Introduction

Recently I noticed that everywhere I go on the internet, there are blogs everywhere. I met a few people of my age who made their own blogs, and I've seen some blogs on the internet that I actually enjoyed reading. I think it recently became pretty popular because more people started having access to internet around the world, so if bloggers post some stuff up online, other people can see it and discuss ideas about worldly topics. I recently got a school assignment asking me to write a blog about the class/course where the assignment came from, so when this opportunity came up I was pretty eager to start it up right away.

That being said, the posts that I am going to make will discuss a fairly obscure subject, because the course where my "blogging assignment" came from is about "how to think logically". You might ask, "why is this n00b taking a course about something that every non-handicapped human being on earth should be able to do? Am I reading the blog of a retard?". Well let me say this, in my high school I was a straight A student (I might have done better if I wasn't so lazy and addicted to games and anime), and I am the guy who always got above 90 on all my Math and Computer Science courses. But this course has surprised me in two things. First thing that I was surprised at was the mountain load of work that we have to do in this course. I definitely didn't sign up for this aspect, considering how I heard this is one of the easiest courses in my university. The second thing that I was surprised at was how brutally difficult thinking logically can be when you are reading a programming code. For those who are familiar with python programming, here are the programs that I had to analyze: http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/~heap/165/W13/Lectures/W1/q.py. Although each definition only consisted of four lines, for some reason I had the hardest time figuring out what each of them did. Just the other day, the professor made every student in the lecture hall write down on a piece of paper the function of one of the four definitions that I just mentioned, and then the students had to pass down the paper that they wrote their functions on to another person in the lecture hall so that person can match which definition the function came from. I don't know about you, but I believe matching is probably the easiest type of question that can come up on any sort of tests. The professor tallied the number of pieces of papers that correctly matched the function with its definition, and it turned out more than half of the class matched them incorrectly. This could be due to two reasons. It could either be that students were still groggy after coming back from winter break, or that we truly were a bunch of "retards" who couldn't do something so simple as matching functions to definitions. Just to let you know, this is a course from University of Toronto, which is known for having one of the most brilliant group of undergraduate students in Canada. When the professor first asked us to do this exercise, I expected at least 80% of the class to match them correctly.

What conclusion this leads me to? For one, I should probably do the homework to get more familiar with the way that the questions make me think. The other is that I am glad that I am taking this course. It has already piqued my interest with its lectures and challenging problems, which is a good sign for the start of any course (I took so many courses that the professors just info-dumped students, so much so that I came to hate classes where you just memorize things). Challenging problems are always good for learning. It makes you think critically and feel engaged in the course (but I wouldn't want those kinds of problems on a test). It also means you are learning something new (if nothing in a class challenges you, then you should probably skip to the next level of the subject or just not attend the classes).

That basically ends my post for this week. One thing I got to mention is that I am not particularly good at writing (my high school English mark was in the range of 80 even though I spent more effort than those kids who got like 90s and stuff), so feel free to point out any grammatical errors I might have made or any methods or ideas that can make my posts easier to read in the comments section.