OSSU blog #8 - Calculus

Calc 1A, 1B, and 1C

It's been a while since my last OSSU post - about 14 months. During that time I started and finished single-variable calculus. Similar to Programming Languages A, B, and C, there are three online courses (if you do the Open Learning Library (OLL) version) but it's really one big course (MIT 's 18.01).

I took AP Calculus AB and BC in high school and got a 5 and 4 (respectively) on the exams. On the off chance he ever sees this: thank you for being an awesome instructor, Mr. Sade. You made calculus genuinely fun and interesting.

All of the material in 18.01 is stuff I had learned before, but much like the OSSU prerequisite math, I had forgotten a lot of it.

That being said, it still took me over a year to finish going through material I had already learned previously. Though it took two years in high school (AP Calc AB and BC are each two semesters), in college this course is only a single semester. On one hand, this is embarrassing. On the other, I am happy to have finished with a lot of confidence in the material, after a few weeks-long breaks, and while I have a full-time job, family, social life, etc.

The course

This course was fine, but could be better. I think my high school calc teacher did a better job, but it's probably not fair to compare my experience then to how I experienced this course now. I wish there were more practice problems readily available, but you can find more elsewhere (e.g. in the OCW version of the course, which I'd probably recommend over the OLL courses at this point).

In particular I would have liked to see more optimization problems. We got a lot of those in my high school calc classes and they were monumentally helpful, even (or especially) when they were hard to make sense of. Sometimes a fellow student would mouth off, which would prompt Mr. Sade to quickly devise a practice problem asking us to figure out how quickly said student would be buried under a conical pile of sand. Good times.

I "passed" the class by taking the practice final and self-assessing my answers against the given solutions. I scored a little over 77% on the first try. I did award myself partial credit where I thought it appropriate, though obviously that's a subjective thing. Unsurprisingly, most of my mistakes had nothing to do with calculus and everything to do with basic algebra.

Study habits

Part of the reason this took so long is: I scaled back how much time I spent on OSSU. Most weeks it was down to the 7.5 hours/week minimum I had set for myself, and sometimes even less than that. This time included watching videos, reading content, and doing practice problems and exams. I'm going to need to increase my study time to make it through the rest of OSSU in any sort of timely matter, especially since the next course is Math for CS (i.e. discrete math), which I do not have much prior experience with.

Another problem was that late 2023/early 2024 was kind of a crazy time in my personal and work life, so I sometimes went weeks without doing any calculus. When you take a break that long, the problem is twofold: you obviously lose any forward progress you would have made during the break, but you also have to spend additional time to get back to where you were when you stopped. There's a similar problem when you stop going to the gym for a while - you can't just show up again after 6 weeks and expect to lift the same weight.

In prior posts I lamented about how I could have avoided similar problems with a little more discipline, by being a little more intentional - but this time around it was simply a matter of priorities (my apologies dear reader, but I won't be going into the details here).

Flash cards

I used flash cards heavily for this course. I made a card in Anki for anything I thought was remotely important and tried to keep up with daily reviews. This served me well when doing practice questions and tests - I typically did not need to look up formulas or other such information. It was also useful to have these things in the front of my brain when watching lectures and digesting new material. It should be said that despite all their advantages, flash cards are not a substitute for practice problems.

Displaying math things in Anki

Anki has support for MathJax built in (MathJax is not quite the same as LaTeX, but it's similar). Most of my calculus Anki cards have MathJax in them. It's come in handy a few times at work too - there is a lot of crossover between MathJax and many other math display engines.

You can press ctrl+m, m (or cmd+m, m on Mac) to add inline MathJax in Anki. I used this Math StackExchange post as a cheatsheet: https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference.

More responsibilities

I have also become a social organizer for the UTC_Night cohort in the OSSU Discord community. This means I help facilitate the little community we have in that cohort. This happens primarily through the weekly check-ins, but there's usually a fair bit of chatter in the channel throughout the week too. I'm happy to report I've made a few more acquaintances in this cohort since becoming a social organizer, which is part of the reason I joined the OSSU community in the first place.

Next up:

I loved calculus in high school, and I love it still, but the truth is that it's probably not going to make much of an appearance in the rest of my OSSU studies and possibly also my career. My next course is discrete math, which has A LOT to do with computer science. Calculus is listed as a prerequisite, but honestly I'm not sure how much help it is going to be.

In any case, I'm excited to learn some new math and hope to have another post here by early January!