 Hi. My name is Chico. I've been asked to do some instructional math videos, so here we are. The first thing you have to understand about mathematics to really grasp it, to really understand how to do it, is that math is just a language. It's just like any other language. Instead of having letters, it's got numbers. Ten numbers to be exact. Zero all the way to nine. Every number that you're ever going to come across is going to be made up of those ten numbers. That's how easy math is. So keep that in mind as we continue. Every other course you take in your life, most of it anyway, is going to be teaching you brand new material from one year to the next. Math is different. Every year it just builds on to what you learned from the previous year. So what you learn in one year, when you go on to the next year, maybe they tag on an extra 20% information. That's it. Or 5% sometimes. Grade 8 to 9, it's the same course. There's two things you've got to consider before we go any further. Number one is that you're going to have to stop using the calculator as much as you are. You have to win yourself off the calculator. To be able to really understand the language of mathematics, you have to learn the simple operations and be comfortable in working with numbers. The higher up you go on to mathematics and your educational mathematics, you're trying to understand mathematics, the less you end up using the calculator. So you need to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. And dividing is really just expressing numbers as fractions, which is really the rational number set. So the less you use the calculator, the easier math becomes. It may be hard at first, but the sooner you do it, the better it will be. The simpler math will become and the further you will progress. The second thing you've got to understand is that the corporate education system that's established right now is not here to completely educate you, but is here to teach you what you need to learn to function within the society. So for you to be able to fully grasp and be comfortable in using the language of mathematics, you have to educate yourself. Why so much emphasis on math? Think about this. If you want to go to university, college, polytechnical institute, or if you just want to educate yourself, two of the most important courses you'll ever take, two courses that you've got to do really well in is math and English. That's what universities look at if you're going to go to them. The reason is they're looking for people who can communicate to others. Math, I've said before and I'm going to continue to say it, is just a language. So if you're able to communicate in English and you're able to communicate in the language of science, then you can get new ideas across. You can understand other people's ideas. So for you to be able to excel in anything you want to do, you need to know how to communicate. And again, if math is a language, you're able to view things from a different perspective, which gives you more information so you can analyze something and get the most you can out of it, or get more out of it than if you just saw it from one perspective, which would be English or the non-math version. So if you're looking at it from here and if you're looking at it from here, you see two different things. So learn your math. It's super important. It'll make life easy. To be able to go from here to here, there's certain steps you take to get the job done. So all you need to do is learn those steps in the right order to get to the right answer. Now just like skateboarding, once you learn a trick, you're not constantly thinking about, okay, you got to get down with your right foot and kick out with your left foot and do all this stuff. You don't think about it anymore, it just becomes part of you. And math is the same way. Once you learn how to do certain operations and go through a certain process, you won't have to sit there and constantly think about, oh yeah, I've got to carry a number up here or do this or do this or do this. It just becomes natural. And the more math you do, the easier it becomes because the more tricks you learn. And the more math courses you take, the more teachers you have, and the different perspectives you see, and all of a sudden certain things will make sense. Now for me, when I took calculus at university, my first time I took it, I failed it. The second time I took it, I had no idea what it was doing. I was just going through a routine and trying to get the answer. And most of the time, if you learn a certain routine, if you don't know how to do it, you'll get an average mark. Now when I was taking this course for the first two months of the course, I was just going through a routine. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know why I was doing it. One day I sat there at the library and read through the books, through the textbook, and I kept on doing the problems, doing the problems, and all of a sudden, boom, it just made sense. And it was an epiphany. It was just like, oh my God, what? So this was about a quarter way through the course. So what I ended up doing is going back to the beginning and looking over everything from the beginning again, and it just became ridiculously easy. It just became stupid. I couldn't. I was baffled why I didn't understand it before. So initially it might be hard, but don't worry about it. The more you do it, all of a sudden it'll just, you know, there'll be a moment where it just automatically makes sense, and all of a sudden, you've taken care of a whole bunch of stuff you never understood, and you can go on to the next phase. It's just exactly like doing a trick. Once, you know, you might practice it forever, and then you might have to step away from it and do something else, and doing that something else, you know, you'll learn something that will help you in this trick, and you come back to the trick you didn't get before, and all of a sudden it's just like, boom, you nail it, and then you keep on nailing it. And that's it. You just continue on that way, and you continually grow and learn and become better at it. So just keep that in mind when you're doing this stuff. Don't worry about it if you don't understand why you're doing everything or why certain things are, you know, are a certain way. The more you learn, the further back you can go and really understand the little intricate details of it, okay? So just do the work right now. It'll take you a few weeks or a few months, you know, and hopefully it'll make sense in the longer. Okay? Good luck, and don't forget, continue to do the problems and the exercises.