So, another week of school goes by, and that means we've got more math to go through. I'm still kinda sick of derivatives, to be quite honest, but that's beside the point. Regardless of my opinion on the subject, we keep having to use them, so I guess I should just get over it at this point. I can still whine about it here though, right? All jokes aside, this week introduced a topic that I pretty much hate, so that's something new to complain about.
So, slope fields. Need I say more? I sincerely hope that we drop these as quickly as we went through them, they're pretty awful, and not in the 'these are difficult and I'm a wimp so stop making me do them' way, either. I find them to (generally) look like a garbled mess, as if some jerk took a pen and marked up a page of graph paper for no reason. Okay, that's a bit harsh, but still. The dashing is annoying and somewhat jarring, and trying to follow them can be a real pain when they're hand drawn. Maybe I'm just bad at drawing imaginary slopes, but looking back on the slope fields I've had to make, I honestly can't tell what the slopes are supposed to be. I can get the sign (I'm not so bad that I can't determine the general direction they're going) but aside from that, it's just a bunch of stupid lines that make some disjointed pattern. I understand that they're meant to show the general shape of a family of functions and all that, but I still find them incredibly irritating. Also, I don't think I've been helped at all by looking at them, but I might be able to chalk that up to sleep deprivation. Seriously, I've been unable to sleep half the week, and it's pretty awful. It might explain why I'm so passionate about this topic right now, even, though I have a feeling that these would bother me on my best day. Anyways, my main point is that slope fields are dumb, ugly, and I don't like them. Even if they might be helpful at some point.
The rest of the week went fairly well, I'd say. Nothing too bad, we did have a little activity earlier that kinda didn't help me at all, but I'd say it's more of a personal failure than a failure of the activity. Switching groups seems like a good idea, and I can see how it could work, but when your table can't solve the problem, it doesn't help one bit. And when the one guy who had to move was the one to explain it to my table, it just kinda decimated any hope for a new perspective on things. If anything, I saw how other perspectives were as bad, if not worse, than my own. And it also reinforced my idea that change is generally a bad thing and should be avoided at all costs because, had my group never been split up, we would have gotten the answer. Instead I got to sit there struggling through a problem that I had no idea how to do along with three other people who weren't any closer to the answer. To be fair, this was on my worst day this week, and I was pretty much out of it for every class, so I may have been able to perform better under different circumstances, but still. I'm pretty much just mad because I'm bad, and I'm gonna blame it all on sleepless nights. Actually, now that I think about it, this week was pretty awful in general, and I'm disappointed in my own ability (or, in this case, lack thereof) in learning new material. Where I was picking things up immediately just last week, I took significantly longer to understand things that are fairly basic. Don't get me wrong, I understand everything (or, at least, I think I do) at this point, it's just taking longer than I'd like.
Well, that was a positive post. Basically I'm just overtired and salty about anything I can be, I should be better by Monday. Hopefully. If it makes this any better, this was actually a pretty good week, it's just that the positive parts aren't really applicable to this kind of thing. The little-to-no homework we've had all week has been really nice though, and the quiz seemed pretty easy, so that's nice. On that note, I'll leave for the week. Next post is, yet again, on Friday.
EDIT: Looking back, it looks like I pretty much just expanded on my rant last week. Not my intention, but thinking back, we've used slope fields a fair bit the past couple days, so I think I'm still somewhat justified in whining about them for a little bit.