I’m a computer science and computer engineering double major. This semester I’m taking Calculus 2 along with some other general education classes.
My Calculus Journey
Last semester, I had a rough experience in Calculus 1 because the math department at my school isn’t the best unless you’re already good at math, and I’m not a math person.
I found out that if it’s not directly what they’re teaching in Calculus 1, they skip it. And there were a lot of things I didn’t understand at the time, so I had to go back and look up stuff like trig or things like that.
Overall, I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing, and it took me a lot of long hours to learn everything myself — asking my friends for help, and reviewing information from a lot of different sources.
When I started Calculus 2, I thought I cannot let this happen again.
Having a professor with much the same style as Calculus 1 made it pretty clear to me that I would need additional resources early on. He didn’t explain things well, and he skipped steps, which means you’re always trying to figure out how he reached his final answer.
So I knew I would need something like one place I can go to that I know will have an answer for me. And that’s when I found Calcworkshop.
As opposed to other websites, I felt Calcworkshop was designed to give me everything I needed in one place to succeed in math.
I was a little hesitant at first because I figured it would be another Khan Academy, but a paid version. And then I actually started using Calcworkshop. I was like, oh, this actually explains all the stuff that I’m having questions about.
My Strategy
So what I ended up doing, I would go to class, and I would have my laptop out, and I would wait for my professor to say what topics we were going over. And I would pull up the Calcworkshop videos and watch them in class and take notes because I knew I would understand Jenn’s videos better.
Jenn’s videos often gave me the sense that I could teach my class better than my professor based on how she presented it.
And that did happen two different times. My one friend got quarantined, and I would have to provide her notes that I took from watching the Calcworkshop videos because our class didn’t have any extra resources for her. When she returned to class, she was able to pick up right where she left off and was able to do everything without any problems.
I really like the fact that Jenn will teach you how a concept works and then apply it to several different examples. And she also does some special case examples where you might have to do an additional simplification or something before you actually apply the concept.
Overall, I feel like my understanding now in Calculus 2 much, much better than when I was teaching myself back in Calculus 1.
I feel like I understand more of the concepts, and I could do them from memory. So if you give me a problem, I could just do it. And I could explain to you what I’m doing too.
I would not have made it through this semester without Calcworkshop. That is 100% a fact.
So if anybody feels like they’re struggling in a math class and needs extra help, I think this is the place to go for that. Because everything is going to be explained, it’s in-depth, and no steps are going to be skipped, and there’s going to be plenty of examples to learn from.
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