Here I am, writing the week one synthesis essay at the beginning of week three's content, while it's actually the fourth week after I started this learning path. Confusing, isn't it? I tried my best to keep up with the curriculum doing the first few weeks. I pushed off the essays and told myself I would get to them once I got caught up with the work. Well, I never got caught up. So, after being four days behind during week three, I decided to “reset” and start the next week at the current week's progress, thus not being behind any longer (at least in terms of completed work). Enough excuses, time for the actual writing.
I went into this course having not done any math since I graduated college in 2016. I somehow managed to make it through Calc I during my time there and surprisingly did not struggle with that course. I have always hated math, having taken two attempts to pass every math class since pre-algebra, and then for some reason Calculus seemed to click. After that, I never touched math again. I took the Pre-Algebra course quiz the first day and did about as well as I expected. I'm writing this so long after that I forget what my strengths and weaknesses were. I do remember I did about as well as I thought I would. Once I started the course though, things started to come back to me and click faster than I thought they would, so that was nice.
Variables and expressions seemed to be pretty easy. Thinking back now I believe proportions were what got me, especially the word problem ones. It took a few attempts and having an AI tutor (Gemini) walk me through a few problems. When this course was originally planned (by Claude), the goal was to work with an actual human tutor on Saturday mornings to go over any hard parts from the previous week. I reached out to a couple but wasn't feeling working with a real person. I gave Gemini Pro w/ Guided Learning a shot and it explained things in a clear and concise way that actually clicked with me and that's what I decided to use going forward. If that ever becomes a bottleneck, I will rethink a human tutor, but for now it works and saves some money.
One thing I have been doing to help me learn, mostly with the Layer 3 stuff (linked just below, and also in the sidebar on the homepage), is throwing the articles and/or videos and whatever content is prescribed into NotebookLM and having it generate a deep dive podcast, slides, a blog post, and infographic. This has been invaluable as 1) I love podcasts, 2) I think of myself as a visual and auditory learner, and 3) I'm always listening to some form of book or podcast in my car or on walks and this is perfect. I'm going to continue to do this going forward and will post them on here by week.
As mentioned in my opening paragraph, the workload — or at least the thought that I could catch up on work after being even a little behind — is unsustainable. As long as I stay on top of it and get my work done the day it needs to be, I won't have any issues. Now that I have reset, I do not see this being an issue in the future, but I need to be more strict with my time. I say this as I have a full time day job, and am also working a contract with a frontier AI company doing RLHF work at 20+ hours a week. Add that to a wife and kid, and an armored combat team that I help run, it can be tricky sometimes. Good thing I do not like sleep. Until next week; wish me luck.