Oops. Haha, I forgot about the chain rule. Little harder to explain than the others, but once again learn by repetition and memory.
I've always thought I was good in math, till I start hitting walls. Calculus was the first real wall I hit. This stuff after some point just stop making sense, you just can't visualize this stuff in your head. I've been there. Keep in mind, I used to get 100's in Honor math classes before Calculus without studying. My best advice, make friends with students around you. Find the smartest kid that doesn't seem like a jerk and just go hat in hand and ask him/her if they wants to be study buddies. I definitely would not have graduated from Electrical Engineering program without doing that, and I'm also shy as heck.
The most important rule for the rest of your entire life: organize your thoughts before you ask for help. Work on some problems and then ask them to help with the ones you can't complete.
Yeah, I too was good at math. Not really the complex stuff, but like in elementary and middle school, I was a beast in math. Then, once geometry started, that's when I hit a road block. Then pre calc, and here I am. You say you graduated with an electrical engineering program...don't you need to be really good at math for any engineering? The only thing that was preventing me from pursuing an engineering degree was because i'm terrible at math.
Wolfram saved me in the sense that it gave me an explanation for most of the calculations I had to do up until calc 3. In the end, the better you do depends on how many indentities you have memorized. In calc 1, work solutions until you can see what the math is doing. The numbers are trivial to a point. Good calc joke: Your mom's derivative is zero. Because she's always horizontal. /drop mic
does this 'wolfram' you speak of give you step by step, detailed explanations for any calculus problem?
Yes, especially out of the textbook that's assigned to you; I'm guessing you probably have Stewart Calculus? Download a solutions manual for it (a torrent is easily found by Googling, especially if you go to a large university), and try the problem yourself first. If you get stuck, look at the solutions manual for the next step, and then carry on. Professors usually give you an easy example in class to get you to understand the concepts.
As a person who took calculus in high school and is now watching fellow students struggle with it in college, the best advice I can give you is to form a study group and meet weekly. You could also go to office hours or talk to the TA.
I'm still fuzzy on the sequences. I memorized crap for a week and never saw it again, so it got dumped from my brain.
I took AP Calc in HS. I remember having a 46 average through 12 weeks. Made a 77 that semester basically acing everything over the last 6 weeks. I took the AP exam without a calculator and still passed it. Moral of the story, Calculus isn't that hard if you pay attention and learn the rules (If you don't, you'll struggle badly). My problem early on was that I was so naturally gifted at math that I didn't think I needed to even pay attention in class. I was spending all my time in class on girls. I was lucky enough to have a great teacher that helped me pull my head out of my ass. Try using books and doing practice problems. The language problem of your professor is a common complaint. If you can't understand him, you can't understand him. It is up to you to try and teach yourself. You need to be ahead of the class so you can follow the professor's math while just ignoring what he is actually saying.
You either need to have a natural talent for mathematics or really good work ethic. Me, I'm a computer science major and I can tell you math may be my weakest subject. So its going to be work ethic for me. Also I HIGHLY recommend you to get a tutor or even RETAKE classes to nail down your fundamentals. Math isn't like English or Bio. If you don't have fundamentals and concepts down you will struggle no matter how good you are at math. I took AP Calculus last year and struggled with a high B after completely blowing off my precal class and Algebra 2 class the years prior. I hate math.
