M347 rush

The personal problems have come back, and have taken up all my time since my last post.
That has created one major headache – I have less than a week to read more than two months’ worth of M347 material and complete numerous iCMAs, plus one TMA.

I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off work, and the TMA needs to go in the post by 5pm Tuesday, and arrive the next day if I’m not to miss the deadline.

Absolutely nothing I could do about it .

So, I made a start last night, and read a week’s worth in a night, then did one iCMA, which I managed to get almost fully correct.

This afternoon and tonight, I’ve read another week’s worth of the next unit, on maximum likelihood estimates. Thankfully, it’s calculus-heavy, and I like calculus, so it was quite a swift skim read, which made good sense.

I’m now boggle-eyed but the plan is: tomorrow afternoon/evening – finish this unit, do the iCMA and the TMA question, Saturday do 16 hours on the next unit, plus the iCMA and TMA question/s, then have a “leisurely” Sunday and Monday doing the final unit, plus iCMA and TMA question/s.

Far from ideal and, once it’s sent, I’ll need to switch back to M343 (should be three weeks behind by then), then do six weeks of reading in 18 days and post the next TMA off.

Far from an ideal, or expected, start to this academic year but sometimes side-swipes come and there’s nothing you can do about them.

My emergency move will be to ask for a two day extension on either TMA, if needs be.

After that, it’s back to the personal problem, and falling behind again.

If I wasn’t such a stubborn git, I’d have jacked the whole lot in for 2012 by now.

Off to bed – work at 6:30am tomorrow.

Remembering everything

If you’ve ever come up against a “maths wall”, you’ll know what I mean when I say you can spend hours, or even days, trying to get from one line in a proof to the next.
When you do eventually get there, and the proof makes sense, you pop the theorem or result into your pocket.
Then, you repeat.
After a while, the stuff you did earlier on gets a little hazy, so you go back to it when you have time and re-read the course notes, as well as your own (usually littered with exclamation marks, asterisks, smileys, and “this came from there”s).

I’m now finding, at “level three” with the OU (read “final year” undergrad) that stuff is coming in so thick and fast that my brain is simply being overwhelmed.

As mentioned in my previous post, I find myself relying on the results of a proof and, as a result, I’m clearly missing some “big picture”.

I’m impressed by people who follow a whole course and can piece bits together with some sort of invisible thread – theorem a leads to theorem b which, in this context, allows…. blah blah.

Meanwhile, I seem to be at the “isolated results” stage.

A maths teacher I know asked me how I’d solve a problem the other day. It was a case of glancing at it and going through a mechanical process to obtain the result.

Great, he said, but how did you know to do that?

Well, since blah is blah, then blah leads to blah…. I explained.

Of course, he said, with a puzzled look.

Somewhere along the line, he’d developed a knowledge gap – or rather, failed to address the gap.

I’m feeling the same at the moment.

Page by page, it all makes sense.

Bigger picture – not yet.

Certainly not yet, though I’m working on it.

And that’s the painful, frustrating bit, which leads to insecurity (on my part at least).

I’m not worried if a bigger picture connection will come up in the exam – I’m actually worried that I’ll look at the course notes (or even need them for work) in a few years time, and it will all be a mystery.

Once again.

M343 CMA result back

Despite the rush, the result was good.
One of the 20 questions wrong, but I see where my error was now.

I’m not convinced I wouldn’t make the same mistake again, though.

As this course progresses, I’m finding I’m tending towards following a derivation, obtaining the result/theorem, and relying on remembering that result a fits scenario b, etc.

The material is too deep for my brain to try to remember/memorise all derivations from scratch – something that was broadly possible in MST209 last year.

Still, by comparison to M347, M343 is, in my opinion, a lot easier.

Not quite so very behind

The M343 CMA is in, with hours to spare. Close call, though there was nothing in it which seemed all that difficult – just a case of following some arguments and proofs, looking at an example or two, then answering the questions.
M347 and M343′s second TMAs are next in line – there’s probably close on 200 pages in total to read or re-read, and 20 days to do it in.
Probably best I get started.

Very behind

Almost a month since my last post and I have done no maths.
Nothing.
Personal circumstances got in the way and today is the first day I can even think of getting back into it.
Lol. Not.
My next M343 assignment is due next week, followed by an M347 one a few weeks later.
From tomorrow, I will be doing 5pm to 2am every day. I can hardly wait (sarcastic smiley).

Behind

From slightly in front, to getting well behind with study. To be honest, I like it this way – keeps me on my toes and imparts the sense of urgency I was, sadly, born without.

Why behind? Well, I have used the past week to rebuild sort my house.

First off, I invested in a pressure washer to clean the block paving. The drive is fairly long – a bit too long for a garden hose to do the rounds from kitchen-through-window-round-house-and-up, so I ended up with a pressure-less supply from a 220 litre wheelie bin, with makeshift gauze filter over the end of a hosepipe.

It did the job excellently. So excellently, in fact, that refilling the joints with kiln-dried sand took over 100kg of the tiny particles.

From there to shot-blasting the decking, which had three years of green, slippery grime which did a good job of mimicking the frictional properties of ice when wet.

Then next door and next door but two decided they wanted to avail of my services. Cue weed-ridden patios and baked in dog pee to blast away at.

Feeling brave, adventurous, and in no mood for study, I ripped all the tiles off the kitchen walls. Why, remains a mystery, since there was nothing wrong with them to be honest.

Anyway, some very modern black glass things are arriving tomorrow, to test my tiling skills to the full (shouldn’t be hard to test them to their limits – I managed to slice my fingers and knuckles to bits removing the old tiles).

From there, while waiting for the tiles to arrive, I inexplicably stripped down all the wood trim in the house – bannister rails, foot boards for the patio doors, that sort of thing – and re-stained them in a not so subtle oak-effect.

Kitchen cupboard handles and new sink followed, then painting the lounge, upper kitchen walls and kitchen ceiling.

Lastly, I replaced a fence panel, painted the fencing, installed a raised vegetable bed, and chopped down a tree for another neighbour.

Left to do: tiles up in kitchen without butchering either my hands or the new sink, and wood-treat the decking.

Procrastinating from study? Me? Never.

Ok, I give up

How do you register for your next course / check your existing student record?
I nominated my TA qualification about a week ago, and now the only things left on my homepage seem to be my current modules.
I’m ******ed if I can find a way to register for a new course, or even check what previous courses I’ve done, and grades obtained.

Anyone help?

On a different note – the exam dates are out.
M343 on 10 Oct, followed by M347 on 18 Oct.
Nice and sensible – eight days between exams should make things a lot easier.

 

Edit: Oh, and Chris, I can’t post comments on your blog – the process just goes round in a circle. Did I break something?

M347 TMA result in

A bit lower than expected but still a pass one.
I was surprised to see some “red pen” and deducted marks against some of my lines – it seems M347′s marking might be a bit along the lines of an M208-applied-to-stats module ie justifying every move, even when they’re obvious.

I did make one stupid mistake I’ll own up – introducing a substitution during integration and forgetting to swop the variable in the limits. Lol. Newbie.

Quite funny how the comments in my M343 TMA called for less workings, but M347 clearly needs more.

So, more it shall be.

Much more.

I’d better get back to looking at both courses – I’ve had a week off to do a load of jobs around the house and am now behind.

The specimen exam paper for M347 has also been uploaded – it looks ok. The first 20% of it was doable, though not within the time frame. It looks like the fundamental festival of calculus.

(Some) results in

Grade 1s for the three M347 iCMAs submitted so far (awaiting TMA result).
Grade 1 for the M343 TMA, and a note to myself not to blather on about something next time before I define the variable. Other observation – as is usual, I have over-written the TMA (but this is a cunning ploy to help me come exam revision time, honest). I seem to have, in my enthusiasm, even managed to prove some basic calculus results rather than appeal directly to them during integration. Fear not, dear tutor, my exam script will make massive leaps between lines, so there’ll be 1/10th of the pap (I just wrote) to mark in October.

Next to do: first chunk of M343 CMA1, first chunk of M343 TMA2 (material overlaps).
M347 in the back seat for the next week.

I’d better do some actuarial past papers at some point, as well. Does anyone know how a pass is determined (fixed level, quantiles, etc)?

Complex analysis

I spent more time this past week on studying non-elected course topics than I probably should have done.

M343 and M347 feel ok, so I began to look at complex analysis, skipping around through various books and watching various online videos as I went.

I’m at a point where I’m playing around with the Reimann zeta function and Euler product, and looking at their applications to analytic number theory, which, of course, has led to a totally baffling meeting with the Reimann Hypothesis, the outline of which I don’t understand, let alone methods of proving it.

And that’s where I’d better stop for a week or so, or I’ll be falling behind with elected study.

A “side aim” this year, is to have essentially studied much of the meat of undergraduate complex analysis before formally enrolling onto a course in it in October this year. From that, an interest in analytic number theory *may* emerge.

Other distractions this week included producing two proofs of Pythagoras’ Theorem, both of which are already well-known (no surprises there), and thinking up ways to evaluate the Gaussian integral (keeps the brain cells ticking over, which is probably a good thing.)

A coin will go in the air this evening to decide whether to crack the next few units of M347, or the next book of M343 in the coming week or two.

The rest of today has been allocated to garden work.