Week 11: Revisiting an Earlier Slog Posting

           For this entry, I decided to read my slog entry from week 5, which was my impression of tracing recursion. The first thing I noticed from reading it was how I did not necessarily understand why we even did recursion. My opinion on it was that it was a neat little trick and an alternative to using loops, which can get complex and long-winded at times. Of course with two weeks left in the semester, I now know that recursion is a powerful tool that is crucial for implementing various methods in trees, binary trees, and possibly for many of the other data structures out there.

           I appreciate the fact that the instructor first got us comfortable tracing recursion as a way of easing us into recursion and to allow us to understand the process of how it works. In my opinion, it got me to be good at tracing recursion, determining the output, and becoming comfortable enough to start writing recursive functions. I could tell by reading my writing that I was not fully engaged in the activities and did not take it seriously, only focusing on getting the right output instead of being cognizant about how the output was being generated with recursion. I really paid the price because if I had been more cognizant, I believe I would have had an easier time in the beginning when we got down to writing recursive functions ourselves. I did not even notice that every recursive functions had a base case (i.e. the smallest possible version of the original problem) and the general case, which breaks down the original problem. It took some hard work to recover and catch up. I guess in a way I agree with my past self in that the tracing was actually “the calm before the storm” of the actual implementation of recursion.

The lesson learned is to not just do things for the sake of finding the answers but think about the process as well in future courses. That is what learning is. I really do believe that I am solid with recursion now. Of course, there will be those curveball problems that will challenge me, but as long as I stay calm and remember my training from this course, I do not foresee any problems occurring. I reacted to my hardships by doing the lab exercises while understanding why the answers are the answers and reviewing notes from lectures. It all comes down to practice.

With this entry, I also decided to look at other people’s recursion-tracing experiences. Christopher (http://www.mybigfatcsc148slog.blogspot.ca/) and I shared similar experiences with tracing recursion. He too did not face many difficulties tracing and rather, found it to be simple, and appreciated the instructor getting us to practice tracing first. I liked how he thought recursion was not going to be “that bad” because that’s how I felt too. It looks like later on in his summary of recursion that he rather enjoys recursion, whereas I’m “cool” with it. I guess people differ in strengths and weaknesses.