Category → school

Note-taking

Finally getting into geography honors. And surviving, somehow, with grades that still might count as ridiculous-in-a-good-way. The one big change I’m getting used to is the need to take actual hardcore notes.

For eight years, most classes I’ve gone to, both inside or outside school, have been straight from a book or handout, which would be so easily read and comprehended (…to me) that any notes would be a waste of energy. A couple science teachers would make us take notes and count them as a grade. All you had to do to get an A was write down most of the important bits, even if the chapter sections were written in exaggerated cursive that took up half the page and there were random teddy bears straddling the margins, as in my notes.

There was a stage in maybe seventh grade where I told myself I would make neat, doodle-free notes that actually summarized the stuff in biology (the easy seventh-grade kind (not that we still remember all of it)), and to get to that goal I would force myself to use only one page for each section, with a special way to mark the vocabulary words. It helped studying a little, but the stage didn’t last, and I ended up doodling again.

Even when the going finally got tough and understanding became a nontrivial task, I still had irrelevant embellishments and a bunch of artificial fonts for my “notes”. Even in the days when I was free to go to the Chiao-Tung University for classes twice a week (and still get consistently ridiculous grades, judging by the score breakdowns the prof gave us after every test), my notes looked like this.

[L'Hopital notes]
Exhibit A: mathematical analysis/advanced calculus notes, circa 2010

Freedom Writers SEO (or lack thereof)

Note: My 2012 self wrote this. It is preserved for historical interest and amusement. Two months ago for some random reason I noticed that somebody had found this blog by Googling for the Freedom Writers contest page. Shortly thereafter, the school went ahead and held it for the second time, two years after the first contest, and even more people have started searching for some combination of “ibsh freedom writers”, resulting in an anomalously large number of hits to a certain just-over-two-years-old post.

Freedom Writers

Note: My 2011 self wrote this. It is preserved for historical interest and amusement, and does not reflect my current beliefs or attitudes. Also, it has linkrotted.

Alrighty, if you’re looking for the IBSH Freedom Writers contest website, its URL is http://freedomwriters.ibsh.co.cc/. (2013/03/28: The link is now dead. I’m not surprised; it’s just more evidence that free websites of the “do your own html files” type are really fragile things.) I just tried to help my sister find it through Google, it’s nowhere to be found, and instead there are hits in ancient archive posts from this blog.

Yay! I'm back!

Note: My 2008 self wrote this. It is preserved for historical interest as a glimpse into the history of this blog.

Blog revival!!! Thanks to Jonathan for reminding me of the existence of Blogger.

Today was a good day all in all.

Accomplishments:

2006 Summary

Note: This post is backdated. I am writing this post in 2018 because, as part of the Big 2017 Remigration, I have decided to delete most of the posts because they were too embarrassing and sparse on information, but figured I might keep a rundown of the highlights.

2006, on this blog: