Borasko

Cross-posted from my substack Summary: This goes over a year of self teaching, the topics of math I was able to learn, how I view the best way to learn math and what my general view of math as a whole is with my limited current knowledge on the subject. At the end is a guide I made for anybody else that wishes to teach themselves math, no matter the skill level. The Wild World of Online Learning: When you first start out to do any project it's usually best to have instructions and a goal of what a ‘finished’ state looks like in mind. Most consumer bought appliances that require assembly come with a very hand holdy instruction sheet and all the parts required, the same can not be said for trying to learn an area of knowledge. I would argue a good chuck, >60% of the year, was just spent on figuring out what I needed to learn and where the next logical step from that was. I will fully admit that GPT-3 and other AI advances got me interested in joining the industry. I will also fully admit that I immediately jumped into Coursera’s Intro to Machine Learning and crashed hard when I realized I wasn't getting anything out of it because I barely knew high school algebra and couldn't understand what I was looking at, because I wasn't interested in anything math related until now. Even reading about what partial derivatives were, there was too much scaffolding of previous calculus math needed to really set me up for understanding. The kicker was I could still pass the coding assignments and it made my “grade” look good, but that’s mostly because of how the course was set up. I complained about online learning because of it here, but I’m going to be a bit more dispassionate in this review. This cycle repeated in a few more online courses. I would spend time going through the course, get by doing the assignments, start to get frustrated because I didn’t know why what I was learning was going to be important down the road, then eventually drop the course and start looking