September 16, 2014.
At the start of lecture, Larry had presented a table, where we needed to fill in with the worlds "no", "one", "example", "counter-example". The table was laid out like so:
|
Universal
|
Existential
|
Verify
|
|
|
Falsify
|
|
|
Although I have a pretty good understanding of the concepts taught last class, this table was not intuative. I understood that Verify/Falsify was True/False and Universal/Existential was for All/Some. Perhaps because I had not fully settled into the CSC165 mindset, this all seemed foreign to me. I did not know where to begin. At first, the All/Some True/False was getting mixed up in my brain, but as that came more clear, allocating the words into the table was nonsensical. I had thought each of the words some how correspond to the box. So I formatted my table to look something like this:
|
Universal
|
Existential
|
Verify
|
counter-example
|
example
|
Falsify
|
one
|
no
|
Of course it was entirely wrong. As soon as Larry had done the first example, my mistakes became very apparent, and I had slapped my forehead, disappointed in my misunderstanding.
As Larry started covering "Evaluating Quantified Claims", and Python syntax were introduced, the for/in/in made it very confusing. The chattering classroom (understandable--people are eager to answer the question!) made it harder to concentrate, to clear the meaning in my head.
At this point, I was feeling down and discouraged, as it seemed to me that I could not keep up with the classroom. I made a mental note to review and practice Python more, so the syntax will be obvious and second-nature to me. This is what I am getting into! The questions were difficult, but I had still made an effort to answer, whether they were erroneous or not. These questions are very good, and got everyone thinking, so please do not misunderstand my frustrations to be negative feedback towards these questions!
The second half of the lecture got more into words/sentences and representing their meanings into symbols. I am currently taking PHL245 (as recommended by the Undergraduate office), and the concepts and questions were oddly familiar. I had already done many similar questions in the PHL course, so these questions were less of a struggle than the initial half. It was good for my confidence, as I was able to answer the questions more promptly. This is not saying there was not any questions that did not get me stumped! The English language can be very complex, and many ways to convey a particular meaning.
One tricky question was when identifying whether a sentence was a statement or not. The specific sentence was: "The sandwich tastes delicious". In my mind, “the sandwich” is a very specific item. When you’re saying this sentence, you are referring to a specific sandwich. However, as Larry later pointed out, there is no context in which the sentence is being spoken, thus losing its quantifying characteristic, not longer making it a statement. Hm!
Finally, the last challenge was to convert the sentence introduced at the beginning of the lecture into symbols. This part was very briefly skimmed over, and not enough time was allocated to work on the question. However, it was very interesting exercise, and I hope it would be done in a similar way in years to come.
September 18, 2014
This was the first week of tutorial, so I thought I might was well briefly review about that as well. The tutorial was brief, and little to no teaching was done. Only the exercises were taken up and quiz completed. Perhaps there was not enough content to cover, but more involved exercises, similar to what was done in class, would have been beneficial. The most confusing topic, implications, will hopefully be covered in next tutorial, with plenty of questions. Although I am taking PHL245 which covers similar topics, it would still benefit me greatly.
Until next week;
Maya.
