SLOG week 12

   This week has been troubling and it has challenged not just my skill set, but my endurance with this course. I found out that I did awfully on assignment 2--this after screwing up test 2 as well.
   The problem with each of them, it seems, was fairly similar and quite depressing. I have really enjoyed this course and I have put a lot of effort into internalizing and understanding the material, and yet my mark has been damaged by something more fundamental than logic, boolean quantifiers, proofs, etcetera: paying attention. On my test, I spent so much time and so much scrap paper trying to jot down notes to figure out my answer to question 2 that I forgot to add any structure to the proof and I never took note of the fact that the little I did include was simply incoherent; on assignment 2, I read statement 1.2 wrong, not taking note of the order of the variables, and so wrote a long and extensive proof for something that, had I read more closely, I would quite easily have understood to be false. Further than that, I did not include the proofs of the converses in the last two questions; I completely failed to see that part.
   This is definitely irritating and frustrating, but, after some serious self-pitying, I decided to "pull my boots up" and not give up on the course. I know what I did wrong, and though I lost many marks, I can still end with a good mark if I pay attention to my prior faults and I try to learn.

   In question 1.2, basically what I did was prove something like the reverse of the statement. What my answer in theory meant is that if you know the absolute value of the difference of the floor of two numbers is e, you can say that the absolute value of the difference of the two numbers will be no more than e + 1. Of course, this is a vaguely similar idea to what the question asked, but "vaguely similar" is very different from "the same". I screwed up, big time. However I am reflecting and taking a look at my paper. I am still proud in a sense because I really enjoyed writing it. Previously I was scared of proofs, and with assignment 2 I genuinely felt stimulated and happy writing them. That is a big step. The fact that I did not read it close enough is something that I will just have to learn from.