wordsworth

Today I did a lot of work. It felt like most of it was not watching class videos when in reality the time was split pretty evenly. The first thing I worked on was ebay stuff. I looked at the pictures that exist on the big computer and priced what I could using ebay. I still have to work on the shipping prices but once I look at that and weight the items I can put the items on ebay. Then I put the pictures into individual folders and then those folders into another folder.  I really like folders. They make everything neat and tidy. Then after that it started raining but I wanted to work on the tile. So I brought it inside. It also gets kind of icky with bugs outside, lots of spiders in the tile. But I shock them all off. Also I found out that the red ground leaves red on my legs when they get sweaty from sitting there.  Either way I did about 5 tiles in an hour. Got them pretty clean too.

After that I did more calculus. Watched a lot of videos. At the end of this session of videos there were practice questions. You have to get five in a row before the program moves on. I did not do that well. I kept not getting five in a row so much that I eventually got five in a row just because the questions recycle. Some of them were really hard. I will either go back and try them again or wait awhile until I do.

Either way that way my day today.

On Monday I just spent some time exploring Khan Academy. They have a lot of interesting videos and classes on that site and they are all well organized. There are some computer programing videos that seem interesting.  The programming seems to use a programming system called JS. The intro videos are about drawings and animations which seem pretty interesting. I did not watch a whole video but the part I did watch seemed easy to follow and well put together. I watched some of the math videos to have deemed them to be much more helpful then the MIT videos. The person who narrates the videos likes to start at the very beginning. For example, I watch two different videos involving slope and in each video the commentator went over the basics of finding the slope of a line before going into detail about the slope of a curve.  It was a refreshing change since all the videos at MIT just jump right in. It is kind of like the “previously on…” whatever tv episode you are watching. Either way it helps me understand what is going on step by step. I learned how to understand simple derivatives, those involved in finding the secant lines within a curve. I cannot explain it all that well. All I know is that it involves the slope, which I already know about, and after you find the slope it involves setting the change in x equal to zero and figuring out the equation from there. Pretty easy and straight forward. I have not gotten to the harder derivatives yet but I am sure they will be explained in a manner that can be easily understood. I really like Khan Academy. It might be a bit redundant at times but that might be just what I need in order to understand what the heck is going on with this crazy math.

This was supposed to be posted last night but I fell asleep.