Stopped by a friend’s house a few days ago to do homework, which
somehow devolved into me analyzing what programming language I should
try to learn next in a corner, which is completely irrelevant to the
rest of this post. Oops.
Anyway, in normal-math-curriculum-land, my classmates are now
learning about matrices. How to add them, how to multiply them, how to
calculate the determinant and stuff. Being a nice person, and feeling
somewhat guilty for my grade stability despite the number of study hours
I siphoned off to puzzles and the like, I was eager to help confront the
monster. Said classmate basically asked me what they were for.
Well, what a hard question. But of course given the curriculum it’s
the only interesting problem I think could be asked.
When I was hurrying through the high-school curriculum I remember
having to learn the same thing and not having any idea what the heck was
happening. Matrices appeared in that section as a messy, burdensome way
to solve equations and never again, at least not in an interesting
enough way to make me remember. I don’t have my precalc textbook, but a
supplementary precalc book completely confirms my impressions and
“matrix” doesn’t even appear in my calculus textbook index. They
virtually failed to show up in olympiad training too. I learned that
Po-Shen Loh knew how to
kill
a bunch of combinatorics problems with them (PDF), but not in the
slightest how to do that myself.
Somewhere else, during what I’m guessing was random independent
exploration, I happened upon the signed-permutation-rule (a.k.a.
Leibniz
formula) for evaluating determinants, which made a lot more sense
for me and looked more beautiful and symmetric
and I was annoyed when both of my linear algebra textbooks defined it
first with cofactor expansion. Even though they quickly proved you could
expand along any row or column, and one also followed up with the
permutation formula a few sections later, it still felt uglier to me.
Yes, it’s impossible to understand that equation without knowledge of
permutations and their signs, but I’m very much a permutations kind of
guy. Sue me.
Note: My 2012 self wrote this. It’s a bit dated, but
it’s okay, and also is of historical interest for featuring me
explaining the CSS I learned from English class.
Every time I notice that I have hoarded a large number of strange
assignments and essays from another school year of work I get all
guilty. First there’s the knowledge about ancient Chinese dynasties and
plant hormones that I only have shadows of recollections of, which makes
me wonder whether all the time and effort invested by teachers,
classmates, and myself have gone wasted.
I know, though, that given that I still sense these shadows, it
shouldn’t be difficult to look up and relearn this stuff if I ever need
to do so. This brings me to the non-factual parts of the learning, such
as writing skills with all its variations. There’s persuasive writing,
which I don’t use much because I can’t usually even persuade myself to
take a side in anything, let alone others. There’s descriptive writing
mode, which I don’t use much because the most vividly describable things
I encounter are food, and the shallowness of piling flowery adjectives
together to talk about food just makes me cringe nowadays. Previously, I
wrote at least two such compositions in sixth grade. Blech.
I have to wonder whether it really means anything. Taiwan’s system
classifies the grades neatly into 6/3/3 sections, but then our bilingual
department also uses the somewhat illogical and faintly sexist
freshman-sophomore-junior-senior naming thing, in which the big jump
happened last year.
Neither of these naming issues, of course, really matter. Shakespeare
says, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Nor, I would
think, do the different color of uniforms we have to wear (pink, if you
didn’t know.) But AP classes probably count for something.
I am going to take AP Biology. Why did I pick AP Biology anyway? It
seemed like a reasonable default choice. I guess I would like to know
something more about the mysteries of life and consciousness to guide my
philosophical side, and many of the other courses looked too murderously
intense. The perfect stepping stones into the giant hamster wheel of
overachievement that everybody is crazy about here. But then I learned I
still received eight chapters to study by myself during summer vacation,
alongside the English reading assignment. Oh well, so much for
relaxation.
You know, I used to think of this issue, about all the academic work
we students pile onto ourselves and all the ensuing stress and chaos,
from a strange detached third-person viewpoint. Not everybody has a mind
that is fit for all that brainwork. Some people have to do the artistic,
imaginative things. Some people cannot function optimally in our intense
learning environment. Somehow, imperceptibly, according to my apparently
not-all-that-bad grades, I put myself in the crazy book-grinding
category, and I am having second thoughts.
I don’t feel the energy for all this intense future yet… The past is
still so close, so vivid, so attractive. Our graduation trip, for
instance.
Yeah, okay, fine, I admit it, what follows is a rough record of our
graduation trip that has been stuck in draft limbo for approximately
forever, and I was trying to segue into it. I’m a perfectionist, what
can I say?
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.
Exhibit A: mathematical analysis/advanced calculus notes, circa 2010
So, as triggered by my confrontation with the Chinese book report
(remember? whatever the answer is, it’s okay): a reflection on my
incompetence at dealing with two languages, and why this matters, or
not.
I can think in both languages. It’s a natural product of our school
environment. The two languages often have to complement each other; most
of the nerdy terms or globally relevant allusions are English-exclusive
(I couldn’t talk coherently about SOPA in any language other than
English!), but a lot of cultural and geographical staples around here
are Chinese only. And sometimes there are unexpected holes where an
innocuous-looking phrase simply has a few too many connotations to
translate perfectly (the example I always get stuck on, and have yet to
solve satisfactorily with anything short of a full sentence recasting,
is “appreciate”.)