Springing back into School... and stumbling a little.

This semester sees me taking my last STP class (with Dr. Broatch who I have been lucky enough to have a class with for three semesters in a row!), and three Math classes, each with a significant amount of modelling and coding. As someone who has minimal experience with modelling/coding, I am feeling out of my depth. I am trying to have a positive mental attitude about my semester, but in all honesty, I am struggling. I am having a hard time feeling that I have what it takes to be successful in mathematical education or in a mathematical career.

One of the reasons for feeling that way is that I don't learn well from reading textbooks. I learn even less orally. I learn best by engaging and interacting with the subject I am trying to learn, and by taking and reviewing detailed notes so that I can remember what I learn. I am finding that a lot of higher level math classes rely heavily on the styles of learning that are weak for me. A current struggle that I am facing with note-taking is that I am having a hard time understanding one of my professors (see figure 1).

Figure 1: An idea of a mathematical proof of the number of infectives in a simple SIR model going to 0 from today's class. I could not understand a lot of what my professor was saying as English is not his first language and he often mumbles, and I could not understand what he was writing either. By the end I was completely lost and my personal notes were made of half sentences and incorrect interpretations.

I really, really want to understand what I'm supposed to be learning because I know the higher I go in my math education without actually learning anything in my classes (even if I earn an A), the less prepared I will be to understand harder concepts later on. However, as a wife and a mother of three children, I don't have a lot of time outside of school assignments to supplement my learning on my own. I know that I want a solid mathematical foundation and I don't feel as though I am building one which leaves me feeling frustrated and disheartened, like I don't belong. 

So looking ahead to this semester and what I hope to learn: I would love to build a foundation of mathematical modelling skills that will follow me through to future classes, but in reality my goal is just to be able to learn something valuable from each class and pass each with a high grade. 

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