Everything covered today was a complete mystery to me. Without even knowing what kind of course CSC165 was, what I wasn't expecting was a course on expressing myself. My whole reason for avoiding any English course; now in vain. This course also required me to keep a blog, something else I wasn't keen on doing. I had never been much for using the internet to express my life, thinking that my life was my business, and no one out there probably would care to read such boring entries of complaints after complaints. Nonetheless, SLOG #1 is here. (Against all my will.) Even at the end of the lecture, I still wasn't entirely sure what CSC165 was about, and instead I just assumed I would understand in the next class. Since then, topics such as ambiguity and balance were covered, and for the most part, made sense. I was relieved (to say the least) that nothing went in one ear and out the other.
The following classes started to have Computer Science terms in them, and a certain line in the example threw me off.
>>> [x * 2 for x in [1, 2, 3]]
[2, 4, 6]
At a first glance, I had never seen any line like this one in my half-year of CSC108. Programming, even though it is my major, wasn't exactly something I was completely confident in. At first, I panicked, thinking I missed something important last semester and would have to look into something as basic as for loops again. I later read the line over and over, and realized it was rather simple, just multiplying x by 2, for the number in the list. Professor Heap went on to explain that this method of for loops is what will be used in this course, as well as in CSC148, so it seemed like an important thing to take note of.
In-class quiz 1. 'quant1'. What in the world...? Again, my Computer Science failed me, and it didn't help that I hadn't managed to catch the question or even which example I was supposed to answer. After a pitied help from the person sitting beside me, I realized I had to do example 3. After reading the 'quants', I subconsciously knew that there had to be a difference between 'quant1' and 'quant3', but my ignorant self choose to ignore that, so I had put the same description as 'quant1'. After feeling proud that I had actually answered the question, I couldn't help but notice that something was off. When he told us to hand it in, it struck me; not all of L1 was a subset of L2 for it to be true, only some needed to be. Quickly erasing and rewriting, I handed in my quiz, now properly proud, and slightly embarrassed about my first reading, and made a mental note to read more carefully the next time around.
The last class had symbols. Oh the symbols. I had never seen an such things, and the handwriting of Professor Heap had me doubting what the symbols even looked like. When the quiz came around, I panicked like no tomorrow. I was looking left and right, thinking to myself, how do all these people know what they are doing? They know what that 'U' means? Even that line about the O? Again, not feeling confident, I simply copied what he had written previously, taking a complete guess. After the class, I immediately rushed to the class website (I hadn't brought my laptop with me) and looked up in the past slides if there was anything I should've already known. After finding nothing, I made a quick check to the course documents and found the page that saved my life. (Like 10 minutes before I started this blog.)
A ⊆ B - A is a subset of B
A ⊊ B - There exist at least one element of B not contained in A
∅ - Empty Set
These were the main symbols that had confused me, for a good 2-3 hours. Luckily, thanks to the confusion they gave, these symbols have now been burned into my memory.
What a start.
P.S. Had a lot to complain about, really don't think i'll have this much to say in the following SLOG's.
A ⊆ B - A is a subset of B
A ⊊ B - There exist at least one element of B not contained in A
∅ - Empty Set
These were the main symbols that had confused me, for a good 2-3 hours. Luckily, thanks to the confusion they gave, these symbols have now been burned into my memory.
What a start.
P.S. Had a lot to complain about, really don't think i'll have this much to say in the following SLOG's.
