He is very funny in my opinion and his classes are very enjoyable because he always has this good mood. But maybe my way of learning this course theory is sitting, reading a million times the theory and building my confidence step by step by going through the examples.
