Thank you inf and pseud for reminding me why i should be grateful for life as i know it now....no more f'ing math homework. OH THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!

i hate math. =) good luck inf.

hate is such a strong word

well um.... i watched the videos, understood it perfectly as i followed along with him and then as soon as it ended and i looked back at my homework assignment i realize.... i can't remember any of what he just said

Well, at least that's a start, right?

eh, im watching it over again

yeah, im def done for the night, i got a small grasp, but not enough to do much with.... ive spent enough hours on this assignment.

you could always reread what I spent so long writing for you... just read it slowly--this is a common mistake people make with textbooks and such. they don't read like novels. The information is much more dense. Read a line, draw a picture to go with it, read the next line, and add to the picture...slowly...

i went back through it, and it does make a lot more sense now, but im going to have to ask for a review about this information tomorrow.

oh,right now is shower time so ill brb in a few

well um.... i watched the videos, understood it perfectly as i followed along with him and then as soon as it ended and i looked back at my homework assignment i realize.... i can't remember any of what he just said

Why this happens--the person giving the demo knows how to do the problem. All the steps are explained clearly so they make perfect sense. What's different when you try to tackle a problem is that you don't know how to assess which step should come next or how to approach it. If someone were there showing you how to approach it, it would look easy again. This is why it's key to really understand things conceptually. Because then you CAN figure out how to approach things on your own. It becomes a matter of reasoning through it instead of trying to remember the steps.

hey all, back

so....was today better than yesterday?

yeah, and hoping tomorrow will be better than both of these days

that would be a good way for things to go

less stressful but that's not going to happen anytime soon, so at least a bit less stressful than the last 2 days since i had all of my work piling up to worry about among other things.

hey, sorry every1. lost track of time and it seems as though i am late for bed

well night everyone, mm, pseud, and all others, sweet dreams and wishing you all well 2morrow.

today was much better

Really glad to hear

good deal. get all of your homework done on time? Did your math teacher go over limits and stuff?

yeah, but once again, we only went through delta and epsilon in passing, and she told us we would never be tested on it ever , but that it was still "good to know just in case". yeah, its all done

Did the rest of the students in class seem to be just as confused?

I think the reason for teaching you those types of problems was sort of to get a taste of real analysis. I'm trying to think if it's even that applicable to calculus(whcih is what you are working up to, right?). Limits are important because that's where you get at the definition of a derivative. But epsilon and delta balls around domain and range points... hmmm....maybe it's needed to define smoothness of a function so that the derivative is defined...yeah yeah--to take a derivative at a point, you need at least continuity around that point. Being able to find a delta for any given epsilon proves continuity. It'll read something like: if for all epsilon > 0 there exists a delta > 0 such that |x - c| < delta whenever |f(x) - L| < epsilon where L = lim as x->c then you can, like, take the derivative of f(x) at c...or something... probably f© = L must also be required.

yeah, at first they were all confused, but they soon learned how to find teh delta, not why, but how

and do YOU know what the delta means?

The thing of it is, though, unless any of you are planning to be math majors, you probably won't need this knowledge. It's just building up to the definition of a derivative. Then you will learn how to take derivatives and you won't see epsilons and deltas again until maybe you go and define integrals. To use calculus, you simply need to know how to take a derivative and what information a derivative is telling you. How a derivative is derived, isn't as relevant.

yeah that's what she was telling us, that we wouldn't have to understand the why unless we into higher level math or major in math.

but i understand what the delta and epsilon are doing, its the range that the value can be and still be within so much of the limit if i am thinking right.