18 years ago, I failed grade 9 math with a 23%. Today, I passed Introduction to Calculus on Coursera, which is offered through the University of Sydney and taught by Professor David Easdown.
I wish I could say that I actually enjoyed the course, but I feel like that would be doing a disservice to the version of myself that has been pulling his hair out for the past 5 weeks. Indeed, if I’ve learned anything during this process, I’ve learned that Calculus is hard. Very hard.
I will say, though, that this is in no way meant as a slight against Professor Easdown and the style of the course. Quite the contrary; Professor Easdown is an incredibly engaging teacher and manages to make this very difficult subject digestible. And while I wouldn’t say at this point that I can ‘do calculus’, I would say that the course was very, very rewarding and that it certainly provided a cohesive overview of the pertinent topics in the field, as well equipping the learner with a thorough understanding of the symbols, language, and relevance. The notes that accompanied the lectures were very valuable and helped fill in the gaps, and the structure of the course was very smooth as you transitioned from one topic to the next.
I took this course because I have been rolling through some courses in Artificial Intelligence and simply found that I was out of my depth and simply coding along without any idea of what I was actually doing. And while memorizing algorithms and formulas has its benefits, I decided that I want to fully understand this field – and I don’t think that one can do this properly without a fundamental understanding of Calculus. This course provides just that.
The practice quizzes were more than a little challenging (with the last couple of questions usually very, very challenging). I found that I often had to supplement the course with alternative resources, such as Youtube, Khan Academy, Symbolab, and so on. I had to re-watch lectures and thoroughly dissect the reading notes. As I mentioned, it was a very difficult process that had me pulling my hair out and I’m a bit ashamed to say that I nearly threw my laptop on several occasions. However, as it is with learning any new skill, you just have to keep pushing through knowing that it will be worth it in the end.
Then you get to a module exam, and at this point you realize how you’ve learned so very much in such a small amount of time. It’s honestly incredible. And by the time you get to the very end of the course, which I did today, you realize that you somehow have all the prerequisite knowledge to step by step make sense of equations that might as well have been written in a different language just a month ago. I don’t feel like I can describe that particular feeling.
In all, this course was one of the more rewarding things that I’ve done in recent memory, and I’m so very grateful to Professor Easdown for putting it out there and making such a thorough overview of the topic so accessible to anyone with the interest to pursue it. I coupled this with 1blue3brown’s series The Essence of Calculus on Youtube, and between these two I feel like for the first time in my life I have a true appreciation for the art of mathematics and I’m very eager and inspired to carry on with my studies in this field. Thank you so very much.
Jack