The Royal Court

“This is ([high school]), not a pressure cooker” - 3 Idiots

The Royal Court

Now as a junior, my classrooms contain two clowns (in a good way) and two uncles. One of my teachers is a long-time comedian, another one pretends to be sad (in a funny way), and the other two interesting teachers are like uncles. They’re all pretty fun to have as teachers; the first two are very entertaining as people, while the latter two make the material enjoyable to learn. I also have two other great teachers, but they don’t have very distinct characteristics that would let them fit into this analogy. However, I believe they all have a deep passion for teaching.

The first day of school was pretty interesting, because that’s when I feel the influence of my brother the most. Some students have siblings that the teachers don’t like all that much, so it would be better for them to conceal their identity, but that is not my situation.

My chem uncle thought I looked familiar and asked me if I had any siblings. I said, “J…” He responded with, “Ah, so you’re King J…’s brother.” I thought that was pretty funny, but I still don’t know the story of why he is called that. The following day, I was dubbed, “Prince Tom,” which doesn’t make sense because the prince is the king’s son but I guess it sounds pretty cool.

However, as for my other uncle, I’m not actually taking a course under him.

Doorman

In two of my other uncle’s classes, I’ve taken up the profession of “doorman.” I sit near the door and make sure that the door is closed when it gets loud outside. My friend actually suggested that I wear a doorman’s hat, but that joke would be expensive (20 bucks).

I was introduced as the “teaching assistant,” but that basically means I write the schedule on the board or something. Of course, to live up to this nickname, I do have to work on my actual understanding of the topics at a deeper level. However, other juniors in my class are telling their friends (and family?) that I’m teaching the class, which makes me seem really smart and isn’t true. I don’t have a very good grasp on people’s emotions, but I get the feeling that they are a little bit ticked off.

This school is pretty competitive between students because everyone wants to get into some top college, which I don’t appreciate. Why can’t there be some pure competition for once? No one goes for world domination anymore these days. Back in the good old days, my boys Alexander and Napoleon had their eyes on the prize (step it up classmates). However, I can’t really speak to that business because I’m just the doorman.

But anyway, I don’t just sit there for nothing. I try to record the teaching techniques used and the general flow of the lesson. I have an advantage over the teacher, which is that I’ve taken the course that he’s teaching but he has never taken his own course. Although, I also have a disadvantage against my past self because I forgot what I learned last year…

Overall though, my suggestions don’t have a big impact because the teacher doesn’t make big accidents (otherwise I would be a doorman for another class).

Questions

I always feel a need to ask teachers for help, but I’ve been asking too many basic questions to teachers when I can find the answer online. Although, if I delve deep enough into something on my own, the teacher won’t be of much help. So, I am not sure how to resolve this.

Maybe I can just ask a teacher if it is to get a basic understanding of an idea. It’s often faster to ask someone to explain something rather than read Wikipedia.

By the way, some people say that you should download every Wikipedia article to your phone so that you can access it in an emergency, but I doubt that it would make any sense for most people reading all the jargon.

Masaru the Chef

Warning: don’t read this section if you are afraid of meat preparation.

A slightly off-topic discussion, but I’ve been watching a Japanese cooking YouTuber by the name of Masaru. His videos are basically diving and catching fish, then filleting and cooking them. He isn’t exactly the best chef, but his marine creature anatomy knowledge is astounding. He doesn’t know the things he says by heart, but he does a lot of good research online before recording, which I can appreciate.

Also, he has a lot of respect for the animals that he catches. Whenever his harpoon brushes the fish, he feels bad because he hurt the fish for no reason. Also, he eats as much of the fish as he can, that way it doesn’t go to waste.

Of course, he doesn’t limit himself to just creatures that he has caught by diving. He also orders some online. For example, he once did a video in which he butchered an entire alligator. That was nuts but very fun to watch.

There is no censoring in his videos so do not watch if you are afraid of blood, organs, etc.

A Decent Summer

I think I got quite a lot done this summer, although I do feel like I didn’t really make much progress on my personal projects. I just dropped everything to attend some online summer program which didn’t actually teach me all that much. However, it did alert me to my lack of understanding in the fundamentals of math. Also, that I need to be fully engaged in something if I want to participate. This is a warning to you as well: don’t join a group or a project if you aren’t willing to be fully engaged. That means constant communication, work, and organization centered around it.

The students were cool though so I made friends with some of them. They come from across the nation, like New York, California, Texas, Florida, etc. The idea of the program was really well conceived though, with an emphasis on encouraging stress-free learning and exploration for discussion. The only problem was building up trust, even after it was established that it was going to be a no-judgement space. Of course, it was probably the fault of the online format more than any other factor.

Goals for the Year

I have some things that I would like to accomplish during my junior year.

Academic

Work hard in all of my classes and learn how to establish a schedule that allows me to get my work done and work toward my other goals. I don’t want to worry about scores anymore because they will reflect the work I put in but they won’t be symmetrical.

Mathematical

I want to get through a linear algebra textbook, and get some knowledge on partial differential equations after completing the ordinary stuff. Compete in some competitions like M3 or AMC.

Computer Stuff

I have a ton of personal projects which have existed for almost a year with almost no progress, and that is definitely just my laziness, which I have to overcome. Minecraft screenshot classification will get knocked out first, I won’t do any other project until it is done and there is a video of it on YouTube.

Do some programming problems and hackathons, learn how to make an app from scratch, figure out how to make my own GNN.

A student once computed the similarities in humor between the two jesters. I would assume it had something to do with vectorizing their jokes and then computing the dot product or distance/angle between them. I would have to learn some NLP for this project.

YouTube

The gameplay commentaries, math and programming tutorials, and idea sketches are nice, but they aren’t exactly high-quality content. It’s just me playing a game or drawing in Paint 3D with a cat in the bottom corner.

I’d like to move toward more tightly edited and scripted videos that demonstrate effort and research. I’m not sure if I want to learn the 3Blue1Brown programming language, but it really seems like the future of visualization. Although I’ve heard that it has some problems, if it ever becomes super high-quality or gets reworked by someone else, I’m sure that I won’t have an excuse to not learn it at that point.

These changes will make production take much longer, taking into account my schedule and projects, so I will only make videos between projects and after each project is completed.