Year of the Rabbit

“There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes.” — Zhu Guangqian

Free Periods

Free periods are interesting. I used to think that they were completely useless and that students should just take eight classes and that’s that. However, as I began to be an assistant teacher, I began to see the value in not taking eight classes. They act as a good break from the rest of the content and serve as a bit of catch-up time.

Whenever I see someone with no free periods, it makes me kind of sad because they could have just gone to their favorite teacher’s class to learn and have fun. However, as a freshman, I must say that I did not like any of my teachers. However, as a sophomore, I began to realize that they were actually very interesting people. That is why I would hate to be a teacher: there is no fun to be had in a boring teacher’s class.

Many people think it’s strange that I would want to be an assistant teacher in my free time, but it’s the obvious choice since there isn’t really anything else for me to do other than waste time on my phone. Also, it’s fun to see other people working so hard to solve problems with the pressure of a grade book clamping them down. Meanwhile, I’m chilling on the side with an open mind; as it turns out, people can learn better if they are not so pressured and are actually interested.

Multivariable Calculus

Yesterday, I got some new free periods: period 3 & 8. I went to Multivariable Calculus as well as another AP CSA class. I think that the AP CSA class was not that great of an experience because I’m taking the course period 2 and I don’t learn anything at all, so it’s just a snooze fest since I see the same content twice a day. There’s also no time for jokes in the class because the pacing is actually quite serious.

However, Multi was really fun because the students there kind of seemed to need some help. There was also a problem I noticed with the way that the teacher taught parameterization. I would have suggested that when the range starts from a non-zero number, that the student creates a new variable $s$ based on $t$ so that they do not mess up the linear shift needed for the correct $t$ range.

Also, I was able to answer a test question about finding a normal vector to a plane that contains a point and a line. The question was multiple choice and those cheesers (cheeser is someone who uses underhanded tactics) just did the process of elimination with a zero as the answer for the dot product between ABCDE vector and the line being the correct answer.

However, the proper way to do it would be to find any 2 points on the line and then create a v-shape by using the point given and the two points, then do the cross product in order to get a normal vector to the plane.

I really wanted the teacher to ask on the test about drawing gradient vectors on an isoline (or whatever it’s called) because students (from my experience last year teaching) often do not understand how the gradient points in a direction away from the current value of the function because the direction of maximum rate of change must be in the direction away from the direction that would make the value stay constant.

Student-Led classes

Although this would never fly, I think that students who are willing to teach should be able to teach their own class. Another requirement would be that the student is qualified. There are important classes that teachers might not have the time to create a curriculum for, and so could delegate such a job to a student. For example, my school does not have a college-level Linear Algebra course; if a few good math students were able to create a curriculum and teach it to a class, I think that it would greatly benefit the school.

However, there are almost too many problems to name with this idea:

1. The students teaching the classes would have too much power over other students, since this teaching student would be in control of the grading.
2. There is no real way to quantify which students are good enough to teach and no way to fairly pick between the ones who do want to.
3. Just because a student is good at a subject does not mean they would be good at teaching it to others.
4. There is no way to quantify which courses should be allowed to exist. For instance, is an Intro to Machine Learning course more valuable than a Moby Dick Deep Dive class?
5. Only 11th/12th graders would be able to teach classes and assuming that the course is something that only specific individuals could teach properly, courses would die 1 or 2 years after they are envisioned, making the idea unsustainable.
6. Similar to the first point, teaching students could engage in quid pro quo (ooo fancy phrase) with other students in order to gain favors in exchange for a good grade.
7. If the course is a highly-weighted, high-level course, then the higher-level prerequisites would likely only benefit top students. However, if the course were a standard level course, then students who are not actually interested would sign up for the course just to get a credit.

Alternative ideas

In the end, this idea must be scaled back dramatically if it would ever exist. For example, a student designs a curriculum alongside a teacher and then the teacher would be able to submit the course’s curriculum to whoever determines the new courses.

Many schools currently have a structure that allows small groups of students to learn from one teacher-student. However, this acts more as after school tutoring for existing courses like math, rather than an official course that has the backing of the school.

New Friend

I met someone with a very diverse background that is also going to Caltech and discussing things with her is super fun. In a late-night conversation, we discussed our approaches to friendships. She believes that it is best to just see what happens naturally and that people will meet their best friends if their personalities match to begin with. However, I believed that it is better to be active and learn more about the other person.

I think our ideas come from our experiences of losing many friends as a result of constantly transferring schools and needing to deal with the loss of friendships. However, we dealt with it in different ways. I do not believe either of us is right or wrong, but this is simply a difference in the way we approach things.

Personally, I believe that it is likely that if someone is not proactive, they will lose out on opportunities they would have otherwise had. However, continuing lost causes is one downside to my mode of thinking. Furthermore, making an investment of time and energy leads to attachment, perhaps too much attachment to hope.

I may change my way of thinking, but I am the type that feels extra bad when an opportunity slips by because of I was not able to capture it.

But, now that I think about it, it’s really the relative changes that matter to emotions. Thinking logically, the me from before and after are the same in many ways.

But, now that I think about it more, there is value in the attempt and learning from it.

Overall, it’s fun to see what someone different from me not only culturally but also in the mode of thought. She was very direct about what she was and was not interested in. Among the things I respectfully thought were unusual:

• She does not like cats (she likes big dogs)
• She only likes instrumental music (I guess I used to only listen to 7obu)

However, we do have our similarities.