Week 238 – Mar. 18th to Mar. 24th

It was another not-so-great week for me on KA. 😒 I put a somewhat decent effort in but I probably could and should have studied more. I’m really struggling to understand Green’s Theorem, so I branched out this week and watched a bunch of videos from other creators trying to get a better understanding of what’s going on with it. It helped a bit, but I still haven’t completely figured it out. On a positive note, I DID get through the exercise, however I got lucky and guessed correctly on a few of the questions and so I decided to redo the exercise and finished the week only being 2/4 questions through the exercise. (But even though I got both questions correct, I still don’t understand them. 🤬) So, all in all, it was a pretty lousy week even though I did make a bit of progress understanding Green’s Theorem.

Here are two questions I worked through from the exercise:

Question 1

To be completely honest, I don’t have a solid grasp on ANYTHING that’s going on with these types of questions. Here’s an explanation I found online about the difference between the equation used for curl vs the equation used for divergence:

In this explanation, the author uses M and N in place of P and Q. I think what I’m most confused about is simply that in KA’s answer the line integral is ordered –Q dx + P dy whereas in the screen shot above it’s written at M dy – N dx which, if they instead used Q and P, would be P dy – Q dx. Given that KA’s answer just swaps the order of Q and P, this shouldn’t be that tricky for me to wrap my head around, but for whatever reason I keep messing up these questions particularly because of the order. (Plus it doesn’t help that I don’t really understand what Q and P represent or why they work the way they do. AGH!!)

Question 2

Again, same thing here. I don’t understand why cos(xy) is Q and why sin(xy) is P. As you can see, I can do the calculus without issue, but I don’t know what’s going on or why any of this works…

So, ya… I’m not going to write anything more about Green’s Theorem in this post because I simply don’t understand what the hell is happening. Just to fill out this post and to at least show that I put SOME effort in at least trying to understand Green’s Theorem, here are the seven videos I watched this week from outside of KA:

One of the most frustrating parts of all of this is that I have no clue how close I am to figuring it all out. I could be a week away from it clicking for me, but I could just as easily be one or two months away from understanding it. I feel like I’m close, but I’ve been feeling that way for the past few weeks so I don’t really trust myself at this point. As I essentially said last week, I’m REALLY hoping I can wrap my head around what’s going on this coming week so I can finally get back to making some progress through this final unit, Green’s, Stokes’, and the Divergence Theorems (240/600 M.P.). It’s pretty disappointing and frustrating that I’m SO close to reaching the goal I set for myself FIVE YEARS AGO (……😐..….), and yet the finish line seems to be getting further away from me. 😭 It’s redundant to say this at this point but as always, my fingers are crossed that I can (PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD) make some decent progress this coming week. 🤞🏼 🙏🏼 🤞🏼 🙏🏼 🤞🏼 🙏🏼 🤞🏼 🙏🏼 🤞🏼